Observations at the End of March
...in which the author lists a collection of somewhat random observations and thoughts
That's like the worst thing you can do in writing generally and blogging specifically, but it's my website and I can do as I please.
I'm sorry to say that I remain unemployed, despite my efforts. The one good thing about having a tremendous amount of time on my hands and a certain level of professional desperation is that I'm highly motivated to learn new things and maintain old skills, and I've got nothing but time in which to do it. To that end, I've started learning how to use Pandas for data analysis. I would be lying by omission if I didn't say this was mainly because I have an e-book on the topic that I got in a Humble Bundle, and I'm a sucker for Python stuff.
I would've said I've never done data analysis before, but, as it turns out, I've done a bunch, it just went by the title of "Probability and Statistics", "Quantitative Analysis", or "Qualitative Analysis". Turns out that Poli Sci degree does have some relevance, if you can call acquiring a journeyman level of skill in a career field I will likely never pursue relevance. Still, it's actually pretty fun, and I could easily see where I could have leveraged some of this in my previous company.
The book uses Jupyter notebooks, which are a lot of fun. Apparently, towards the end of the book, we'll be getting into machine learning a little bit. This is something I've been interested in for a while, and it'll be nice to speak with some authority to people on LinkedIn posting about AI taking over entire industries without actually knowing what an LLM is.
Speaking of LinkedIn, I recently wrote a post about how developers who've spent a long time working in JavaScript on the front-end can just as easily use Node.js on the back-end, so, if you're a recruiter, or you're hiring, bear that in mind. And because the post has the word "recruiter" in it, about a million Indians (from India) started sending me connection requests and messages with their resumes, asking for a job. Had they read the post, understood the post, or taken about one second to notice that my job title has nothing to do with recruiting and is, in fact, the same as some of theirs, they would've realized they were barking up the wrong tree. If you want a perfect example of why hiring in IT is a complete and utter disaster, that's about as good as you get.
It's sort of a perfect allegory. If you want to know why companies hire other companies who use AI and automated screening extensively instead of just doing it themselves, this is why. These types of people ruined the field. They're eating the goose that laid the golden egg. When you see a job posting that's twenty minutes old and has over a thousand applications, this is what's going on. I hate that the job market in this industry has turned into this, but I can't really blame companies for not wanting to deal with being mobbed by thousands of unqualified applicants.
A bunch of people who couldn't be bothered to get past "recruiter" didn't let that stop them from flooding my inbox with requests for a job. Would you trust someone like that with production code?
I don't know how to fix this. It might not be fixable. But that's why we're here.
Partly in response to the job market, and partly because, cards on the table, I'm ready to move on from writing code as a primary job responsibility, I'm looking at titles like Sales Engineer and Solution Architect. My big value-add, and the part I have unexpectedly found I enjoy the most, is talking to people and coming up with something to show for it, be that a plan, an analysis, a list of requirements, whatever. I'm a good communicator, but, I think more importantly, I'm a good conversationalist. That's rare as hen's teeth in the engineering world, quite frankly. If I'm being completely honest with myself, I think I've reached my ceiling as a pure developer. Now it's time to move into either something more client-facing, or into something more strategic.