trying to reason about my previous jobs
One or two jobs ago, when i was in the same utter shitfest of a job search limbo that i am in now, i put together a spreadsheet of my various jobs to try to figure out if there were any common themes around the jobs that i relatively enjoyed and the jobs that straight-up sucked. I can't remember if i posted about it on LiveJournal, but since i am losing sleep over this, i guess typing it up again might help ease my mind.
I have now worked as a formal salaried employee at 10 employers. (I have also worked freelance a handful of times in my life, but that's irrelevant for the purposes of my current situation, because you can't get visa sponsorship as a freelancer.)
Of the 10 employers, 1 was a government department and 9 were companies.
Of the 9 companies, 4 were privately held, 2 were running on venture capital funding, and 3 were publicly listed on the stockmarket (or wholly-owned by a publicly listed parent company). Despite my general distrust of venture capitalists and public companies in general, there doesn't seem to be a strong correlation between the ownership and my experience at the company. That also holds true for the location of the corporate headquarters. I often try to avoid getting hired by American companies, because i see them as less respectful of workers' rights than European companies, but realistically it's less the HQ that dictates your annual leave and more the actual country your office is located in.
In my spreadsheet i compare things like the type of product or industry, how often the release schedule was, whether my role was more development or management, the size of the company, the size of the office... But there doesn't seem to be an obvious correlation. It's hard with only 10 data points to look at.
What i didn't do when i originally put together the spreadsheet but i have done now is add my reason for leaving each job. And it turns out that 5 out of 10 jobs - whether i liked the job or not - i left for a reason completely unrelated to work. My first job i left to transition. 4 other jobs i left because i was moving city or country. So, of the 5 jobs that remained, why did i leave them?
3 of those jobs i left because of new management. At one of the jobs, my manager left and i got reorged under the director who wanted me to focus on something different that i hadn't originally been hired to do. At the other two, the company got a new CTO that decided to dictate a complete technical rebuild of stuff that i'd already invested time in making good. How can i control for this in my job search?
In all three of these cases the person in question was a self-aggrandizing douchenozzle who felt like their role in the company was to do a "digital transformation" or "embrace open source" or "move to the cloud" or some other massive fucking wank project that soley existed to make their résumé look good so they could move on to some other executive position a few years later. I've seen them all on LinkedIn, i know that's how they operate. One of them even brazenly tried to recruit me for a startup he wanted to set up that would've competed with the products our current company was selling. So, basically people who are rocking the boat for their own selfish reasons, and because they're high level people, rocking the boat means fucking up the lives of hundreds of employees. Of course the first thing they do is try to build a cabal of supporters who will evangelize and police the epic change they're trying to do. And because i am a good developer whose opinion often carries sway amongst the rest of the team - and sometimes even beyond my team - i often end up on the recruitment list for this cabal. And this is where these fuckwits go wrong, because they don't realize that although i always push for high quality code, i never push for rebuilds-for-the-sake-of-rebuilds. I will always choose incrementally improving what is already there over blowing it all up and starting again. Always. I refuse to be drafted into a special forces unit tasked with executing a scorched earth strategy of corporate change.
God, it makes me furious just thinking back to these assholes.
The thing is, if you just start working at a place after these guys have already set up their policy, then it doesn't feel quite so spurious, because you might be tasked with building a new thing, without knowing what was already there before. Except then you start digging through archived documentation and talking to oldtimers and you realize that - yes - you are rebuilding the fucking wheel just to placate the ego of some self-important asshat at the top. That's what was happening in several department in my last job, and arguably in my own department too. It's why i switched teams after six months. And then Chinese nationalism and government meddling pushed me out. But that's a different story.
Thinking about it now, it seems there are a lot of companies where i didn't particularly find the work very interesting, or the location especially exciting, or my colleagues all that friendly... but i was still able to plod through it - just do the work. But in most every case where i was just "fuck this shit", it was because management explicitly made me feel like Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill only to get crushed by the same rock and push it back up again. It is my absolute number one most hated thing in the tech industry - unnecessary rebuilds. Building the same fucking thing again that already existed just because it's a newer or hipper technology. And always - always - the reason for doing it is some kind of political bullshit. You can't climb the ladder at the executive level if you don't have a bullet point on your résumé that says you masterminded a massive restructure or technological transition. Nobody wants to see "maintained existing systems and processes with a high quality of service".
And then i guess that makes me think it would be better to work at smaller companies, or at least at companies where the executives are not switched out every couple of years. Yeah, that might make them resistant to change, full of employees who don't give a shit, who are just coasting... And that annoys me too. The other end of the scale is these idiots who truly are just wasting space at a company, who sit there collecting a paycheck and don't give two shits about the customers, the product, the quality of the work... I hate having to put up with colleagues who don't care at all, because that also makes the work feel pointless.
I want my work to have a point. To be solving a real problem for a real customer. That doesn't seem like it should be too much to ask for, and yet... it is. In the tech industry it really is. So much of what we do is just a colossal wank, and somehow we keep getting paid tons of money to do it. It's a superb grift, and so when the stock market crashes and tech stocks get the worst of it... even though that's bad for my job prospects and (now) also bad for my investments... I always think - ha! Good riddance. Cut these fucking fools down to size. We're not wizards. We're not artists. We're fucking mechanics. We're bricklayers. We get the blocks, we put them together. The end. I want a job that just acknowledges that. And colleagues who - while acknowledging it - still take pride in being the best damn bricklayer they can be. Is it really too much to ask for?
Sigh.
The two HR interviews this week seemed to go reasonably well, but it's hard to say. I guess i'll know more if they invite me back for a second interview. 2 interviews out of over 20 applications isn't a great callback rate, but it's similar to my experiences looking for work in China. I assume that a large number of companies immediately rule me out because i am a foreigner. C'est la vie.
I am exhausted already, you know. Looking for work is possibly even more emotionally devastating than doing the actual work. I'm so tired. I need another sabbatical.
I have now worked as a formal salaried employee at 10 employers. (I have also worked freelance a handful of times in my life, but that's irrelevant for the purposes of my current situation, because you can't get visa sponsorship as a freelancer.)
Of the 10 employers, 1 was a government department and 9 were companies.
Of the 9 companies, 4 were privately held, 2 were running on venture capital funding, and 3 were publicly listed on the stockmarket (or wholly-owned by a publicly listed parent company). Despite my general distrust of venture capitalists and public companies in general, there doesn't seem to be a strong correlation between the ownership and my experience at the company. That also holds true for the location of the corporate headquarters. I often try to avoid getting hired by American companies, because i see them as less respectful of workers' rights than European companies, but realistically it's less the HQ that dictates your annual leave and more the actual country your office is located in.
In my spreadsheet i compare things like the type of product or industry, how often the release schedule was, whether my role was more development or management, the size of the company, the size of the office... But there doesn't seem to be an obvious correlation. It's hard with only 10 data points to look at.
What i didn't do when i originally put together the spreadsheet but i have done now is add my reason for leaving each job. And it turns out that 5 out of 10 jobs - whether i liked the job or not - i left for a reason completely unrelated to work. My first job i left to transition. 4 other jobs i left because i was moving city or country. So, of the 5 jobs that remained, why did i leave them?
3 of those jobs i left because of new management. At one of the jobs, my manager left and i got reorged under the director who wanted me to focus on something different that i hadn't originally been hired to do. At the other two, the company got a new CTO that decided to dictate a complete technical rebuild of stuff that i'd already invested time in making good. How can i control for this in my job search?
In all three of these cases the person in question was a self-aggrandizing douchenozzle who felt like their role in the company was to do a "digital transformation" or "embrace open source" or "move to the cloud" or some other massive fucking wank project that soley existed to make their résumé look good so they could move on to some other executive position a few years later. I've seen them all on LinkedIn, i know that's how they operate. One of them even brazenly tried to recruit me for a startup he wanted to set up that would've competed with the products our current company was selling. So, basically people who are rocking the boat for their own selfish reasons, and because they're high level people, rocking the boat means fucking up the lives of hundreds of employees. Of course the first thing they do is try to build a cabal of supporters who will evangelize and police the epic change they're trying to do. And because i am a good developer whose opinion often carries sway amongst the rest of the team - and sometimes even beyond my team - i often end up on the recruitment list for this cabal. And this is where these fuckwits go wrong, because they don't realize that although i always push for high quality code, i never push for rebuilds-for-the-sake-of-rebuilds. I will always choose incrementally improving what is already there over blowing it all up and starting again. Always. I refuse to be drafted into a special forces unit tasked with executing a scorched earth strategy of corporate change.
God, it makes me furious just thinking back to these assholes.
The thing is, if you just start working at a place after these guys have already set up their policy, then it doesn't feel quite so spurious, because you might be tasked with building a new thing, without knowing what was already there before. Except then you start digging through archived documentation and talking to oldtimers and you realize that - yes - you are rebuilding the fucking wheel just to placate the ego of some self-important asshat at the top. That's what was happening in several department in my last job, and arguably in my own department too. It's why i switched teams after six months. And then Chinese nationalism and government meddling pushed me out. But that's a different story.
Thinking about it now, it seems there are a lot of companies where i didn't particularly find the work very interesting, or the location especially exciting, or my colleagues all that friendly... but i was still able to plod through it - just do the work. But in most every case where i was just "fuck this shit", it was because management explicitly made me feel like Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill only to get crushed by the same rock and push it back up again. It is my absolute number one most hated thing in the tech industry - unnecessary rebuilds. Building the same fucking thing again that already existed just because it's a newer or hipper technology. And always - always - the reason for doing it is some kind of political bullshit. You can't climb the ladder at the executive level if you don't have a bullet point on your résumé that says you masterminded a massive restructure or technological transition. Nobody wants to see "maintained existing systems and processes with a high quality of service".
And then i guess that makes me think it would be better to work at smaller companies, or at least at companies where the executives are not switched out every couple of years. Yeah, that might make them resistant to change, full of employees who don't give a shit, who are just coasting... And that annoys me too. The other end of the scale is these idiots who truly are just wasting space at a company, who sit there collecting a paycheck and don't give two shits about the customers, the product, the quality of the work... I hate having to put up with colleagues who don't care at all, because that also makes the work feel pointless.
I want my work to have a point. To be solving a real problem for a real customer. That doesn't seem like it should be too much to ask for, and yet... it is. In the tech industry it really is. So much of what we do is just a colossal wank, and somehow we keep getting paid tons of money to do it. It's a superb grift, and so when the stock market crashes and tech stocks get the worst of it... even though that's bad for my job prospects and (now) also bad for my investments... I always think - ha! Good riddance. Cut these fucking fools down to size. We're not wizards. We're not artists. We're fucking mechanics. We're bricklayers. We get the blocks, we put them together. The end. I want a job that just acknowledges that. And colleagues who - while acknowledging it - still take pride in being the best damn bricklayer they can be. Is it really too much to ask for?
Sigh.
The two HR interviews this week seemed to go reasonably well, but it's hard to say. I guess i'll know more if they invite me back for a second interview. 2 interviews out of over 20 applications isn't a great callback rate, but it's similar to my experiences looking for work in China. I assume that a large number of companies immediately rule me out because i am a foreigner. C'est la vie.
I am exhausted already, you know. Looking for work is possibly even more emotionally devastating than doing the actual work. I'm so tired. I need another sabbatical.