I’ve learned to create a “mental base of operations”.
Sounds weird but they a places where you can create a makeshift office or space to sort stuff out, get stuff done. A coffee shop, a desk in a corner somewhere, a cheap hotel room. Somewhere where you can relax and get into your own headspace for a period of time so you can focus on what needs sorting.
A place where you know you have half an hour, an hour, or maybe two, where you can just focus and get stuff done.
I worked a contract at a University once working on planning a strategy. When I arrived they had no desk or place for me to work. My office was mobile, all in my backpack. I just needed Wi-Fi and power. I found a quiet desk in the University library. I worked from there for the best part of a week. I was on-site and available for meetings and when I wasn’t in a face-to-face meeting I was in my mental base of operations: a quiet library.
I’ve written articles in coffee shops, an eBook in a hospital cafe, written reports in libraries and spare rooms. I’m writing this post in a gym waiting area. All you need is a little space for a short period of time to just focus and get stuff done.
Category: career
Fail fast
I often hear “follow your passion”, or “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”. Yet many of us have absolutely no idea what that is. We follow a career path that is dictated to us by circumstance, necessity, our family and friends, or just whatever is available. Some people never find their passion, their “true calling”.
Is that a bad thing? After all, careers are just a vehicle to earn money in order to live. You hire out your time and effort (brains and brawn) in return for remuneration. You earn enough to live on and to squirrel some away for retirement. Maybe a little extra for some nice toys and the occasional holiday. Do we really need to enjoy the work?
It would be nice.
Figuring out what you are good at and enjoy doesn’t come easy to everyone. Some of us can wait years for the inspiration, that spark.
There is a way of finding it faster though, but it does require a certain amount of risk and experimentation. It’s often referred to as the fail fast method. Essentially it involves trying different things and seeing what works and what doesn’t. In this case you would try a particular job or start a business and see if you enjoy it. If not, find something else and move on, failing fast. Maybe parts of the job or business were interesting so incorporate that into your next attempt, refining with each new venture. You didn’t fail at the last five attempts, you just found five career paths that were not right for you.
There’s no harm in trying. Go for it. It beats waiting for something to come to you.
Give me a job
It amazes me how people have specific job titles that they hold on to, especially in IT. For instance they are a Systems Architect, or a .Net Software Developer, or maybe a Project Manager specialising in AWS projects. When out of work they search for jobs using these exact titles.
Who needs a ,Net Software Developer within my area, or remote, paying what I’m asking?
As the markets get worse and roles are thin on the ground and you are competing with hundreds of other applicants for the same roles, they still don’t bend, they remain inflexible, only looking for their particular job title.
In the past we would look for work by seeing who needed help and with what. Did you have the skills to do what was required, and is the pay being offered worth the effort? If the answer to both was yes then you’d apply. The job title didn’t matter. You could figure that out later, as long as you paid me what we both agree I’m worth.
Find someone with a problem that you can solve willing to pay you what you are asking and you have employment. Simple. Yet somehow we seem to have forgotten this basic rule and when finding ourselves out of work we look for job titles not needs. Which companies have a problem that you can help them solve? Forget how they are trying to solve it by advertising for various roles. Look at the bigger picture and see if your skills and experience can help them.
As an example from my own career, I was once asked to meet with a particular client that was advertising for a tester. Several agencies had sent them testers and every one was rejected. One agency asked me if I’d go along and meet with them to find out what was going on. They were based in Cambridge so I took the train figuring out that I could do some shopping and visit a few public houses while I was there. After the usual formalities my very first question was: What are you looking for? It turns out that no one had actually asked them this. They told me that their main software provider issued them with an ultimatum: either fix your system or we will no longer support it. Over the years they had created Frankenstein’s monster. It was a mess of patches and hacks and upgrading it took too long and hit their SLAs hard. They had been told that they should hire a tester and that was what they were attempting. What they actually needed was a consultant to come in and figure things out, not a tester who needs direction and control at the hands of a test manager, which was the type of candidate they were being sent.
Over the course of our meeting I outlined a brief plan for them covering what they needed in terms of skills and experience. I was hired as the consultant overseeing the work.
Look beyond roles. Look at what the company or client actually needs and don’t worry about job titles. You can figure what to call yourself later.
Online job hunting in 2024
Looking for work online, especially in the IT industry is pretty brutal in 2024. Assuming you do find roles that match your criteria, over 100 applicants have probably already applied. Using tried and tested techniques you tailor your CV and cover letter to the job description in the hope of moving to the front of the pile. Fingers crossed!
You hear nothing.
LinkedIn will usually provide information on the agent advertising the role along the lines of “This person generally responds within X number of days”. Yet they never do. You hear nothing despite all the time you took to research the role and craft your application.
It’s not rudeness, it’s a combination of inefficiency, a lack of automation, and unprofessionalism. Don’t take it personally. Assuming the job is real (more on that later) chances are that there were too many applicants and the agent did not have enough time to respond to all. Automation would help here, but not many agents use it, or use it well. Then there’s the unprofessionalism. A lot of agents are young, college graduates, or fell into the role after their intended career path didn’t lead them where they wanted. Recruitment is not their passion. Don’t bother remembering their names, next month they’ll be doing something else. The recruitment sector has a high turnover rate. Combined with mad incentive schemes and recruitment targets it’s all just a fast-paced game that many fail, and you, unfortunately, are just a pawn on the board.
Then there’s the jobs that don’t exist. Or might, possibly, in the future. Some recruiters like to predict market trends and monitor local news to guess who may be hiring and what kind of jobs. So they create fake job profiles to bring in candidates so that they are ready to go should the roles actually materialise. Most don’t and your data has now been harvested into a recruiter database.
You did read the terms right?
Chances are they may put you forward for roles without your permission just to prevent other recruiters from doing the same. It may be worth requesting your data be removed from recruiters that have not successfully sourced you a role. They may even sell your data on. Or if they are swallowed up by a bigger firm your data may be merged into another database that you did not consent to.
Between being ghosted, ignored, and harvested, you may become somewhat depressed. Don’t be. Its just a game and unfortunately in 2024 it’s brutal. But there are ways of taking back control, one of which is to become your own agent. One with a single candidate: you.
Look for potential employers or clients yourself. Tap your network for leads. Promote your candidate at every opportunity. Sell sell sell!
Go give it a try. You might find it fun. You’ll definitely learn what it’s like to be a recruiter, and about self promotion. Just don’t take being ignored, rejection, or being ghosted personally. It’s just a game.
See you in 2025!
Thank you for your application
“Thank you for your application”.
I hate that statement. Especially when received in an email informing you that you haven’t got the job, one that you did not actively apply for.
The job market is pretty dire at present. There are few jobs in IT, even less if you specialise. Finding the real jobs among all the fakes is even harder. What with CV harvesters and the recruitment agency incentive schemes designed to fill their databases with candidate data by lure of a maybe role.
What annoys me however is where you are headhunted, go through several rounds of interviews and testing, only to receive an email saying “Thank you for your application but..” followed by anything from we have decided to go in a different direction / hire a candidate with more relevant experience / changed our minds due to the current economy / etc etc.
I don’t really care about the reason why as they are usually made up anyway and never constructive. The phrase thank you for your application just irks me somewhat because I did not apply, I was approached. I was actively sought for the role. I was told I was the only candidate they were considering and I had calls with the team and the CTO. All wanted me to start immediately, they were just waiting on the paperwork to go through HR / the board / the CEO.
Then pow! An email:
Thank you for your application..
ADT
I learned that I was no good at sales around age 18. I was looking for work and was offered a sales job on commission with ADT, the alarm company, or at least an organisation performing door-to-door sales for them.
They started off by teaching me how to break into houses. It sounds strange but they actually did. For about 30-40 minutes in a cold hall with stale coffee we were informed about various techniques on how to break into houses. The thinking was that if we came up against stubborn home owners that said they didn’t need a home security system for whatever reason that we would be able to counter it with why they did because we knew how burglars think.
I was paired up with an older lady as my mentor. She was only a couple of years older than me and had been doing this for only a few weeks. Plus she had a car so she could drive us around to and from our sales area.
I wasn’t good at selling house alarms. My heart wasn’t in it. I figured this out fairly quickly. It all came to a head at the end of a long evening with no sign-ups when we arrived at a house with evidence of a recent break-in, namely a boarded up front door. My mentor said if we can’t sell to this home owner we should give up.
The home owner turned out to be a little old lady who had indeed been burgled recently. She had no money for an alarm. In fact she couldn’t even afford a contractor to fix her door. Her nephew had boarded up the door where a glass panel had been and had dropped off a new lock but had yet to return to fit it. Each night she would prop a dinning room chair up against the inside of the door for extra security as the door could not be locked. She would barely get any sleep each night from worrying.
Being a nice guy, she set about fixing us both a cup of tea while I got to work fitting the lock using a screwdriver set retrieved from under a sink. I left feeling good about helping someone, but with no money nor aptitude for sales, but with knowledge of how to break into houses.
Thanks ADT.
Gig economy
I’ve started watching this YouTube channel called London Eats. Not sure why. Maybe because I find it relaxing?
This guy zooming around the capital in the dark making food and parcel deliveries on his electric bikes and scooters. It got me thinking about the gig economy. How these workers don’t have a traditional employment contract, but are paid a fee per job.
After four hours of work this guy earned less than minimum wage and called it a good night. How? Less than minimum wage? Is the gig economy a way for employers to hire cheap labour? The apps these workers use must take a cut of the profits although they do offer meagre bonus payments if you work harder, faster, completing more deliveries within certain time periods.
The London Eats guy augments his meagre earnings by filming his shifts and turning them into quality viewing. He also confesses to having a day job so his shifts only need to be a few hours. He also sells swag from his channel and has sponsorship from various companies. So he’s making ‘his gig’ work. But I’m curious how others are faring from this industry, being paid per delivery.
I guess it’s nothing new. In my youth I worked for a company that paid me 1p for every flyer I delivered. If I could deliver one a minute that’s 60p an hour! Sounded great as a kid needing to augment his pocket money, but even with inflation an adult wouldn’t do it. Explains why so many of us were school age delivering those flyers. Child labour.
The gig economy is here to stay. It makes sense for the employers as it’s cheap labour. And as there appears to be no shortage of willing workers it must be profitable enough for some. Or maybe they just like working when they want to, being by themselves travelling around the city listening to their tunes going door to door, having no in-person boss.
The Net
Do you remember the Sandra Bullock movie The Net? I loved that movie when it first came out. Not for the storyline or because Ms Bullock was in it. I loved it because it showed me a possible career path that I didn’t know existed. One that I thought looked perfect to me.
You see Sandra’s character tested computer software for a living, all from the comfort of her own home. She didn’t have to deal with long commutes or co-workers. She worked freelance when she wanted for whomever she wanted. Free from office politics and office parties. Bliss!
I vaguely remember the rest of the movie. It was probably so-so. Not as good as Speed or Demolition Man (remember the seashells?). But I do remember it igniting the idea of becoming a freelance tester, a troubleshooter of software, and an ethical hacker.
It’s interesting where ideas can come from. A book, an overheard conversation, or a conspiracy movie from the 1990s.
Thanks for the career inspiration Ms Bullock!
Musings on working in London
I’ve worked in IT for the best part of three decades and somehow during all that time I’ve managed to avoid working for a company based in London. I’ve been there for several interviews and many meetings but I’ve never had to work there.
It wasn’t on purpose, it just didn’t happen. And I’m ok with that, now.
Don’t get me wrong I do like to visit London. Piccadilly Circus, the Trocadero, the underground. Over time I’ve come to appreciate living and working in the countryside. As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to enjoy the gentle ebb and flow of life outside the cities and major towns of England. It’s nice on occasion to go into London for a meeting or event but that’s it. I find it too.. peoply.
I like people and the intenseness and craziness of cities, but in moderation. I don’t think I could live and breathe that amount of people and activity every day.
It helps that I live so far from the nearest city and that the trains are so expensive as both combine to supply me with the perfect excuse as to why I can’t work there. The maths just don’t add up. The cost of train tickets and travel time make such a commute too expensive. You end up giving a huge part of your income and time to just getting to your desk each day.
During the pandemic I got used to life in my village. After the pandemic I joked that I had become village agoraphobic, in that I rarely left the confines of the village. It is a pleasant existence. It also saves on fuel costs and car insurance!
So despite the younger me anticipating a busy life in the city, the older me has come to appreciate the calmness and slowness of life in the countryside.
Hustling
Instagram is full of people pushing products and trying to show complete strangers how amazing their lives are, but there are some nuggets of wisdom on the platform. I don’t post myself, I just have a sock puppet account I use for OSINT purposes, which if I’m honest I may also use just to browse.. on occasion.
One thing I’ve learned from Insta is how much some people really hustle. By hustle I mean work hard at promoting their brand, their products, their whole reason for being.
For example just look at The Rock or Mark Wahlberg. They both post multiple times a day pushing their products and movies. If you didn’t have Insta you may only hear about their occasional movie and catch a snippet of news about them and probably think they have it easy, make a movie, collect the millions, repeat, right? With thanks to Insta you can actually see how much they are hustling. Up in the early hours each day hitting the gym, then promoting their clothing / alcohol / sports nutrition products, then doing interviews and photoshoots, followed by attending events for further networking opportunities. It looks exhausting!
These two are constantly hustling. And they are not the only ones. Check out Arnold and Stallone. Both in their 70s still hustling like crazy. Like a duck swimming we have this picture of these celebrities in our minds that everything is easy for them on the surface, but Insta pulls back the curtain and shows us how crazy active these people are underneath, working at maintaining their image and brand.
Take a look at sports personalities and fitness models. In the gym multiple times a day, promoting their classes or courses, doing photo shoots and training videos, attending events and working hard to promote both their image and what they are selling.
It may be full of cat videos but there are still nuggets of wisdom on Insta.