Job progress or lack thereof

~ e.v. ~ 1 Comment

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One of the things I am noticing is that my skills are becoming a bit out of date.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. 🙄

Everything hurts #2

~ e.v. ~ 5 Comments

Not everything. My hip and my butt and my hamstring. Or maybe it’s not my hamstring, maybe it’s just my butt. I don’t really know. I felt it was improving. I was running. Not as much as I wanted, but not that far off. I was doing daily hip strength exercises, planks etc and even deadlifts every couple of days.

Then disaster yesterday morning as after about 20 seconds of running my butt and or/hamstring cramped. Ouch.

So anyway I got a tennis ball into my hip and it now feels a lot better, and I’ve been trying to foam roll the very top of my hamstrings (which is actually not very easy to do effectively, because it’s a big and soft area). I still have some discomfort there but everything feels a lot looser now.

I’ll find out over the weekend if this is enough. If not then I’ve decided I’ll just bite the bullet and book a physio appointment on Monday.

Worklife

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

The passive job searching thing isn’t really working. LinkedIn sends me emails every day with lots of jobs I could apply for, but the problem is that I need to read it and filter it down to some I might be interested in. One of the big problems is companies who advertise jobs but don’t advertise salaries. At the moment I’d just avoid all of those because it’s not a good use of my time to go through an interview process to get an offer that’s less than I’m currently earning. I guess the problem can be stated more succinctly and generally in that those adverts I read and do not think “I want this job”. So that’s where that is. I haven’t reached the point that I want to start investing my own time into finding a new job. It’ll happen though.

My sister is currently about half way into her notice period and is bringing back memories for me as she is dealing with terrible HR at her current employer. She had a month’s notice period but it’s taken them two weeks to finalise her finishing date. She had asked to take her holiday and finish a week early and they’ve finally come back and said no (which is a bit petty in my opinion), but to get to this point she’s had to send numerous emails to HR. The last one, which finally got a response, pointed out that she’d handed her notice in two weeks ago and she would like to know her finishing date, and the HR woman replied to say that she didn’t think it was unreasonable to make her wait that long. I read the emails and thought my sister was polite and the HR woman was quite snotty. In that circumstance the right thing to do is to apologise for the inconvenience, not to double down and act like the person you’re inconveniencing is being unreasonable. My sister is being quite grumpy at the moment though. I think she is just bored and wants to leave. That’s how I felt when I gave my notice this time last year.

Work is a hassle. I’m still wondering about going self employed. It’s just the hassle of chasing potential clients, but if I did it right I wouldn’t need to. It’s all preparation. Maybe I should be starting that.

LINKEDIN DRAMA

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

I’ve been getting some interest from recruiters since signing up to LinkedIn last week but I haven’t really been paying much attention to it. For whatever reason I felt more settled at work this week so it seemed less important. I have one chat going with a recruiter which I think is going to fizzle out soon with him accepting he doesn’t have anything I’m interested in at the moment, and I have another I declined because it would need to me to drive to their office, which is less appealing than taking the train. If I was desperate I’d go for it, but I’m not. There’s another one that looks like a possibility but under the desirables, it says “pre-existing security clearance”, so I think I’ll skip that one.

So that’s all OK, but today I got a notification on there saying “Someone at [my old company] viewed your profile”. That just made me panic. I don’t even know who it was because it doesn’t say. I am definitely not over that job. This is why I didn’t want to be on LinkedIn. It connects me to somewhere I don’t want to be connected to.

So. I went and blocked a few people I definitely never want to speak to again, which means they can’t see my profile at all. I forget the aliases I used to refer to them as now. One was Becky, obviously, since she was the reason I left. Another was Mike, who I kind of used to be friendly with but he wasn’t exactly supportive or trustworthy. Mike would say pretty nasty things about Becky behind her back, but to her face he was the the total opposite and seemed to want her attention, which I found irritating. Things cooled, well, froze when she repeated something I’d said to him in confidence. I later learnt that he’d actually said quite a lot of things. He seemed to think he was a friend but he was one of those “with friends like these, who needs enemies?” kinds of people. My counsellor described him as ‘leaky’ and suggested that when he learnt something he tried to use that knowledge to get people to like him because he was insecure (which he definitely was). Probably true.

So anyway… as I went on his profile today to block him, I read the summary he’d written about himself and thought it seemed familiar. I unblocked and went back to Becky’s profile. Yes, he’s literally plagiarised her summary paragraph. It’s about 100 words long and all he’s changed is the job title. He’s also left her a comment on a post she’s shared saying that she is “lovely”. Which is a totally normal thing for a man to write on his married co-worker’s social media, right?

Anyway… they are blocked now so that’s the end of that and hopefully I’ll feel a bit less on edge about LinkedIn knowing that they won’t be able to see that I exist on there.

Everything hurts

~ e.v. ~ 7 Comments

Well, not everything, but lots of things do. My foot is twinging again, my wrist/hand is twinging as well (carpal tunnel?), my hamstrings are a pain in the bum (literally) and my hip is still not really feeling OK. Last night when I was lying in bed my lower back felt soooo tight.

I haven’t run since last Saturday and I seem to be in worse state now than I was then. I guess that’s not incredibly surprising. Muscle imbalances often don’t sort themselves out and muscles and tendons like to be worked. And the fact I sit down all day isn’t good. My hip flexors get tight and that’s why my hamstrings hate me right now. I’m going to start running again tomorrow (but only gently) and hope for the best.

Earlier today I got caught in the trap today of looking at the “people you may know” thing on LinkedIn. It was really bad for my mood. I knew LinkedIn was a bad idea. Anyway… I added a rule in my ad blocker to hide those suggestions. I was quite pleased with myself for that.

LinkedIn

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

After two working days on LinkedIn, I’ve had 7 profile views, one connection request from a recruiter, one phone call from another recruiter and one other recruiter contact me with a job spec (not really interested, the company is in London though the job is supposedly remote). So overall I’m feeling content about this. There seems to be enough around that something should pop up at some point without me needing to concentrate much effort into it.

LinkedIn is a weird place. It’s trying to get me to connect with people it thinks I know. The strangest one is someone who I very briefly met about 8 years ago. He was also hired when I started my previous job, but he only lasted about 6 weeks. He was a student in London at the time and working part time and remotely, so, unsurprisingly, he hasn’t listed it on his profile. But how did LinkedIn match us? Very odd. All I can think is that he used to have it on his profile and LinkedIn has maintained the link to our ex employer even after he removed it? I don’t know. LinkedIn is a bit sinister really.

I don’t really like that it’s trying to match me with people from my previous employer. I don’t want to feel ‘connected’ to that place in any way. I think LinkedIn is a mental health black hole if you’re not careful. I’ve set up some job alerts by email and I’ll try to limit my interaction with the website until it emails me with something relevant.

The recruiter I spoke to asked me what I was earning now and then said “did you take a pay cut at your current job?”. Which made me think. I didn’t, it was actually a decent jump, but when they offered it to me they had already asked how much I was earning, and I do think they took advantage of the fact I was massively underpaid to start with. I knew that at the time and overlooked it because it got me away from my previous job and it was still an upgrade, so I’m not resentful of it, but that doesn’t mean it’s a situation I should continue indefinitely.

Hello again, LinkedIn

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

I ended up recreating my LinkedIn profile today, because I got a bit fed up of my boss earlier. We don’t have very good processes at this company for deploying our releases. Deploying releases is always hairy but there are ways to make it less hairy, such as taking backups and rolling back if things don’t go as they should. My boss doesn’t do that, and then when it doesn’t work he sends a cryptic one line email which explains a small percentage of what you need to know. I find the email thing really odd. On a call he’s fine, he explains things properly, but on email he just doesn’t. Literacy problem? I don’t know.

So today I got just frustrated enough to make myself visible in the job market again.

But interestingly work was not what was really stressing me. I thought it was, but it’s not. I didn’t notice until this evening, but my watch says my stress levels have been super high all day, even before I woke up.

Even so, I think it’s about the right time to be getting back on LinkedIn. As it’s a fresh profile I don’t have any connections so it’ll take a little while to build visibility to recruiters. I haven’t really done much. I added my current job title and employer and university but haven’t put my old jobs and descriptions on there yet. I can get all that from my CV from last year.

Next problem will be thinking of how to write my achievements in this job. What have I actually done here? Lots of things but it’s all specific to the project, whereas my for my previous job it was easier to explain things in a more abstract way. I will need to think about how to present that. Although I think that after being here almost a year, I’m not sure my CV has really got any stronger. That’s interesting.

And I guess I should also take a professional looking photo, urgh… maybe I’ll leave that a few weeks. I don’t know. The point of LinkedIn for me is to get agency recruiters talking to me. I don’t really expect to be dealing with actual employers. So maybe the photo doesn’t matter.

Sunday

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

I haven’t written for a while about how I’ve been finding not being on antidepressants any more. My sleep has improved a lot again and I’m glad about that. I think my mood has as well, but not entirely. Today I felt depressed and anxious and I don’t really know why. I just didn’t used to get days like this when I was on Citalopram. On days like today I really miss the calming effect it had on me, even if I didn’t really realise it at the time. I feel better than when I last wrote about it though.

In other news…

My sister got a new job! Well, an offer. She has been looking for a few months. She got a £500 pay rise after being at her current employer for 18 months, which seemed a bit offensive, but her new job is an £8k pay rise. Overall her employer seems pretty terrible. It didn’t get off to a good start when she went to a second interview there and the interviewer/HR woman didn’t turn up (my previous HR manager also scheduled a meeting with me then didn’t turn up! Seems to be a common theme. Uh oh I’m getting stressed about my previous job now).

The new job is at a prestigious firm and will look good on her CV.

It makes me think about my career goals. I am starting to get recruitment spam again now, and I’m getting emails every so often for jobs I’m qualified for, advertising salaries of £55k, £60k. That’s quite a big jump from what I’m on now. I don’t really care about money per se, at least not in the sense that I have an expensive lifestyle (I really don’t), but it’s a safety net for the future. It gives me options. So I do care about it, it’s just more of an abstract concept. I still have the crazy idea that one day I might start my own business (well, I’ll probably need to be back on Citalopram for that) and having as much money as possible before doing that sounds like a good idea.

My employer has still not said anything about my six month pay review (now 4 months overdue), so I think my plans are that I’ll wait until November, when I’ll have been here a year, and then I’ll recreate my (deleted) LinkedIn profile, set the option to signal I’m open, and see what turns up.

Saturday

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

My hip improved then got worse again. After Sunday, I did a lot of foam rolling and by Wednesday I was running again, mostly pain free. Then a longer run Thursday, which was OK. But by Friday it was hurting again and this morning I had to stop at 10k. I think hills are a problem. I stopped at the bottom of a hill this morning and had to walk home and it was painful just walking up it. It’s weird because it feels OK again now, but now I have a lot of aches in my upper hamstrings and into my bottom. I think that’s probably where the dysfunction is, especially as hills seem to set it off. It’s always hard to know what to do with these kinds of injuries. Obviously it needs rest, but I’m not sure that’s going to be enough.

I’m a bit worried about the COVID second wave that we seem to be experiencing. Or rather, I’m worried by our government’s approach to it. Similarly to March, we have the luxury of being a few weeks behind other European countries, so we can look at them to see a glimpse into our future, and yet we don’t seem to be learning any lessons from that. We know where this goes. I can understand reluctance to lock things down again but I’m very surprised we don’t have some strong messaging on working from home again.

Virtual Great North Run

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

The Virtual Great North Run was really two runs in one. The first run was a fast 10k and I would have been very pleased with it were it not for the fact that my hip was getting tighter and heavier and starting to cramp painfully. The next 12.5k (yes, that’s too far) were painful, slow, and interspersed with stretching breaks that didn’t seem to do much. I’d have cut it short if it hadn’t been an event.

The ‘virtual’ side of the race was massively overhyped by the Great Run company and didn’t work properly. I ended up running an extra 1.4km because the viRace app didn’t manage to connect at the start of my run but apparently it sprang into life part way in, so to make sure I actually ‘officially’ finished I decided to keep going after the end. Every so often it tried to play me some official audio, but only worked roughly a third of the time, so what really happened was the music my phone was playing just paused for no obvious reason. I assume I was supposed to hear something as I finished, but I didn’t, so that was a bit anticlimactic. I have found before that the Great Run Company are very strong on marketing and not so good on delivering, so I wasn’t really surprised.

Overall it was a pretty bad run. Actually it was the worst run I’ve ever done, easily, and it’s going to take some recovery now before I can run on my hip again.

I’m not sure what’s wrong with my hip. I had felt it was a bit tight a few days before, but it didn’t seem like anything and I’ve never had any issues with my right hip so I didn’t think much of it. It’s over the outside of my hip so I think it might be the infamous IT band. I was hobbling around the house this morning and couldn’t walk in a straight line, but I’ve been on the foam roller pretty much every hour and it has eased off quite a lot now.