So if you follow me on Mastodon you know that I’ve been deeply engrossed in my own job search as of late. Currently despite being a fossil, I’ve got two prospects that I’m juggling. One gave me an offer yesterday and I’m hoping to get an offer from the other one today. Despite my intense distaste for tech interviews, I went through the ringer with two companies at the same time and surprisingly managed to do rather well on the technical portions.
I attribute this to the fact that both interviews relied heavily on live coding tests (e.g. Hackerrank, Leetcode) to validate an applicants technical skills. While I expressed an extreme distaste for these mechanisms in my post “Tech Interviews Are the Worst”, it turns out I’m actually pretty good at coding pointless bullshit for an audience on the fly. What I’m not good at is keeping from cursing to myself while I code, but I managed to keep my mouth in check for the duration of both exercises.
In any event, my personal confidence level has gone up. I feel better about myself. Part of me wants to position myself as the person who doesn’t give a shit about what other people think, but man, it makes me feel a lot better knowing that other people think that I at least got the skills required to do the job.
So that’s it? Is the blog and website done? Link to heading
Fuck no. For starters I’m planning on rejecting the first offer with extreme prejudice. The pay rate was good but they put a stupid time limit on the offer which directly conflicts with the response timeline I had given them up front. I told them multiple times that I would respond to their offer by Monday noon EST as I’m waiting out another prospect. I also told them this was not a prelude to a bidding war as I was just going to either pick one or reject both.
But they decided to show their ass and flex their muscle and set it to expire tomorrow. Now if the offer wasn’t bad, maybe I could forgive that. But then they also declined to share more detailed benefits information so that I could validate the insurance coverages against the needs of my family. On top of that, while hitting up current employees for benefits information (it’s a large company so this was easy to do), I discovered that the tech org within the company is transitioning to Stack Ranking and as if that wasn’t bad enough they are using commit and pull request counts to fuel their “metrics”.
Fuck. That. Noise. I covered some of this garbage in my post “Performance Measurement Is A Lie” so feel free to click on over and review that if you haven’t already.
Okay so they are asshats, but what happens to this blog if you do get another job? Link to heading
I’ve been quiet lately but that’s mostly because a huge portion of my mental prowess has been dedicated to doing well on jumping through all of these interview hoops. In any event, I can’t really speak freely on my actual blog that is branded with my actual name as the things I want to say and have to say are basically “career limiting moves”. This blog gives me a refuge from all of that. Even though I haven’t built an audience for shit here yet, in time that problem will resolve itself as I continue to post more content and interact with the community on Mastodon via my alt account.
Lets get real: Another job isn’t going to solve my problems. I’m still a fossil and a relic of days long gone in the industry. I’m still going to rail against all kinds of shit regardless of where I work or how good my personal situation is.
That’s because this industry is going to shit.
I hear you, but I thought you really hated your current job. So why not just take the offer? Link to heading
That’s a good question and frankly I have had a tendency to ignore red flags surrounding job offers in the past. It’s a failing that got me into the mess I’m in now. However there is an old adage which I believe applies here, “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” I have a good handle on the shenanigans and incompetence of my current employer.
For all of their many failings they actually aren’t bad people and the benefits are decent. Plus its easy to game the system there and scale back on work when I get frustrated despite the insane deadlines and endless scope creep. That’s because they don’t have a clue how to actually manage developers and whenever they miss one of their dates they just change it in some management meeting and make no attempt to make any of us feel bad about it. Which makes sense as we had nothing to do with picking the date and weren’t even offered the opportunity to comment on it before they pulled it out of their ass and announced it to the world.
From a career standpoint, my current job is a festering boil of fail that will increasingly damage my career prospects moving forward the longer I stay there. However from a non-technical perspective its at least somewhat manageable. The long and short of it is that I have taken the first offer too many times over the course of my career just to escape where I’m currently at and I realize now that this is a failing on my part.
Even so, I’m rejecting the offer because its a shitty offer flanked by red flags coming from a company that clearly has its head up its ass. Not because they happened to be first.
In addition, as I mentioned earlier, my confidence level has gone up over the last few weeks and that’s a good thing. That has put some fuel back into my tank and will allow me to weather the storm at my current gig for awhile longer if need be, hence the title of this post, “An Ounce of Confidence is Worth a Pound of Pain”
Okay so what now? Link to heading
I’ve been brainstorming some additional content. I’m hoping to write a post around good team dynamics sometime soon. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking on this topic and ruminating on the idea that in the past I’ve been the kind of person that manages to “break” teams on a certain level. Mostly due to a high productivity level more than anything else. I want to change that. But in order to do that I have to think through how that works on a more practical level some more.
In any event, stay tuned. There is much more to come!