by Adelaide Song on 2024-03-13.
Tags: software
fellas we’re really hoping that getting a cybersec cert will miraculously get me out of my current situation
Not spectacularly.
Probably the worst part of the job market is the crushing level of scale you have to be prepared for. Recruitment is human machinery on the scale of thousands to tens of thousands of people; the experience from the flipside is hours spent shotgunning applications, and then further hours spent on the take-homes and inane Myers-Briggs psychographics they make you do as a result.
Every rejection form email I’ve been sent also comes with the standard ‘we can’t give feedback’ conclusion, alongside a variable amount of dick-sucking to try and appease your ego. At this point I’m not sure who would bother asking anyway, although I suppose the disclaimer was always there for legal purposes anyway.
Unclear. Nothing I’ve done has been promising so far, but it’s also true that this is the same thing I was doing during COVID and before I got my latest job. It still had the exact success rate (i.e., zero percent) and any hopes I had that it would change were probably over-optimistic. Turns out tech hasn’t miraculously 180’d at the end of Q4. We’re feeling effects of an over-supply that was kicked into motion a few years ago and I would be surprised if we didn’t keep feeling them for a few years more to come.
I still think a cert has the highest expected value as far as my available and plausible courses of action go- at least the ones that would meaningfully improve my quality of life. I would need to get a fairly sizable salary up in order to even think about the most basic steps, those being moving out and affirming care (itself gated behind moving out.) The work is also just more interesting than slaving away on sub-CRUD apps and Power BI dashboards all day- or even worse, having nothing to do at all and having to do all that nothing after a 1.5 hour commute.
Weirdly, I actually really like where I work at the moment and would be perfectly happy to live in this area long-term. It’s around the same distance and time to commute into the city, and it’s nearer to the utilities I care about (proper coffee, LGS) while also being relatively cheap compared to just living in the city full-stop.
It’s also a fair distance away from my family, which is another plus in case things escalate further.
Ultimately this job is fine as a holdover, but staying too long might outright kill my career in software and it’s not a place with a tremendous amount of upward mobility. The stuff I do on the job isn’t going to be enough to get me from what is, statistically, a somewhat above-average dev to a proper senior. I’ll make a note of bringing some system design books in to read in the interim. People might get mad at you for watching YouTube but it is unspoken never to fuck with someone who has physical reading material.
Right now I’m taking care of the health issues I’ve been putting off for an irresponsible length of time. I finally got the leftover post-COVID bronchitis taken care of, so I can actually sleep for more than four hours at a time, and now it’s a matter of seeing a physio and getting my spine back into shape.
I’ve been trying to keep my core strength up; it’s one of the few kinds of exercise I can stand without procing dysphoria, and it helps that it’s useful for keeping my back out of trouble in the future. One of the few benefits of my extended commute is that I’m walking a lot again, and my (admittedly absolutely pathetic) stamina’s notably gone up as a result- absolutely hoofing it for buses has also been useful for shaving off those irl framerules on the commute, and therefore getting to leave a half-hour early at the end of the day too.
We go next. Ultimately that’s all that matters.