Posts tagged 'job search'
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After a weekend-long breather, I'm searching for work in earnest as of (let's be honest) 11 this morning. Twelve hours later, I left the office, feeling not significantly better than on arrival.
I did a little work on my final project, but nothing of significance. I honestly thought of implementing authentication using Devise—it seems a lot more robust than my home-rolled solution—but I quickly recognized it for what it was, a way to put off taking the next step. Maybe I'll prioritize that down the line, once my app is more feature-rich and I have applied to a few more places. There are a lot of things I can see I could do better; using jQuery's modals in place of Backbone.Modal, for instance… but really, I just want this app to feel like a complete app. In time.
The job search is… well, it feels like the last couple times I've gone looking for work. There are a lot of companies whose missions are practically opaque, and a couple dead-ends—companies that were bought out or maybe even went out of business since they were added to whatever list I'm looking at. But overall, the feeling I get is that there are a lot of companies that are funded to the level they are simply because it's easier for someone to throw a couple mil at a lot of long shots than to get in early on a few sure things. I do wonder about the status of venture capital: are there really that few interesting problems left, that all there is to fund are yet another X?
And yes, if any future hiring manager bothers to read this blog, I understand that I'm pissing on the hand that might want to feed me, and I'm sure there are all sorts of interesting problems that I could find at any employer, but it at seems kind of … pointless? Everyone's doing the same things, at least on the surface, and their marketing copy doesn't do a good job of differentiating them from the competition. Hell, at least half the sites I've seen are using templates or libraries I've seen elsewhere, and it's just like… do you even believe in yourselves? I'm not sure anyone cares how many redbulls you drink per week at your office, and the fact that all your testimonials come from the same thirty day window, eight months ago, says a lot about how dynamic your business is.
Sure, writing copy about yourself is hard—this is something that I'll have to face, on a personal level, in a couple hours or days—but isn't there something meaningful you can say? Or are you all, like the company that specializes in popups on outbound links, just plain evil? I wonder what their conversion rate is?
The strangest things is that I actually believe in marketing, I just don't see a lot of firms that are targeting what seems to be meaningful, reasonable, or sustainable avenues in that area. It's much easier now, with cloud hosting and quick launch templates and tools, to generate a respectable (looking) online presence, and as such it's not as clear now when a company is two bros and a scam compared to the late 90s. And I'm sure that a lot of it has to do with a (relative) lack of creativity and a (somewhat) saturated marketplace; the next real game-changer will probably come out of left field, where no one else thought to look.
Great, now I'm thinking of how to make a better marketing platform. I have some weird ideas, but nothing of any substance; they're all fleeting, like ghosts. Does it merit thinking about? At this point, with basically thirty days of expenses left, probably not. But the money is not going out of advertising any time soon, and I don't have the knee-jerk revulsion for it, conceptually, that others seem to.
I don't mind finance or marketing or mobile app development, per se, but there's just so much crap.
Back to sifting tomorrow.
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Well, it's the day, and we have an hour until people should start showing up for project day… and I'm just sitting here, blogging.
I spent the day thinking about what I want to say about my project, and how I'm going to present, and refining my resume. I finally have enough final project under my belt that it's not purely embarrassing, but I know that there's so much more work that I can do before I can consider my project "functional".
On the plus side, my resume is much nicer now, and I am much more comfortable with SASS and
@mediaqueries, and it looks nice both on screen and in print. But there is never enough time to do what I want.Case in point: we have to set up for demo day now. Whelp.
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I did make headway finding employers today, which is good. There are quite a few that I can tell are doing things I would enjoy, now that I know how important user interactions and a strong API are to me. All the glue in the middle is not so interesting, which suggests, me being me, that this will be my first role out in the real world. Lol.
Most of the work just involves reading corporate copy and trying to suss out what it is that a company actually does. I will say that if I can't understand a company after two or three reads, they don't go on the list at all.
As for the rest of the day, I spent a lot of time stressing out about getting my project portfolio together. I still don't love my final project, but I started doing some major refactoring late yesterday afternoon and well into the night, and even though I haven't tested what I'm writing as much as I'd like I know that I prefer Marionette.
My project won't be done in the way I'd like, but as long as I can show it off, it should be okay.
This is stressful.
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Yesterday, Tommy asked to sit down with each of us at some point this week, to see where we are and what we're working on. I grabbed the first slot, and basically asked him "so, what are we supposed to be doing this week?" The list of tasks is pretty daunting at the moment, but today I feel like I'm getting a better handle on everything that needs happen in the forthcoming weeks.
In short: I need to figure out how to best identify jobs to apply to, I need to compile those into a "roadmap" of places to apply, I need to (at some point, starting next week) apply to them… and to prepare for that, I need to get my portfolio, resume, and cover letter together.
Speaking of that, I did some work on my personal website (where you're reading this) (ed: this is no longer true; I'm on a different site now), and learned quite a bit about how Wordpress works. It's okay, but I still kind of hate PHP. In time I'll probably get it more to my liking, but it's functional now, at least.
Again, the coming priorities are portfolio and job searching, and how daunting they are! I've decided that I have more to do than Backbone can handle, so tonight I started reading into Marionette. It's not something that happened as a lark; I found myself doing so much repetitive stuff in Backbone, and the solutions I found always seemed to lead to Marionette anyway. Finally, tonight, upon turning my attention to my final project again, I found myself installing three plugins to add functionality that Backbone didn't have and that I didn't much feel like writing… and said, to hell with this, I'm going to do it right.
It looks like a pretty good drop-in add-on to Backbone, so I'm pretty confident about the possibilities. I told Tommy, though, that I'd have it together by Monday, which is going to take a lot of my time. Here's hoping.