After 5 months in my bookmarks, hey let's spark this conversation up again.
Thanks Brian for sharing your experience and insight. Sounds like it got very stressful for you, so I'm glad you found your current job and hope you don't have to go through that situation again. At least you don't have a kid... that would've compounded the stress to ulcer status. Or maybe you'd go all Cinderella Man and deliver a gimme job punch FTW.
We all complain about our jobs from time to time, and many less fortunate people would rightly deem such behavior smackworthy. We shouldn't forget that a boring or frustrating day at work is better than a panicked sense of helplessness and life ruination.
That being said, apparently I'm all about making my career less and less stable. So, I have some thoughts from this experience.
In school and shortly after, I'd have thought it crazy to not have a job. Our parents taught us we should be working and saving money for a house, kids, retirement, etc. A friend who left SocialChorus before I did, also to be unemployed and income-free, had said it was one of the best decisions she'd ever made. This fascinated me and made me less scared and more curious. Then doing it myself, giving up a good steady paycheck and having to find my own health insurance, oh yeah and with a mortgage, my mind was opened to a whole new world of possibility. Breaking free of the rules I thought I had to follow, I now feel much more free and in control of my own career and future. If I don't like my job, I can quit. I've done it before and survived. I can take time off, travel, train myself, work as a freelance contractor, maybe do part-time work and spend more time on hobbies. I can go work in another city or state (or country?) for a while and see if I like it. I'm still on track to die alone, but at least that long solo road doesn't have to be so repetitive. It'll be interesting to see where this leads. Of course, it's possible because I spent all those years saving a good portion of my income.
On the other hand, my self-doubt and worry haven't vanished completely. Although Web and mobile development are going strong and will be for the foreseeable future, and Ruby on Rails is a very hot technology to know right now... I'd still be somewhat nervous if I really needed a job and was going in for an interview. Will I present myself well? Will my experience seem valuable to them? What if I choke on a tough coding challenge? What if my salary demands are too high and hyperintelligent kids willing to take much less make me a less-bang-for-buck hire? I've been on both sides of the hiring desk and know it's hard to evaluate a candidate and hard to prove value to a company without doing a nontrivial amount of real work.
Anyway, I'm sure we'll come back to this topic. Pretty sure we're not all in our dream job situations yet. It'll be interesting to see what's ahead.
