Leaving WiredTree

I had the exasperating and exhilarating experience of leaving my last job. I spent about two months looking for work. I had a very slow start, and my experience the last few times I’ve looked for work has led me to believe that a lot of companies are bad at aggressively pursuing candidates.

I applied at a lot of places, strictly in Chicago, strictly in linux roles. Some form submissions became form rejections, I’m comfortable with that. I did have the initial problem that all the resumes sent for the first two weeks had the wrong phone number on them, and my resume is spare, I don’t like to over fill it with keywords.

I had a number of experiences with recruiters, some were excellent, very hands on, and at each step I was prepared and know what to expect. Some were aggressive, and I probably had a few phone interviews that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. The job I’ve just taken at Mbira Technologies, was handled by CPS, which is a company I’m not sure I’d otherwise heard of. Jobspring always seems friendly, though I haven’t talked to any of their team in a long time (Samantha reached out to me a year or more back, and if I ever need to look for work I might contact her in addition to CPS). I interviewed over the phone with Braintree, and probably would have taken a job there if they were a bit faster, they initially rejected my application, then followed up a few weeks later. I think I learned more from their code challenge than I have from any other task, it was both open ended in how you achieve it, specific in what needs to be done, and testable. I was able to leverage the small experience I got from solving their problem to gain confidence and insight that translated into more well-rounded skills when I interviewed at Mbira.

Going to Mbira

So I’m moving out of web hosting, into, well, more website hosting, but this time for one site and all of its IT, no cpanel, and very limited external clients. I’m pretty excited, it’s going to be life changing to have dinner together with Beth rather than lunches, and I look forward to filling my evenings with general nerdery. The computer crowd in Chicago has a rich network of meetups and hack nights, geared toward the 9-5 downtown set, and I’ve been excluded from basically everything since I started working shift work at WT. I’m glad to be back in the daylight.