On trying and failing and trying again
Everyone of us who has gone through a job hunting period in their lives would resonate how it feels to try over and over again but failing. I would like to give a personal perspective, based on my own personal experience on job hunting.
I have continuously kept an eye on the jobs, even though I may actually not think about changing jobs, mostly for keeping myself up to date with the job market’s requirements. Any engineer with a few years of experience would know that the requirements and needs are constantly changing, so checking or applying for jobs while you are happy about your current position may help in the future. Besides, finding out where the trends are heading towards, in software engineering, may also help with your current job and benefit your company.
On the other hand, the responses you may get to your applications may be quite discouraging. Companies, including the well-known fancy ones, while appearing to be a nice and caring place to work for, tend to ghost out your mails, or even ghost out after 2 or 3 interviews. At the same time, you may see their HR or company account itself posting on Linkedin, about how much they care about the people. Ironic, isn’t it? In some cases, trying to poke them wouldn’t work either, they just ghost you out, no matter how much mail you may send.
Interview processes, themselves actually deserve a separate post, are usually far from being optimized or even related to the job itself. Applying for a Data Science position? Here, have some coding test on array sorting algorithms for 4 hours (My personal record for the duration of coding test is 4 hours and half, from a startup, which is not even set up yet, because they are looking for ninjas or some programming evangelists, you know). Assuming that you are quite determined and go through a few hours of testing, again, you may end up being ghosted out. Because you either couldn’t achieve what they are looking for, so why bother? You are just another cog, there are more cogs to apply for being part of their fancy system, so replying to you is just a time loss. Most of them would send a template though, so don’t worry about being ghosted out. Getting a response from a bot would make you feel better, and by that their HR may happily claim that they have “returned the applicant” in their daily update next day. Asking them about reasons for their refusal? You know, by some feedback you may use it to improve yourself on your next application. But hey, most of them wouldn’t even bother checking your mail in response to the template message (Most would be a no-reply address anyway).
Assuming that you pass the initial screening, you land a call with some techies, depending on how their process is, it might be one more non-tech meeting as well. Although this phase usually goes more “humanly” than the other phases, just be ready to see some mid-level lead who actually attends to show off how much they know rather than assess your skills, especially if the other interviewer is their supervisor. Constantly cutting what you are saying or Googling the stuff you mention, just to say “Is it X, isn’t it? It uses the Y library and Z tools?” while you are in the middle of something else. Or you may end up getting questions like “Why do you think using NoSql is useful for this case?” while you have never mentioned that at all in your interview (true story, indeed), and replying that you haven’t mention such a thing would only get a “OK, please go on”.
Then there you go, opening Linkedin or some other job site, trying to find which matches what you are looking for, just to repeat the process. If you are doing this not out of need but for market check I mentioned at the beginning, it is fine. But if you are in need of a job? It doesn’t leave a nice taste in your mouth. After a few tries, self-doubt kicks in. Motivational quotes like “Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better — Samuel Beckett ” would have the opposite impact than the one it aims. Not to mention, being unable to find a job for a few months, and then you will start getting questions why your CV has gaps, why you haven’t found a job and stayed out of the market (Because you know, who needs empathy ?). Even there are better versions of these questions for COVID-19 era: What did you do to improve yourself during this time? Because every single person on this planet has the resources to attend some fancy webinar or course or may be mentally stable enough to do so in times of panic and threat.
Whole thing is like an endless loop isn’t it?
