I'm not the best, I'm just very good

sidewalk cafe on a sunny Thursday afternoon in Seattle

I have to admit, today is a difficult day being unemployed.  My morning started out with a three mile walk along the Puget Sound.  All the images and sounds, the smells, and chill of this morning are not available in a photograph because I just did my walk.  Upon returning home, I hit the computer to begin checking for new jobs.  I followed up with one thank-you note to a screening interview I had last week and just a follow-up email to a job I replied to last month.  Then I began the process of looking at the "new" jobs which came through the transom.

Everything moves so slowly "out here."  Days pass and you don't hear from anyone.  Then all of a sudden you do.  There's a flurry.  Then you feel like a child forgotten at the bottom of a well.  There's no way to make "it" happen, whatever "it" happens to be.  This existential limbo kept me from leaving for many, many years - whenever I was disheartened by reorgs, frustrated with bosses, or just plain pissed off with the structure, I stayed - not because I was brave, or sure, or ambitious but because I was afraid of exactly this - what I'm going through right now.

But "right now" isn't so horrible.  Dave is outside working in our overblown garden.  I just finished
warming up some chicken wings.  I've been working on my letterpress poem layout.  I'm proud of what I was able to finish in my last class on Regression Analysis.  I bought three books today.  My mortgage payment is shockingly low.  I have health care and at this moment do not have hives, a sciatica episode, a cough, or the flu.

This job search / next career thing is uncomfortable and frustrating and - yes - at times exciting.  But the days when the powerlessness of NOT being able to Make Something Happen after having made things happen for so long feels like defeat.  And when salt is added to the wound, like an incident which just happened last week, it stings.

I had a pretty good phone screening with a company and I'm mildly interested.  That in itself does not bode well, but let's be real now, I need to start paying attention to how I feel about these jobs and these companies.  I did accept an offer of a second interview when the recruiter then mentioned they had a 40 question technical interview as part of the process.  Now this is for a job which had much the same profile as work I've done before.  It had some ETL, they didn't appear to have a centralized database, so there would be some small database development.  It's about accessing and joining information together to make sense of it using whichever scripting language they preferred.  As a matter of fact, I was looking at taking a pay cut - and being just fine with that - because I understand I'm jumping industries, I'm "junior."

But do I believe that I will find the 40 question technical interview a decent use of my time?  No.  Considering the fact I'm nearly entirely self-taught with my coding, I do pretty good.  Yet, when I read some of those prep questions, I just laugh at the idea that I could pass.  According to those people who are writing the questions, I should have never done the work I did and the company would have been better off if I'd just been slinging hash in some dive in the mid-west where they still believe dinosaurs are only 6,000 years old.

What does this make me feel about this company?  If I'd know that before I even had the first screening interview I would not have responded to the recruiter who reached out to me.  I don't see this as a "good sign" of an environment match.  This surprise just hardened my attitude.

Luckily, I had a salon appointment the following day to get my hair done.  I brought this up as a topic of conversation surrounded by women, foil, and the noxious fumes of hair dye.  One brilliant woman came up with this for my current dilemma:  Don't send an email stating you will not attend the next interview.  Go ahead, take it.  But once you get there, if you find it to be absurd, just put your pencil down, walk out, saying, "Thank you for your consideration, but I don't believe this to be a good match for me."

And so,  I'm about to start rejecting technical interviews. Some of the best articles I've read in rebellion of the technical interview are by a guy named Jon Evans who writes for Tech Crunch.  And while this guy is probably Don Quixote, I am absolutely going to tilt at this windmill.  His alternative does require the engineer to do some work and those of us who have had a very long career will find ourselves working overtime to get this done, he suggests making sure we have a project available on a site like GitHub where we have a project we've done ourselves and can share.

Here is what Jon suggests in his article, "The Terrible Technical Interview," from March of this year:

• It is time for engineers–especially excellent engineers for whom demand is high–to start to flatly refuse to do whiteboard interviews.

• Yes, really. Nothing will force companies to move on to better techniques faster than losing appealing candidates before they even get to interview them.

• But. This refusal must be coupled with a counteroffer: replacing the interview with a discussion / walkthrough of a side project the candidate has built themselves, in their own time.

Here’s the process I have in mind:

1. The interviewer takes 30-60 minutes to familiarize themself with the candidate’s project

I can't reiterate this enough to my friends - the time of hiding behind the curtain is over.  Unless you want to take up another career in poetry (which I am actively pursuing, I might add as a parallel stream), you need to make sure you begin to build your public presence:  LinkedIn, GitHub, and start modifying what you can of your work projects so you at least have some samples you can produce.

This Friday is going to be a big day for some people.  I'm wishing all my friends the best of luck, that the outcome is whatever they wish - be it the package or the job.  I certainly hope that those who are just a year or less shy of the Modified Rule of 75 for subsidized medical are not affected.

But even if you aren't affected GET STARTED taking care of yourself because I'm sure there's more to come.  You know there is.