Job progress or lack thereof

This week the job seeking has again not progressed much. I have had one recruiter ask me for a CV, at which point I realised I didn’t have an up to date CV and had to create one. Well OK, I need to do that anyway, so I did. But he now wants my phone number and I’m not sure I really want to talk to him. Hmm. 😶

I had another recruiter contact me with a job spec which is actually a possible match. It’s not a 100% match, but it’s a I’d be happy to be put forward for it. HOWEVER, there is a note on there that they are having meetings once per week in the office. I haven’t been into an office in six months, and to me it seems questionable to expect your staff to commute into a city centre by public transport as cases rise rapidly. So I flagged that with the recruiter and will see what he says. The nice thing about job seeking while not being in a rush is that you can afford to ask awkward questions because you can just walk away and wait for something else (Boris Johnson take note).

I had another one contact me with a ‘local’ role (his word). I was tempted to reply back to him and say “if I have to google the name of the village, it’s probably not local”, but I ignored it. I had another contact me trying to get me to employ someone. Um, ok. I think he needs a better recruiter.

One of the things I am noticing is that my skills are becoming a bit out of date. A lot of places want experience with modern JavaScript frameworks and ES6, which I used a fair bit at my previous job but not at all at my current job. My current employer is not staying up to date with the market at all, which is a problem because they’re also not compensating me enough to accept risk to my future earnings.

A few years ago I wrote an Android app in a (now obsolete) JavaScript framework (which currently earns me around £1 per day!). About a year ago I half finished another app, in a more modern framework, but I never finished it because at the time I didn’t want to spend my free time doing my job. So I think what I need to do is spend a few weekends rewriting the first one in a modern framework and finishing the second one, so at least I have some recent experience and can talk about it a bit more convincingly than if someone asked me about it now. And who knows, if I publish the second app, maybe my income will increase to £2 per day. As long as it stays below £2.73 per day. Because then I’ll have to declare it and pay tax on it. 🙄