Tag: life

Popularity

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

I have two interviews this coming week. One is the second interview from the phone interview I did a few days ago. I misunderstood when he said technical test – it’s actually a ‘collaborative’ coding/technical test thing done there and then inside the interview. That’s good as it really is time limited to 45 minutes, but bad because, well, I’ve never done that before in an interview setting. Which is funny. It’s a test designed to show I can do what I’ve been doing every day for the past decade, and I’m worried I might not be able to do well on it because I’ve never done it before.

The other interview is a phone interview. It’s come via the same agency – when she phoned me to tell me about the second interview, she threw this one in there and said “I’ll send you through a spec, and get back to me if you’re interested”. Less than two hours later, her boss emailed me to say “great news, they want to interview you! Are you free Monday?”. Well, I didn’t actually say I was interested and I haven’t looked at the spec yet, but…

I’m not sure about this one at all. I would have filtered myself out if I’d seen the spec published as an advert. They are looking for Umbraco experience, which I don’t have. I don’t get why they’ve written a spec saying Umbraco experience is a must, and then they see my CV and instantly want to interview me. The other thing is that the software they make is for online gambling. That’s a very exploitative industry. On the other hand, how many employers don’t exploit people?

I would have skipped it even if they hadn’t asked for Umbraco experience, though. Umbraco is a content management system (like WordPress) and if your technical problem looks like a CMS… Well, I’m not sure you’re going to keep me interested for long. But we’ll see

Interview…

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I had an interview today. It went OK I think. I got really nervous about it, but I don’t know why. I also got really nervous about seeing the physio last week, because…? The tablets make me more functional when I’m nervous but I’m not sure they reduce the nerves at all.

He asked me some technical questions, and I got the hard ones right and the easy ones wrong (duh). Not because I didn’t know the answer, just because I’m not used to having to suddenly remember and regurgitate obscure technical trivia over the phone. I’m not too worried because I was able to speak in depth on the harder stuff. Apparently the next stage is a technical test, which is usually where I look at it and go “I’m not spending the next week doing this!”, but we’ll see. He said it would be about 45 minutes, which is reasonable… assuming this estimate bears any relation to reality (big if).

I’m not too sure what I think at the moment. The recruiter told me it would be predominantly remote, in the office around once a month. But the interviewer had other ideas and said they were thinking of it being more of a hybrid role with 2-3 days a week in the office. The plus side is that it’s within walking distance (just about), so 2-3 days in the office there is much better than 2-3 days in the office at my current employer. But that’s not really the right comparison, is it?

Weekly update

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I had to rearrange my running physio appointment for next week because I somehow managed to give myself an ice burn on my foot last weekend. So I also ended up not running all week, which gave it a rest I suppose. I did a short-ish (6.5km) run today and it actually felt OK, but I’ll still keep the appointment since this seems to be a cyclical thing.

I’ve been preparing myself a bit more for interviewing again. I decided to get serious about it, which means I’ve completely overdone it. I bought a new webcam and a high quality microphone so I can use my desktop (with a wired connection) instead of my laptop for video calls. I read somewhere that high quality audio makes you come across better, so I thought, well, OK, let’s invest some money into that. It makes sense to me. If the other people interviewing are on low quality laptop webcams (pointed at their chin) with noisy audio and then I come along with 2K video and clear audio then, rightly or wrongly, I look a lot more professional. So now I have a big desk microphone plugged into an audio interface with lights and knobs (I already had the interface for my guitar) and I look like a radio DJ or something.

The problem now though is lighting. The window is behind me, which isn’t great. I kind of got away with it before by having my laptop angled at the side of me, but doing an interview like that with a desktop monitor isn’t really going to work. So I’m rearranging the room. Now I just need to buy a longer ethernet cable…

In totally unrelated news, I don’t get the Tour de France thing, with them threatening to sue the woman. The woman holding the sign didn’t collide with the rider, the rider collided with her. I mean, he’s on a bike and he ran into a stationary pedestrian. Did he try braking? Nope, he kept pedalling until about 2 metres before he crashed into her. Even Lionel Hutz couldn’t lose that case.

Plans

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I’m off work this week, but I’ve decided that next week is the week! The week to start making moves. It was always my plan, at least for the last couple of months, to not do anything before this week off so as to avoid being stressed during it. Next week I will email the MD about my very overdue salary reviews. I think the phrasing will be something along the lines of “While I’m enjoying working here, I’m sure you understand that it’s important to me that my salary remains fair and market rate….” and then refer to my contract which says I’m entitled to an adjustment effective from May 2020, and another from May 2021. It’s fair and factual and doesn’t assume malice but it will set out my position that I haven’t forgotten and I’m not going to let it slide.

But really this is just the first stage. The second stage is starting to interview elsewhere again. I could just do that in parallel or instead of, but if I end up negotiating a salary elsewhere using my current salary as a baseline then I want that baseline to be as high as possible.

I don’t really know what to expect here. It’s possible that as soon as I mention salary they’ll find a reason to get rid of me, and the reason I’m concerned about this is that they’ve got rid of two other people since I started, under strange circumstances. I don’t think this is likely and I think it would be extraordinarily stupid as they are currently in violation of the written contract, but it’s a possibility. But I also don’t expect much positivity either. I mean, I don’t think it’s an accident that we are where we are. So I’m expecting that anything they offer will be more of a token gesture to satisfy the contract rather than a genuine effort to be fair and competitive. I guess my feelings are prejudiced by my last employer, so maybe I’ll be proved wrong.

But how they respond to it is up to them, not me.

Vaccinated

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I had my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on Wednesday morning. I didn’t really know what to expect from it, because my mum (who had AstraZenica) spent about 3-4 days feeling like she had flu, whereas my dad had absolutely no reaction whatsoever. I had a bit of a headache and an achy arm in the afternoon but nothing much. I went for a run on Thursday morning and found I didn’t have any energy and ended up cutting it short, then Thursday afternoon and evening my left leg was aching a lot all over, like I’d really overdone the running (I hadn’t). I ran again this morning and it was much better. And my leg doesn’t ache.

I was worried a bit that I’d react to it like my mum did. I had an upset stomach last week and I really wasn’t looking forward to another few days of feeling horrible.

Also, on the medical theme, the NHS is going to start sharing medical records with commercial third parties starting in July. If you haven’t heard anything about this, it’s probably because they’ve kept it very quiet. The data is ‘pseudonymous’ rather than anonymous, meaning that while it won’t have your name in it, it certainly can be used to identify people. Personally I think as a whole, this is appalling. This is an NHS Digital initiative, but hasn’t been adequately publicised by NHS Digital, who are acting as if it’s the individual GPs responsibility to inform patients even though it’s a national issue. The fact it’s happening as an opt-out system under a short timescale without any effort to inform patients is bad, and the opt-out is complicated and confusing (as there are two different opt-outs) and inconvenient as you need to locate, print, and submit a paper form to your GP specifying your preference. Making the opt-out paper based is a little ironic given that we’re talking about massive digital data collection.

It’s hard to look at this and assume good faith.

There are some details on how to opt-out here. The overall story is covered by the Financial Times.

Plants

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Last week the government announced it is going to ban the sale of peat compost from 2024. Which is good because peat is a precious resource and the vast majority of compost does not need to contain peat. But it’s bad if you grow plants that have evolved to grow in peat bogs, like me. I tried a peat substitute called Thrive a few years ago for germinating seeds and it was rubbish. The seeds germinated fine, then grew for a little while, then just stopped and eventually died. Meanwhile the ones in peat kept going.

So I’m trying again!

These are some Venus Flytrap seedlings which were germinated in peat. I think they’re about a year old but I’m not exactly organised when it comes to this stuff.

The ones on the left are in coir, which is some kind of coconut by-product and supposedly* an eco friendly peat substitute, and the ones on the right are in sphagnum, which is/can be a beautiful moss (not so much here, but hopefully after the sun gets on it).

My prediction is that the ones in sphagnum will do fine, and the ones in coir won’t.

Here are a few other planties. I’m pleased with the plant in the first photo, which is a Sarracenia Luecophylla. It’s been very slow growing and doesn’t produce many pitchers, but it’s 70cm tall this year. I have a few divisions of it now but this is the biggest. I liked how the colours on the second photo came out.

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*I am sceptical that coir’s real life production is either eco-friendly or ethical, but that’s for another time.

Office?

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My boss today casually mentioned that the managing director had casually mentioned that he could get everyone back into the office in June. 🤔

I don’t really know how this is going to go, because at the moment my response is “nope” . I mean, I haven’t been vaccinated yet?! But also…

The thing with commuting is that it’s just terrible. It takes up about two hours a day and it costs about £1000 per year. If my employer suddenly says “hey, we want you to work an extra ten hours per week and take a £1000 pay cut”, well, no thanks.

But then there’s also the salary review issue. I’m now 12 months overdue a salary review and am actually due another one just about now. I haven’t worked out how to phrase it yet, but I won’t be going back into the office before they have settled the last 12 months.

My mum thinks I should send an email to the MD and ask about it, but eh, I don’t know. I prefer the idea of waiting until his expectations are clear before I set out my position. I don’t know how it will go anyway, because if he just makes a demand that everyone comes back to the office now then he’s at risk of multiple people leaving all at the same time, and there aren’t many of us to start with.

Though I do wonder how much the salary issue is just an excuse for me. There are much more important factors in my employment, which are: 1) Commuting is awful, 2) I’m an introvert and working from home is far better for my mental health than working in an office, and 3) I’m bored in this job and if finding a new job wasn’t such a hassle I’d have left already.

Worklife

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Today was a depressing day with work.

I finished a big chunk of work yesterday and merged the new changes into my code. The new changes broke my local version – nothing to do with what I’d done, they were just buggy and I had a lot more test data in my database. Working around this pretty much killed my productivity (and will to live) yesterday, but by the end of the day I was satisfied my changes were compatible so I checked them in and logged off.

The build/tests take about an hour to run so I logged on this morning to see the results, and… disaster, the tests were failing. Anyway the short version is that I spent all day trying to fix and work around other people’s problems. At about 4:45 I realised that there was one issue left and this one really was my fault, but as I’d been working since 8:00 I decided to leave it until tomorrow and went out for a walk. Unfortunately I left my emails open and when I came back I saw that another developer had checked in code to fix my bug with the comment “fix this insanity”. If I was in a different state of mind I might have found that offensive, but his choice of words says more about him than me. And I thought it was a bit rich as I’d have had this solved by 8:30 if I hadn’t had to work around all the problems he’d caused.

So anyway, I thought to myself “hmm”. I don’t feel very motivated at the moment and I don’t think the problem is me. When things like this happen I’m acutely aware that I’ve been here for well over a year and haven’t had a pay review. That’s not very good. This is the first time in my life I’ve worked more than 12 months without a pay adjustment.

So tonight I went on totaljobs and sent off my CV to two places.

Over the weekend I was feeling a bit stressed and guilty by the fact I wasn’t really making any progress with this job search. I had an interview in November and then basically did nothing again until very recently. If I still saw my counsellor I’d have probably gone there and admitted to her at some point recently that the prospect seems daunting and I’ve been avoiding it on purpose, on some level, and that’s just me and my anxiety.

So after much thought I decided to bump myself up to a three quarter dose of Citalopram. I’d always intended to go up to the full dose after Christmas to deal with job seeking stress and interviews.

Recruiters…

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The Scottish recruiter came back to me today with a job spec! At the top of it, it says it’s remote but requires travel to their office in Glasgow once per quarter. Instant nope, so I politely declined. He has again replied to tell me that it doesn’t require travel to Glasgow and is fully remote, and the spec was written pre-COVID! 🤦‍♂️ But then I googled some of the phrases in the spec and I found the company’s website advertising the role directly, where it says the same thing – you need to go to the Glasgow office once per quarter. I don’t know whether to believe him or not, but then, I also don’t really care enough to find out.

I don’t think that letting recruiters come to me is working very well. It occurred to me today that of the three jobs I’ve had since uni, not a single one required me to speak to a recruiter before getting an interview. With two of them, I applied online and the recuiter forwarded my CV to the company without needing to speak to me, and with the other I applied directly. Maybe by letting them come to me I’m just disproportionately dealing with the spammers who don’t really know what they’re doing.

More jobs

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I communicated with two recruiters this week and now have one application in progress. It’s an ‘ehhh, maybe’. Anyway, their wish list overlaps with my experience and the salary is about right, so that’s good? I don’t know. Hiring is dependent on a bunch of things that are basically random.

The other recruiter I spoke to was annoying and pushy. Their role turned out to be a 12 month fixed term contract which they promise will become permanent at the end of it. I replied to say “sorry, I’m not leaving my permanent role for a 12 month contract”. They replied back to give me a long essay on how it’s “as good as permanent” and it just comes down to the client’s budget cycle, blah blah blah, and I should just have a ‘chat’ (AKA an interview) with the employer then decide.

I just ignored that one. I was going to reply back and say “I am only interested in permanent roles. When they are able to offer this I will be happy to consider it”, but I couldn’t be bothered. I already said no.

I replied to a couple more as well, but just a “can you give me some more details please” kind of thing. That’s enough for today.