For me, I was actually just really bad at selling myself (job interviews are not where you should have false humility I learned).
I was very fortunate in that my girlfriend helped me a lot here. But quite frankly what she did was very straightforward. She would do a 30 minute mock interview with me, and ask me pretty standard behavioral questions. Questions like:
- Can you tell us about a time when you had to work on a project with a tight deadline? How did you handle it?
- Can you give an example of a project or initiative that you spearheaded and the impact it had on the company or team?
- How do you prioritize and manage your tasks and responsibilities when faced with competing demands or tight deadlines?
I answered these questions on my own in a notes app, and then when she would ask me I would then draw on my previous experiences and figure out how to answer question that tells a story as best as possible.
This really helped me a lot.
One tip I would give is to generate these questions, try copy/pasting the job description into ChatGPT and ask it to generate a list of interview questions for that role! I found that much better than sifting through the SEO spam for interview questions.
"job interviews are not where you should have false humility I learned"
This is so true, definitely screwed over some of my earlier interviews due to doing this
I had 7 jobs in the last 9 years. I've quit all of them. I interviewed at probably 50-60 places during this time and I'm currently moving to my next role, so I'll begin the 8th job in 9 years.
To practice interviewing you need to firat get details about the job and company and develop a list of questions. If I really wanted a job I'd get 30-40 questions prepared, from job specific to behavioral ("tell me of a time you had to deal with a difficult stakeholder"). Then add variations of the question so you get used to being asked the same thing different ways.
Then always use STAR (situation/task/action/result) to answer the question. This will help the interviewer remember you a lot better and it will also highlight what YOU did.
Practice going through your CV/resume back to front and front to back. Be prepared to highlight what you learned at each role and why you left from it/got made redundant.
With sufficient grind you will become proficient at this and it will make a world of a difference. I can now confidently say "I wont get this role because I messed up X, so if they were paying attention they will reduce my score for this". You will still get rejected (sometimes there is just someone better than you) but the goal is to improve your odds at being the one that gets the job.
I'm curious what the experience/incentive has been to change jobs so quickly. Was it a cluster of redundancies that is inflating the number or do you plan to stay at a job for no more than 1 year + a little? Do your interviewers find this suspicious or negative? I've always been told that if you switch jobs too fast then no one will hire you cause they know you'll leave as soon as you get up to speed.
I wanted to get into a more technical role and a lot of these roles were in customer service, sales, support, fraud prevention, etc until my most recent 2 jobs, which have been in software development.
The other aspect is that I will view a company the same way they view me - a resource and a means to an end. I've been asked in several of those interviews "You don't seem to hang around a lot, how do we know you won't leave in a year" and I tend to answer that "You don't. The same way I don't know that some economic downturn isn't on the horizon and that you would instead scrap me a year down the road.". Some don't like it and engage in that discussion more and some accept it.
At the end of the day, I'm here to do a task you hired me to do, I'll do it well (they can check a ton of references in this respect) and when I'll find something better I'll leave. If I don't get hired because of this, it's not a job I would want anyway. I'm pretty tired of how capitalism and "the market" applies only to workers but it never seems to apply to companies and when it does then you're "not a team player" or "not in it for the long run" or, as we've seen recently on HN, "not part of the family".
So to do my part I always advise / suggest to friends and family to quit. Start looking for something else, get some practice, see what's out there, see if you could get paid more for your skills and see if you could do more interesting work. Those are all possibilities. Unfortunately, most people like to stick with the devil they know and then end up scared and shocked when they get made redundant. Hope that this explains it. PS - the job I most recently accepted seems great, the team and the product seem interesting and I'm looking forward to getting stuck in. However, that doesn't mean that if I start getting bored, if change isn't being effected at the rate I push for and if the product/team turn out to be not great, I might decide to move on.
It's a great attitude to have. Just be aware that if you ever want to become a manager or higher it will work against you. If you just stick to technical positions you'll be fine (until ageism rears its ugly head).
I would love if their customer service was so fast. They keep ghosting us for 7 days. Poking the on a live chat results in "hey we'll look at this".
Truly loving the service but we had to "unproxy" our website. When it works, it brings so much value. I'm guessing our issue isn't trivial to solve though.
As someone who suffers from recurrent corneal erosion (scratches on cornea, that are painful as hell) I incorporated a set of steps to manage this condition.
1. Daily eyelid hygiene - using special wipes to get the leftover from your eyelashes, to unblock Meibomian glands. It can dramatically improve how your eye is moistened. People who suffer from dry eye syndrome should at least try it.
2. Using eye drops daily - whenever I see them or I need them.
3. (Something that is specific to recurrent corneal erosion). I put some ointment/gel when I go to bed. As most of recurrent corneal erosion events happen during the night, it is crucial to be protected when you sleep.
Eye drops in my case didn't help, it mostly
was caused due to producing to little tears at
night when I sleep, I can't put eye drops in
when I sleep.
But there where some things which did help:
- eating/drinking healthy, while unclear it seems my tear under production was partially linked to a unhealthy diet
- eye hygiene helped a bit not much
- Making sure air humidity is at a good level during winter times helped too.
- And while it sounds ridiculous: Getting used to carefully open the eyes when waking up, like very very carefully. That probably helped better then all the other effects combined as most damage seems to have happened when opening the eyes when waking up.
The last one is indeed the golden one. When I feel that my eyes are sealed or I feel a lot of friction I use my fingers to help open my eyes. After that I put some eye drops in.
What is very interesting that there is a certain set of actions that you can take and the ones that helped you, didn't help me (diet - I've been eating healthy for a long time, air humidity - we use air humidifier for a long time too), but the ones that were great for me (eye hygiene) didn't help you.
I can recommend medical grade silicone sleep masks (e.g. Eyeseals 4.0). These keep 100% humidity around your eyes over night, so that they can't dry out.
I had phototherapeutic keratectomy in both eyes (about a year apart) that basically cured my recurrent corneal erosion. I sleep in extended wear contact lenses most nights which help protect the cornea. I also have quite severe myopia so this is also convenient for when I wake up, using the toilet, wanting to know the time, reading the message that just arrived, etc. Then I just need some eye drops in the morning. I use eye ointment at night when I'm not wearing them.
I had phototherapeutic keratectomy which indeed helped me stabilize the situation, but didn't clear the symptoms 100%. I still have occasional erosions, which are much less severe and last way shorter than previous ones (minutes and not days). But I'm not sure if it is because of PTK itself or because of extra care that I give to my eyes daily.
Yes and no. In my opinion Elixir/Phoenix can make you and your team productive from day 1. Phoenix is well designed (apart from few naming quirks and inconsistencies, but hey, which eco system doesn't have them) and Elixir is mature enough. Few years ago there was a problem with 3rd party libraries which were hobby projects, but never turned into proper OSS and were just abandoned - e.g. User Management library called Addict (https://github.com/trenpixster/addict). IMHO the community got much more mature now, so the problem is less apparent.
The argument for no, is the shortage of Elixir developers. I have a feeling that while it's easy to find node/java/c# devs - it is remarkably hard to find good Elixir developers.
I've tried that as an experiment during the lockdown, after reading "Oxygen Advantage". For the first few days I was waking up without a tape, but got used to it.
I eventually ditched it because I didn't see any improvements.
