To be fair, it was the first time in my life that I was officially without a job and officially made myself available on LinkedIn. Most likely, that was a mistake. Most likely, I should have patiently waited for the first company I started talking to to respond. But as everyone knows, patience is not my virtue :). Also, my wealth manager kept asking me how much I would earn a month from my part-time job, and I couldn’t tell him because my onboarding took forever. Again, I probably shouldn’t have started this part-time, but it is what it is, and now I can’t undo what I started.
As I mentioned, the place where I wanted to be most said that they liked me, but now they need someone “more operational “, which is the theme I get all the time through my life, and most of the time, people indeed come back to me in a month or two, but this time, I didn’t have extra time, and more importantly, I was absolutely sure they needed me immediately:), so I kept talking to them. At the same time, since I made myself available, people started to reach out. There were some calls with unacceptably low pay rates, and some with very high rates from the industry I’d just left. There were several “usual suspects“, some interesting and some not. At some point, as I was in different stages of interviewing with six different companies at the same time, it started to wear me down.
I didn’t get any advantage of not working, because I was constantly in the process of interviewing:) or scheduling interviews. By the beginning of October, three companies remained, including the one I started talking to in August and really liked. Another company appeared later than the others, but it looked extremely interesting. Unfortunately, they were very slow in scheduling. I emailed and asked whether they were still interested in talking to me. They said yes, but scheduled an interview for ten days later. Meanwhile, the third company told me there would be several technical interviews, 75 minutes each, and that they would start scheduling.
At that point, I was extremely tired of the whole process. Fortunately, my favorite company came with an offer, which I happily accepted.
Two days later, another super-interesting company reached out, but it was already too late. Overall, the whole process was very different from what I’d expected after reading LinkedIn for several months :). Granted, there were several recruiters who were asking whether I could program in Python and said that that was one of the requirements. My answer was that I am always happy to learn what’s needed, but if they consider a lack of Python skills a showstopper, that wasn’t the right position for me. However, nobody asked me about AI usage, and each company with which I started the actual process needed my brain, not an artificial one :).
This affirms my belief in progress and the overall sanity of humanity.
