New Job
Starting A new Job
Over the last few years I have run my own agency with varying degrees of success and failures along the way, with COVID-19 and a lot of other changes that occured in the world during 2020 I’ve had to re-evaluate some aspects of my life and really focus on certain areas. One of these areas was income generation and employment.
The Changing Factors
In February of this year I was travelling. I was heading to France to spend time with my partner. We were both watching what was going on with covid but decided we would take the chance and leave it up to fate, so to speak. Well roll around the first week of march and France starts locking things down a little, then the second week came and so did total lockdown. No one in, no one out.
This caused a little knock on effect with my work efforts, things started to wrap up more and more till finally… nothing.
With the future in mind, I started to look at options.
- Keep trying to build up something that is stagnating
- Look for a position locally
- Look for a remote position
- Curl up in a blanket fort waiting for 2020 to end
While four would be fun, I mean who doesn’t like blanket forts?!, it wouldn’t be viable for any length of time; option one just wasn’t going to work, the market isn’t there right now for things to keep going; two… this was potentially something there is one caveat, I don’t speak French at all. So this left me with three, finding a remote position.
The Search
In this day and age of technology and the way that telecommuting has seen a huge amount of growth it seems that a lot of people are looking for companies that offer remote positions anywhere in the world. Examples such as Atlassian, GitLab, Automatic, and even Google now are either 100% remote or offering remote work as a permanent option.
With the above in mind looking for sources of jobs wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be, Sites like YC’s Job board and Work at a Startup for programmers and engineers. Sites like We Work Remotely, Remote.co, and even LinkedIn are great sources to find a position that is open for a wide range of occupations in any number of different fields.
The Successes and The Failures
The job hunting market right now seems to be of one of two experiences for people, 1) you either get multiple interviews after sending out your resume, or 2) you get nothing after sending dozens and dozens of applications.
I got rather lucky compared to some other people I know and managed to land a few interviews, some technicals, progressing through multiple stages of testing that some companies seem to have in place these days after only a couple of months of on/off searching. Offers were given, but were either not financially sustainable, or just so beyond low balled that it became clear why people were not joining them. I finally settled on an offer that is from a good company, is well respected by Google and a number of other large web players.
If you are searching and it feels like you’re not having any luck, take a break for a few days then come back to it by sitting down changing your resume a bit (there are many tips out there on how to beat the ol’ OCR and NL reading bots that recruiters use these days), write out a better cover letter that you can customise for each job and just scattershot send them.
Don’t give up and don’t let it get to you for there are a lot of other people in the same boat.
The Future
With the way the world is right now it is very difficult to see what the future is going to be like. I have many questions myself that I have to answer, like am I going to get back to Australia before Xmas? Will I succeed in this job? Will COVID settle down and things get to somewhat of a new normal?
It’s hard to see what will happen but all we can do right now is keep on keeping on.