Tag: career

Now What, Part III

BobbieLeave a comment

They say history does not repeat itself but boy howdy does it rhyme. Another quarter, and another batch of layoffs. This builds on previous guidance.

If you are Leaving

Firstly, I am sorry. I really am. Go check out Now What, and Now What II, for some initial guidance (especially about that RIF package you may or may not have gotten).

Resume

In addition to everything else in those other pages, you will want to use modern tools for modern solutions. While I do not believe AI is a golden hammer, it *can* help you brush up that resume. The key here is to use it for *parts* and then review it and add your voice and finishing touches. Things to particularly pay attention to:

  • a concise summary at the top – by concise I mean 240-character-tweetable concise.
  • bulleted skills list.
  • tailoring to different role types that are adjacent – a given person is perfectly capable of being a Technical Program Manager or a Product Manager, but how you slant your resume will differ for those two roles.
  • clean design – you want enough white space to not make it cramped and not so much that it creates extra pages of reading or the eye falls off the page.

Before you send it out, triple check it for accuracy, and remove any “the user” or other phrases that signal AI use.

Networking

Find local chapters and meet-ups of folks who are in the same industry/specialty as you. Yep, meetup is still a thing, as is dev.events. You may be an introvert (Hi. It’s me. I’m an introvert.) but you’ll want to get out there and network – this can lead to consulting gigs, soft intros, expanding your LinkedIn (up next), etc.

LinkedIn

OK I mean yes, you can post how you are/were impacted. And your feels. But after that you need to look at LinkedIn as a tool.

  • “Link” to those you worked with that you had a good working relationship with – because now you can see jobs that get posted on their pages, by *their* network.
  • Clean up your profile like you clean up your resume: get yourself a headline, an “about” section, make sure your experience and skills are up to date.
  • Did you know you can set the “Open to Work” feature to Recruiters only?
  • Use it to find companies that say they are hiring (more on that later). When you reach out to recruiters or folks hiring, add a short note about why you’re messaging them (personalize it). It will help you stand out.
  • Take a look at your post history – is there anything there that *might* give a recruiter or a company second thoughts? I’m of a “hey if I say it at all I will shout it in a public square” mentality, but not all are.

Job Hunting

Indeed, LinkedIn, etc. all post roles that are “open”. I say “open” because you know and I know that some organizations aren’t great about their job posting hygiene, leave roles online that have been filled, or (in some cases) have “ghost” roles open. You don’t want those, you want real jobs.

If you can, look at the posting date. Focus more on applying to things posted sooner to “now”, than older. Those are less likely to be well into the interview and/or hiring process, and more likely to be legitimate and still funded.

If you know someone who works at that company, reach out to them and ask them for a soft intro to the hiring manager, or a referral.

Stress Management

Touch grass. I’m serious: go out for a walk, make sure you’re hydrated, and so forth; this is a stressful time and stress management is going to be a requirement, because stress can impact a lot of things including your immune system. You don’t want that.

If you are Left

Yes, this sucks for you too; go see “Closure“.

LinkedIn

You get LinkedIn homework too.

  • Find the folks you know are impacted, that you have a good working relationship with them, and “Link” them. This gives them an extended network and exposes them to more opportunities.
  • As fellow Linkies post jobs available, repost them. You don’t have to add your thoughts if you don’t want to, but reposting them extends the visibility of the opening through *your* network directly.
  • For closer impacted folks, you can help them eyeball their resume. Sometimes when you’re in the thick of a role you don’t realize all that you do, so you can be that “realizer” for your impacted friends.

Referrals

  • If your company has open positions, offer referrals for those you know would be a good fit. Referrals may sometimes feel like a black hole via the “system”, so if you can (without too much political capital) reach out to the hiring manager of the role your fellow Linkie is applying for, that can absolutely help.
  • If a position has been open for longer than 2 weeks, *definitely* check with the hiring manager if you can before referring. In the current market, that role is likely already filled or deeply in the hiring process, and it may be too late.

Stress Management

This applies to you, too. Both from a survivor’s guilt perspective, but also from a “there’s bound to be a shuffle in the work structure or the workload”. Try to maintain good sleep hygiene, get some cardio, and stay hydrated, because it’s going to be icky for a bit as you juggle what you see online and what you experience at work.

Deep breaths, and do the best you can, with what you have.

Engineering

BobbieLeave a comment

It’s not often that I’m struck by something on LinkedIn that makes me think. That sounds bad; let me rephrase: it’s not often that I’m struck by something on LinkedIn that leaves an impression that lingers in the back of my brain after I leave the page. Usually, it’s a celebration of folks getting new jobs, folks leaving old jobs, folks looking for jobs, and a smattering of posts recapping job-like events. Sometimes there are adages and platitudes and we can all resonate with that image of the bent tree that ultimately succeeded or whatever.

It’s Boxing Day, or the Day After Christmas, and I’m poking around corners of the internet while waiting for the Nth load of laundry and figuring out how I’ll keep myself occupied for the next few days (yes, privilege). And so I found myself scrolling on LinkedIn, for this post by Nick Costentino. I don’t know Nick, we are “once removed” via a connection I have (or perhaps more than one, that’s the nature of LinkedIn), but this title, and this post, stick in my brain: “As a Software Engineer, you don’t need to know everything.”

Nick goes on to illustrate that good software engineering is not about having all the answers and/or “just knowing”, it’s about problem solving and being resourceful. It’s about having the *framework* (not in the software sense but in the “I can wire my approach to this” sense) to identify and solve problems. And my off the cuff reaction (which I commented) was: this isn’t just for software engineering; this is for life.

Depending on your geography, family affluence, and other circumstances, you got an education in your formative years. That education may have had you learning cursive and doing geometric proofs and diagramming sentences and such, but for anywhere from 10 to 15 years you were formally trained in Things Society Felt You Should Know. A *good* education didn’t just leave it at that, a good education taught you how to work with circumstances that were not solvable by rote memory: what is the scientific method, after all, if not “f*ck around and find out”? The idea being that instead of churning you out at the end of high school or college/uni with everything in your brain and it being 100% “full”, you were instead armed with concepts, ideas, and a method of approach to solve problems and self-manage.

I am not saying that that is the way it is for everyone — “No child left behind” left a *lot* of kids behind, and the current systems in place are highly differential depending on socioeconomic factors. Broadly speaking, however, people come out of high school and/or further education with the impression that they should *already* know everything and it’s just a matter of grinding your way to the “top” (whatever top that may be). And that the path is set for one’s career, and intransigent.

Careers are fungible things, and so are brains.

You will not, ever, ever, ever know all the things. There will be edge cases, there will be corner cases, there will be So Many Times you are working with Not All the Information and frequently it will be because either someone you were relying on for it didn’t know or because some process or person thinks you didn’t need it. Or the systems in place were developed by someone who left five years ago, and no one can read their notes/handwriting (if indeed any were left). This isn’t just in the software engineering world: I have had the luxury of having a few different “careers” in the last 30 years, and in every one of them I can point to a circumstance in which the person who should have known everything (the Vet, the Pharmacist, the Travel Agent, the Manager, etc.) did not know everything and what we all had to work with were some clues and guidelines and our very best efforts. Anyone who has been handed the curveball of an unexpected medical expense, your car breaking down, mystery crumbs on your kitchen floor, or any myriad of things in Being an Adult in the World has experience with the “I don’t have all the information, but I have to deal with this” scenario.

Education is *a* foundation, from which your brain gets wired (with experience) on how to approach the crazy that life throws at you. May your frameworks be resilient and resourceful.