Weeknotes: Season 2: Episode 2

Written by Chris Gibbons

Hello and welcome to episode 2 of this year’s “week notes” series. I’m going to try and get back into a more frequent cycle of writing these - probably every two weeks until I get a new job.

Observations

👻 When did Ghosting become common practice? This really pisses me off, and recruiters (internal and external!) really should know better. I had one person hound me for a chat, we eventually managed to speak, then the fucker just ignores me, repeatedly. Bad form. ❎

(Also, I‘m not saying I am without blame on this too, all I will say is that when you’re set open to work it is very easy to be overwhelmed with messages, sometimes I miss messages from folks, and it can take me a while to reply. In this instance I’m classing ghosting as once you’ve already made contact with a company/recruiter, for it to then drop off)

📣 Let’s talk feedback. Give it. Don’t fuck about giving the candidate something tangible that they can action for future opportunities.

👨🏼‍🎓 I know that not every candidate is going to tick the right boxes, and through gritted teeth, I get it. I say gritted teeth as it feels at times that the criteria used to grade candidates is skewed, whereby someone who can score highly on values, apparently isn’t the right fit as they’ve not coded for 8hrs a day, for the last 6 months, go figure 🤷🏼‍♂️

Things I’ve done

Applied for jobs, lots and lots of jobs. It’s a tiring, thankless task, especially when dealing with a seemingly constant flow of boilerplate rejection letters.

It’s not all doom and gloom, I’ve had a few first-stage, exploratory-type calls, both fun and nerve-wracking. Speaking of nerve-wracking, let’s have a chat about live coding sessions shall we. Bloody hell, I forgot just how anxiety-triggering these nasty little fuckers are. In the day(s) building up to the one I had on Wednesday my anxiety was through the roof.

It went well, or at least I thought it had, but I’ve since had the dreaded we have decided not to move forward with your application at this point in time

Aside from the relentless bullshit of the current job market, I’ve been dabbling with Spanish on Duolingo - it’s something I’ve been wanting to try and learn for a while, slow and steady, and at least Duolingo is supportive and doesn’t give degrading comments about my supposed lack of recent hands-on dev experience.

Things I’ve read

Lots of React-based stuff, just to boost my skills. The one brilliant resource I’ve come across, and it really resonates with my ethos on the web, is The Lean Web Club from the amazing Chris Ferdinandi

The lovely tweets sent by you lovely lot, regardless of the outcome of the live coding they really did help me out, super thankful for them all!

Things I’ve watched

Planning on the following:

That’s all for now, folks.