Job Hunt: September 2019

Since my contract at my current company is coming up in the end of September, I started looking for a new gig this month. A few things were really important to me:

• Finding a job that had some upward mobility.
• Finding a job that had decent benefits
• Finding a job that didn’t really require me to go to an office every day.
• Finding a job that seemed appropriate for me (no Microsoft, yes Linux, yes Open Source, etc).

Before this, I did a few things to make my job search a little bit easier:

• Used Request Tracker to track the email communications from everyone. Email can be weird and you can miss important ones – with Request Tracker, you don’t.
• Used JIRA and the kanban workflow to track the status of every resume sent out, every job applied for, and every company interaction

As I moved through the various interview processes, I moved cards from one column from the interview process workflow to another. I tracked salary, relocation vs remote, the original job posting, and a few other things (the URL of the original post, was I referred by someone, etc).

We’re now 21 days into this process, and I’ve made a nice graph to show how this process has moved along in the past 21 days:

My job offers, as of right now:

• Research/Insurance position, “Dev Ops Manager,” $110,000
• Consulting position, “Dev Ops Team Lead,” $160,000 + bonus
• Retirement Planning position, CISO, $210,000 + bonus
• Match making app, “DevOps Team Lead,” $145,000
• Communications Company, “DevOps Engineer,” $150,000

Ironically enough, the job that I want the most is one that I am waiting to hear back from – an engineering management position at a non-profit that works to eliminate childhood sex abuse and sex trafficking.

This has been, by far, the most stressful job search that I’ve done in a long time.

I’m looking forward to taking a few weeks off at the end of the year to unwind and relax.