Tag: work

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One of the things I am noticing is that my skills are becoming a bit out of date.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

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.

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.

Paranoia?

~ e.v. ~ 8 Comments

I’ve felt quite stressed just lately and I think I’ve finally worked out why. In November I’ll have been at my current job for a year. A year is the milestone I’ve always had in my mind when I think I should be starting to look around and see if there’s anything better. At some point, someone will offer me £10k more to do the same job as I do now, assuming I actually put myself out there.

That’s all fine. I’m content with that.

What stresses me though is the thought of references from my previous job. When I left my previous job, my ex boss promised me a glowing reference. That’s already sounding alarm bells, because I came to form the opinion that anything he promised had a very low chance of happening. He also said he’d provide me with a copy that I could “keep on file”. Guess what: that didn’t happen. So, hmm. The thought that he could sabotage me with a bad reference is a bit disconcerting. I don’t really think he would, but I hardly left on good terms. I mean, I was polite about it, but I left because I thought he was useless and I’m pretty sure he picked up on that!

I looked up the law on references. References must be fair and accurate, which means that he couldn’t really give me a bad reference without opening up a legal avenue (which I absolutely would pursue). He couldn’t even safely write something truthful because I could argue it was unfairly selective and misleading. They actually use my work as the leading example of their abilities and achievements on their website, even now, almost a year since I left. He could hardly justify a bad reference.

So maybe I’m just being paranoid here, but I made sure the current website snapshot is saved in the Wayback Machine and I’ve downloaded a copy and put it on my Google Drive so it’s timestamped.

👍

This is how my mind is working at the moment. On the one hand I’m pragmatic and prepared and I’ll be grateful for it if I end up suing him, but on the other, I’m not sure a calmer mind would be exploring this eventuality.

I am trying harder to stop the spiralling thoughts. I’ve prepared, it’s fine, I can leave it at that. And breathe… I didn’t have to do this when I was on citalopram.

Oh yes, and the other thing is that if I am going to start doing a passive-ish job search again then I need to get back on LinkedIn. I deleted my profile a few months ago because I received a few unwanted messages from SOMEBODY from my previous job. I left my previous job because of bullying. My boss was useless in resolving it. That’s the summary. When I got this person contacting me on LinkedIn, it didn’t bother me much but I just deleted my profile because it wasn’t doing anything useful for me and it didn’t make sense to let it serve as a way for her to deliver messages to me. But I need to get back on there. I don’t really want to do that because… I don’t want to make myself able to be contacted by her, I suppose. I don’t want her knowing where I work. I know I can block her but she used two different accounts to send the messages. I can’t block accounts she hasn’t created yet.

It connects me virtually to somewhere I want to leave behind.

Heat

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

The heat has been a problem for me. When people in other countries hear people in the UK complaining about heat, what they usually don’t appreciate is that during summer time it’s rare to get heat without humidity. We turn from a cold, rainy island into a tropical rainforest island with near daily thunderstorms.

I’m glad it’s cooling down now. When it’s hot for more than a few days I seem to go into an altered state of consciousness as my sleep gets disrupted and all the days seem to blur into one.

I haven’t felt very good at all for the past week. I think it’s probably a mixture of the weather and doing too much running last week and over the weekend (overtraining). I hope it’s not that I’m no longer on antidepressants and this is me going back to “normal”, but the fact is that I’ve felt pretty depressed and emotional all week and they’d probably have helped.

Work has been frustrating me. I learnt today that the company has made someone redundant. This person had been furloughed, so it’s not a huge surprise I suppose (and it turns out he’d actually found another job and had been working somewhere else while claiming the furlough pay too, so it’s not like he’d have been back anyway), but, hmm, I don’t know. I’ve only been here for 9 months now and in that time two people have left (by which I mean they were pushed). That doesn’t fill me with confidence.

I don’t think my job is in danger, but then, how would I know? I am starting to feel the frustrations in dealing with my manager. I get bug reports from him which are a one-line email comprising a run on sentence that doesn’t really explain what he means. I never get any positive feedback. He is friendly enough with me, but the only feedback I get on my work is “this doesn’t work”. That’s a problem. But I don’t think it’s a problem with me.

Then there is the matter of the fact I was contractually promised a salary review after six months, and they still haven’t delivered on that. I’m just going to sit on that for now. I don’t think it is worth the risk of bringing it up yet, especially as since it’s in my contract I intend to and expect to be able to recoup it later, but it hardly makes for a good employer-employee relationship.

I wonder what my counsellor would say if I was still seeing her. I kind of know what she would say. She would say that they aren’t behaving as if they value the relationship and it’s up to me whether I want to act on that. Which I don’t, really. Not yet. It’s incredible to think I’ve been here for 9 months, though. That’s both a really long time and a really short time. There’s always the concern of looking like a job hopper, but I was in my previous job for seven years so moving on from this one after a year to 18 months is fine, really. I’m already half way through that period!

But there is also a good argument for going self employed. I thought about it a bit before I left my previous job but I wasn’t really ready. Now though… I still don’t feel ready, but I feel a lot less unready.

Work

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With work, we are still working from home. Things are starting to re-open and I am guessing they’ll want us back in the office in the near future, which I have to say doesn’t really excite me. My sister’s employer have announced they want her back in her office next week. This seems slightly dubious because the official government advice is still to work from home if you can. More relevant to me, the trains are still running a reduced service so I don’t know how practical it is for me to get to work anyway.

So I’m a little bit apprehensive about that, though I haven’t yet heard anything.

I’m also a little bit apprehensive about the fact I am overdue a salary review. I was contractually owed a salary review after six months of employment, which was the last week of May. So really the review should take effect from June’s salary. It seems unlikely that’s going to happen now as the payroll has probably already been processed. I don’t particularly want to have to bring it up, because it’s hassle for me, and I just shouldn’t have to. I will make sure it happens at some point though and I’ll make sure it’s backdated to June, too (easily done since it’s in my contract). So in that respect there is no real urgency, and, of course, with the uncertainty of the pandemic, it might be better to wait a bit anyway until some of that uncertainty has passed before putting them into a position where they have to decide whether to be generous or not.

But… the main thing I learnt from my last employer is that I should seek quickly to terminate employment relationships where I can’t trust my employer to behave as they should. Things are strange right now with the pandemic, but when things start returning to normal, this is the kind of thing I’ll be thinking about.

Furlough

~ e.v. ~ 3 Comments

I haven’t been furloughed, but I had an email today from the managing director saying that the company will be applying for the government furlough scheme and some of my colleagues will be furloughed, though my role is deemed to be safe.

When I spoke to my manager this morning he seemed quite grumpy at the start of the call, which is unusual, and I guess that’s why. I don’t know who is getting furloughed yet, but I could take a few guesses…

I’m a bit upset though. It’s worrying. I don’t know why though. The practical reality if I was furloughed is that I’d probably enjoy relaxing. The reduction of income would be mildly annoying but would have no material effect on my life. So it shouldn’t worry me really. But it does.

More dreams

~ e.v. ~ 7 Comments

The other night I woke up at the dreaded four o clock after having a dream about work. Except, it wasn’t my work. I’ve been watching Star Trek Picard, and the blonde robotics doctor Agnes Jurati was my coworker. But she didn’t like me much and was quite mean to me so one day I walked out. I woke up really stressed about a job I don’t even have.

Later, I went back to sleep and I was on the bus going home from work (I don’t even travel by bus). Part way home I decided I should go back to work, so I got off the bus and walked back to work with a man who for some reason I met along the way. When I got back to work, they’d decided to close the office early, which also meant I couldn’t work my hours. One of my co-workers (real co-worker, blonde, coincidence?)) was there and she was looking at my timesheet (we don’t even record timesheets) saying things like “well, it’s whether you think you can explain to your manager why your hours aren’t complete…”, which stressed me when I woke up.

I have more stress in my life from imagined jobs than I do from my real job. 🤨