The futility cycle

Another week has dawned and I am still without gainful employment.

I have noticed a pattern in my job hunting over the past few weeks, it goes: Excitement, Impatience, Sinking and Resignation.

Each time I find an advert for a job which looks tailor-made for me it's all very exciting as I tweak my CV and send off my application.
The impatience kicks in when the agent inevitably doesn't get back to me, or there's a delay for some reason, or things are put on hold. This can last from a couple of days to a couple of weeks.
The sinking feeling comes when the overwhelming evidence finally hits me and I realise that I am either not going to be called for first interview, or subsequent interview or not given the job.
I usually managed to keep in the sinking phase for a couple of days by telling myself it's not over til it's over, but the inevitable phone call usually kicks me onto the final phase.
Resignation that yet another job has slipped through my clutches is the last phase. This is especially bad when there are few other prospects around. The phase is usually characterised by stomping, muttering and use of excessive pressure on the keyboard. This phase continues until another tailor-made job is advertised at which point the cycle starts all over again.

To be honest, the situation is made worse by an increasing number of agents who choose to be very aloof and only ever communicate with you on their terms and by companies who place adverts either for non-existent jobs, or for jobs that are later withdrawn with little or no warning. Having looked for work many times in my career, I have to say that the process is far more painful at the moment than it's ever been.

So, in order to break out of this cycle, I've taken the hard decision to invest some of my dwindling funds in some training so I can plaster some shiny new qualifications on my CV. Employing the MacDonald's gold star approach, I'm going for the least effort, maximum shinyness route of PRINCE2 and ITIL certification, possibly followed by some nasty Microsoft ones. This is based on what I've seen employers asking for, what is cheap enough and what won't take me too long to do.

I shall now see if training also has a futility cycle, because right now I'm at the excited bit and already planning how to emblazon my new qualifications across my CV.

FOOTNOTE: The two jobs that looked promising both fell through last week. Reasons were not exactly convincing.

The rollercoaster week

Another week has flown by and things haven't changed a great deal.

The job market is still sluggish, employers still seem very loathed to interview or make decisions and I still don't have a job.

I did, however, land an interview at another company - making a grand total of 2 this year - and have a second interview for the first company.

I think my interview yesterday went well, I said most of what I wanted to, they all peered at some documents I'd prepared in advance and generally I feel I answered the majority of questions well. I am waiting, with baited breath, to see if they are going to call me back. Yes, there is a thrid interview! Never come across this process before, but there we have it.

There are a few things about the job that concern me. Not least of them is the location - it's in a very out-of-the-way place and although it's not too difficult to get to, it involves travelling along some narrow, windy and poorly maintained roads. Not what you want when you've had a busy day and just want to be home.

The next job I'm going for is the opposite - straight down the motorway - very easy. But I have to wait and see what sort of a place it is and whether the people are OK. I generally get a feel for a place and its people quite quickly - years of honing this talent as a contractor.

So, I'm on quite a high at the moment. After starting to get very annoyed that we were now in March and I still didn't have a job, a couple of interviews make me feel closer to that than ever before. We're also managing our money very effectively and still haven't had to raid the savings, and my benefits pay for a few things as well.

I've spent the last week frantically reading about project management and development techniques and feel I've picked up a lot of valuable info, so I'm planning to keep up my research reading and read around a number of technologies and techniques that I've been putting off - it can't hurt. Of course, my progress in Lego Star Wars is going to suffer, but these are the crosses we have to bear.

Downward trend

With all the doom and gloom in the media at the moment, I thought it only right and proper that I jumped on the bandwagon too.

After what looked like a good start, this week has been rather dreadful, jobwise. Things started to look up last week, with not only more jobs showing up on the searchs, but more that I could actually apply for. It started to look like I would be batting them away with my weighty CV.

A week later and I feel that this week has been at a total standstill, so I decided to tally up some statistics to see if it was really true (the offshoots of having too much time on my hands). It turns out that this week is pretty much bang on average in terms of job availability, but last week, which had the most jobs around, I applied for just one (which was unceremoniously withdrawn this week). So, it seems, that I'm suffering from last week's standstill.

Of course, the real issue is the lack of interviews. I still have a number of applications "being processed" including one that's been out for over 3 weeks. All kinds of excuses are offered, but the truth at the end of the day is that no one is in a hurry to hire at the moment. The problem with that is the longer the job is out there, the more likely it is that the budget will be pulled (it happens a lot at the moment) and then you're back to square one.

So I'm still in the unfortunate position of all my eggs being in one basket, which is good in that it looks really interesting, but not so good in terms of negotiating a salary, or if they decide to hire someone else. But - there's not much I can do right now other than grow a phD or three.

Suspiciously quiet

No more news on interviews

Following on from my previous post, there is still no word as to whether they want to interview me or not.

Back from a weekend away in Gloucestershire and into the old job hunting lark again, it's picked up a little today after last week being very poor. Still, the only agents that call are the ones that don't need to - either confirming that I'm _still_ OK to attend an interview, or telling me that they have no more news.

Since I spent half of last year trying to recruit decent software developers, I know what it's like from the other side. One has to draw the conclusion that there are jobs available and people well qualified to do them, but agents are totally hopeless at putting the two together. Maybe there's a new buisness opportunity here .... ho hum.

Academic Fanaticism

I've just endured one of those conversations that really annoys me (Caution, Rant)

An agent rang me and wanted to quiz me about my academic qualifications. "Do you have any?" she asked. "Yes", I replied, "I have an HND". Now, of course, this was rather confusing as I didn't say "Degree", "Masters", "PhD" or "Overlord of the known Universe". "So you don't have a degree?" she retorted. "No", I curtly replied, "Why not?" she asked.

At this point I attempted to explain what a totally pointless question this was. I have 20 years of experience, 20 years since I left a Midlands-based Polytechnic after only 2 years instead of 3, 20 years of actually learning something useful rather than the strange fixation my course had with Cobol (if you don't know what that is, be glad), 20 years of solving real-world problems, learning things the hard way, finding out for myself rather than being spoon fed, sorting out other people's mistakes and chasing impossible deadlines. But this means nothing, because it's an agent and agents don't understand these things, agents always say "I don't really understand that, I'm not very technical", they say "But you don't have experience with version 2.716, only version 2.715" ... it's a wonder anyone ever gets a job!

As you can tell, that touched a nerve. In fact it touched nerves on a number of levels and made me quite cross.

So, after my short outburst (somewhat shorter than recorded here, as you can imagine), she refused to take that as an answer and I had to admit, rather lamely, "I didn't get a grant", which was true - in my second year the local authority did not pay me a single penny in grant money (in those far off days when they generally used to do things like that), and if I'd decided to go on to a post-diploma course, I would have received a similar amount.

I didn't, however, mention that the reason I took a 2 year course in the first place was my dramatically bad A level results, or that these could probably be attributed to the amount of time I spent in the Red Lion or any number of other fine public houses in the area, or the fact that on a Friday afternoon I really didn't give two hoots about Physics and would much rather be playing some nerdy role playing game.

How is this at all relevant now?

We shall see, I'm still waiting to hear if they are going to interview me for the job.

It annoys me most because about 90% of what I learned on my course has been totally useless, I've never used Cobol, or SSADM, or used structure diagrams, or programmed a 6809, and I only spent 6 months writing commercial Pascal. The most useful thing my course taught me was the C programming language, and that was just 6 months out of the 2 years - I learnt far more in the folloing 6 months in a real job. But the academic standard makes it easy for people to put you in a box. It's easy to rank people based on 1st, 2:1 2:2, how "good" the University was, and so on. It's more difficult to look at experience and decide how relevant it is, and that is all, I believe, there is to it.

Breakthrough

Seems I have a second interview for the job.

Unfortunately it's not for a while, due to holidays and the like, so I'll have plenty of time to second-guess how to approach it. There are, alledgedly, a number of candidates involved, so obviously not everybody ran screaming from the building.

Knowing the situation they have themselves in, I think I've got a few pointers on what to research, so a couple of new software project books are winging their way from Amazon as we speak. I genrally find its good to get your mindset aligned beforehand, so I'm hoping they will do the trick.

Sign on day tomorrow too. I have to print out my 4 page job hunting log to prove I've not just been sitting on my backside whilst the government shells out everyone elses hard earned money. Fun.

Land of make-believe

I've returned from a job interview today.

It's the first interview I've had in a little while, and it was somewhat different from the norm. Usually you get asked a load of leading questions, answer them by selecting a situation, viewing it from the most favourable point of view and adding 6. It is then traditional to spout mumbo-jumbo about technology or processes or synergistic flangehandly doohickies and finally retire for coffee and contracts.

This interview started by being told in no uncertain terms that they were up a certain place without a certain implement, that the customers were banging fists on tables, the developers were delivering dodgey code and everyone was running, at increasing speed, around an ever-collpasing singularity of terror.

My first thought: RUN AWAY!

My second thought: Well you could hardly make things any worse, and it would be nice to have a job ... or more particularly, the money that comes with a job.

Don't get me wrong, I've been there before, with project falling around your ankles, code that just won't work and impossible deadlines for impatient customers. It's just that most people try and keep it a little bit quiet. To be faced with this in an interview was interesting, and, I must say, has piqued my curiosity about the company. It's probably some kind of self-harm urge brought on by unemployment, but I actually thought - yes, I could go and sort that lot out.

I am now waiting to hear if they want me for a second interview, so I may never get the chance to find out any more, but we shall see. At least no one will be able to pretend they didn't know what they were letting themselves in for when they joined.