I’m sitting here feeling like a broken husk of a person. All of the rejections and poor fit roles over my career have got me feeling like I’m completely incapable to work in tech. My self confidence is shot. Kaput. Dead.
It doesn’t help that there has been a market downturn, It’s nearly every other day a new round of redunandacies are announced.
So I’m sitting here writting my feelings out. There’s something therapeutic with writting shit down. It helps me to externalise the jumble mess of emotions going in my head. It helps me to think. To get my thoughts in order.
This post is for my own benefit, but if you enjoy being here, thank you for reading.
Table of Contents
Job hunting – again
My existing contract is coming up to an end mid April. I’ve opted to not extend it. Mostly due to a poor fit, but some structural changes has made it hard to feel effective.
The last nail in the coffin was I had been trying to take on more scrum master/agile delivery lead responsiblities within the team and had been practicing this role in my team. The recent restructure meant our team was without one. Last week our team gets handed a new one without any consultation, there wasn’t even an open role that I could have applied for.
There’s been no support to try and step sideways into a role that better suits my interests. It’s now a pretty common story in my career. it makes me wonder, “Hi, it’s me, am I the problem?”. To quote Taylor Swift.
What next?
I’ve been applying for jobs since September. It’s a tough job market out there. This year I’ve been able to interview for a couple of roles at least. Which is more progress then last year. I had no interviews last year.
I do not want a role that is UI automation focused. I cannot see the business value in it and therefor have no motivation for it. I procrastinate this type of work and I simply do not want to do it. There’s been a slow uptick in contract work for testers, but it’s slow.
I’d like a role where the focus is on collaborating with people. This type of interaction is the source of my motivation for work. I would also like to be able to use my technical background too.
Move to financial advice?
Eventually I want to make a career change into financial advice. I’ve got the degree. Just need to figure out when to make the change. I’m buying a place with my partner this year and would like the tech money to help with the mortgage set up. Once it’s all ticking along nicely I’ll be able to make a change in a few years time.
I reckon helping people work towards financial freedom would be a bit more fufilling then helping companies with their testing and overall tech strategies.
Roles I’m looking for
I’m keeping an eye open for almost any role, from pre sales engineer to change management and integration engineer. Even business analyst to test environment management work too.
I don’t need to earn a lot of money to hit my financial goals and could take a decent pay cut for more fufilling work.
If this sounds indecisive, that’s because it is. I know what I don’t want, but don’t know exactly what I want next. I’m happy to give almost anything a crack.
However any work in the wealth management industry does help me keep a pulse on the industry and is a preference.
Does the CV need to change?
I have a generic tech consultant CV, a mobile test engineer CV and a finance/performance engineer CV. I use different CV’s for different roles I’m applying for.
These are still helping me get to interview phase, so are still useful but I can’t think of a way to improve them.
I always enjoy reflecting on how my CV evolved over the years. It does feel like the job application process is even more broken then when I first started networking in tech.
Conclusion
It’s ok to feel broken and disheartened during this process. I feel you. If you are struggling too, feel free to reach out. Sometimes it’s nice to just complain and get things off your chest. This is exactly why I wrote this post.
Side note: Do people still blog these days? I know I haven’t. I’ve actually been using reddit as my main writing outlet recently, you can check out some of my posts under u/bugHunterSam if you like. I now mod a finance sub r/AusHENRY.