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Tue Oct 12 05:28:55 PM EDT 2021
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It was a solid night and following morning adding
CyberCoders.com to the job search engines. Resume up, resume
mangled (from their internal interpretation), resume
corrected. Afterward, apply, apply, apply, ..., apply.

With each submission, there are typically a couple of
questions with free-form text response fields. "Tell me why
you're perfect for this job!" "Tell me about a time when..."
"Describe your current tech stack." Three or four per
application seems about the mean. And as I was filling them
out with some care, I remembered: It doesn't seem to matter.

What does that mean? Statistics. If you enter the game with
the overwhelming sense that you've got to stand out, you've
probably lost. The days of the right weight and brightness
of the paper stock, the font, and so forth? Those days are
gone. That exercise in pounding your uploaded resume into a
standard template with standard presentation has removed
most of "you" from you. No guarantee here, but if on the
other side the hiring folks are getting swamped, you might
better spend your time pumping out two or three times as
many submissions and hitting one who's carefully looking for
you. Hitting apply gets you a phone call or it doesn't. If
you get no calls, adjust.

I was suprised a week or so ago that I'd gotten a call for
an interview so quickly. The half-hour scheduled easily went
into an hour. "I'll send you a link to a screening thing. Do
that as the next step." That screening was trivial. The work
would have been idea. I got my hopes up ~ it was surely a
shoe-in. "It was a pleasure chatting with you. I completed
the work. Please acknowledge receipt and let me know the
next steps."

Crickets. Within a week, I saw the position closed and then
reopened, this time with more details. The new stuff? I told
them I was interested in working their commercial projects,
but I would be very reluctant to go back into serving
government projects. They ignored my up-front warning and
scheduled me anyway. They wasted my time. I became invested
in the outcome. They blew me off and changed tact.

Honestly, I knew better too. I actually should have insisted
on holding the call to the scheduled 30 minutes, and the
entire process should have been "shoot & forget." A good
reminder. This phase of life is well into the "This is me;
take it or leave it" stage. I don't want to accidentally
find myself anywhere near the people pleasing, fully
accomodating nonsense again.

Shoot and forget. Next target. Adjust fire if necessary.
It'll work out or it wont -- no regrets either way.