I used to dream about leaving that job, and I guess I just finally reacted in a way that got me out of it, even if it wasn't ideal. After I lost the job, my girlfriend explained that "for as much as you bitched about that job, you were never actually going to quit." and she was absolutely right. The fear of quitting and having to find a new job was too much for me.
I've been out of a job for a bit more than a year now. I see ads all the time that maybe I could do, but I don't always apply because I don't feel qualified for them. It's really starting to get to me.
So what projects are you working/have you worked on?
I want to be able to leverage this project to get a proper job ("hey look at this! I've shipped something!"), so that just drives my paranoia into overdrive. Literally hours spent messing about with colours ("Is this yellow ok, or should it be more muted?"), rather than coding an extra feature. The colour point is rather moot anyway, since I've got a touch of ye olde colourblindness.
I think I should set a target - I'll have it online by... the end of next week! We'll see how I do.
The rest of my, shall we say, "vacation" has been spent
a) terrified that I'll never get a job again:
I'd spent three years in COBOL-land and any pretense of actual skill had long since rusted over. I had pretty much no inclination to code anything after work, since the job sapped my energy so well.
Even before that job, I still didn't think I was really any good. A programmer-turned-sysadmin friend of mine from college seems to think I'm good. When he moved to England, he said something about maybe recommending me for the job he was leaving. When I expressed these concerns, he said I was smart and could pick things up fast, had faith in me, etc. Unfortunately, my self-esteem sucks, and it's reflected in the projects I start.
I tried to teach myself C#, Java, some python.. but I got so caught up in the details that I didn't get anywhere. I wasn't creative enough to come up with a solid "use it in anger" project, so I'd just give up.
Now, I've got the aforementioned web project, and I'm teaching myself PHP to get it done, but I still feel like a pretender.
b) RSI.
I had started seriously learning from UNSW's YouTube videos, and was reading lots of books, taking notes, etc. when my arm was engulfed in pain. For a couple months, I didn't type much, didn't do much.. I was convinced I was royally screwed and would never be able to code again... at age 25. The pain has mostly gone - I've typed this whole thing without pain - but it does come back from time to time, though the same friend I mentioned earlier is convinced it's psychosomatic at this point. He's probably right, to be honest.
c) Job offer.
I signed a conditional offer back in February, to do a job horribly similar to my last job. I figured I could take that job and use the money from it to take courses, etc. I thought the structure would help me maintain enough inertia. Instead, the job fell through when that company didn't get the contract they were hiring for. It took until June to get that notice. I'd used it as an excuse for being lazy during that time, thinking the problem was solved when it wasn't. Incidentally, the RSI started about the same time the job fell through, thus strengthening the case for the RSI being psychosomatic.
Sorry for ranting, but when I started writing this, I got self-conscious about how lazy/incompetent/whatever I am, and I think I'm being defensive when it isn't necessarily called for. I just.. I don't think things are actually going to work out, and it occasionally makes me contemplate suicide. I need to catch a break, but I haven't earned it yet.
/rant
a) Push the baby out by this week. If you're anything like me, the improvement in your actual project will be exponential.
b) This is a little harder to explain, but I'll do my best. I've felt inadequate many times in my life, and it can be paralyzing.
You need to be OK with failure, because life is full of it. That doesn't mean you should accept it, but it means that your worth shouldn't be defined through being successful, and you shouldn't be crushed by failure. How you do that is really up to you - I've found my own way - but once you're OK with that, you won't feel like you have to "earn" your breaks, and the need to perfect things will decrease.
I hope this is helpful. I don't want to offer more advice than I can chew, but I wanted to at least say something. Feel free to shoot me a message.
And launch the darn app. It cannot do it itself.
I had the same problem for a while, until I realized that the worst that could happen is either you get no response, or they will tell you "thanks but no thanks". If you do get an interview, then that is an opportunity to meet interesting people, and possibly learn something.
The key here is approaching interviews less as a time for some people you don't know to judge you and more as an opportunity for you and some other people to learn about each other. You can learn an awful lot about business, the market, people's technical and non-technical problems, if you make an effort to go on interviews. You may even learn something about yourself, or have a brilliant idea for a project.
Besides, "unqualified" isn't the right word at all. It's more accurate to say that you have a different skill set (based on your horrible migration story) - and skill sets are easy to change, given time and motivation.
Simple. I'm tired of spending an hour on a cover letter, tailoring my resume, looking up contacts at the company, etc. only for all my work to be piped directly to /dev/null.
When I first lost my job, I sent out a bunch of resumes to places hiring for jobs I wanted to do. A .Net developer here, a Java developer there. I never heard back from anything I wanted.
I gave up and applied for a job similar to my last one, and got an offer. They ended up not getting the contract, and I was left with the bill for calling their number across the country for the technical interview, and the bill for a scanner/printer (didn't have one then) that I needed to sign and send back the offer.
I went through a series of phone interviews about a month ago for a junior QA position. After three weeks and three phone interviews with HR, a technical interviewer, and a manager, I got a message from noreply@company.com with a PFO form letter.
I still send resumes to things, but I generally limit that to jobs explicitly marked "entry level" that rarely come in.
If you know anyone hiring in Canada (I'm living 500km from "home" right now, so I don't much care where in Canada) for an entry level position, let me know. I'll work my ass off to get up to speed, I'll work long hours, whatever it takes.
