October was a busy month. Job applications and interviews consumed much of my time. All the time spent was worth it when I accepted an offer for a new job.
The Big News
I started my job search on September 28th and accepted an offer for my new position on October 28th. I may end up writing a separate blog post about what I did to prepare for my job search - creating this site was part of that preparation. For now I will share 3 takeaways from the process.
LinkedIn Helped Me Get a New Job… Again
As much as I don’t like LinkedIn as a platform, it can be a great avenue for companies to contact you as opposed to your applying for a job. A person from the company that I eventually accepted an offer at contacted me through LinkedIn. This is now the second position that I got through LinkedIn as a recruiter reached out to me and helped get me my previous position.
I Underestimated the Shift to Remote Work
The last time that I looked for a new job I never considered working remotely. In this job search most of the companies that I applied to were fully remote. They typically had an office somewhere, but the office was not a place where a large staff worked everyday. Their offices were more of a formality.
In addition to the jobs themselves being remote, all of my interviews were conducted over the phone or on a video call (Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom). Even the interviews for local companies were done virtually. As an applicant, this made the interview process a lot easier. There were a few times when I was able to schedule interviews outside of business hours for me - before 9am and after 5pm - but during business hours for someone in a different time zone. This reduced the amount of time off that I needed to take from my previous company during the interview process.
Don’t Waste Each Other’s Time
For the first time in a job search I took myself out of the running for a position. At that point I had already spoken to a few people from the company and they wanted me to come into their office for a final interview. The company is local, so I wasn’t going to have to travel far for the interview. I enjoyed my conversations with the people that I spoke to and the company sounded like a great place to work. Unfortunately, the more that I learned about the position that I was interviewing for, the more I realized that it wasn’t the right fit for me. After much consideration I emailed the main person that I was in contact with at the company and politely turned down the in-person interview opportunity.
This Website
There weren’t too many updates to the site this month. My only blog post was about formatting dates in Astro. I made one other change to how the site functions - allowing for blog posts without tags. With that change I switched the order of sorting and filtering posts on any of the tag pages. I made the change with performance in mind even though I doubt there is any significant difference in build times on a site as small as this one currently is. Perhaps I will revisit this in the future to test if there is any impact on performance.