Reviewing the Last Year at Last Job

So! Today, I ended up putting my two weeks at Cytracom, unlikely a lot of other places I’ve ever been at, it felt like an eventuality. While I did get to work with a lot of my old colleagues and got to work with interesting tech stacks. My heart wasn’t in it.

It’s partially my fault, partially, the economy’s fault. See, I was laid off from Veriff 4 months before getting the job at Cytracom. And in the state of the economy, I was either getting to a final round, and finding out the company was going through its layoffs, or I was the runner-up after a 6-9 step interview process.

I reached out for a referral as a sort of a last shot. I’ve never been rejected this badly in my life for any job, and I thought I had a dream career over at Veriff. While I was refreshed to see the interview process was fairly straightforward. I was sort of thrown into the mix immediately.

I had a long background in network troubleshooting, Linux, backend development, and Kubernetes at this point, so it wasn’t too hard for me to get productive, but it all felt like a bit of a regression in my career. I was more engineering/DevOps focused at Veriff, and towards the end of my Datto career, but here I was just sort of placed back into the midway point of my career.

Over the year, it felt increasingly apparent I wasn’t learning anything new from my peers, and I was upskilling them in our complicated technology stack. While I usually didn’t have an issue with this, there wasn’t anything to gain from the kinds of things I was teaching back. Along with that, I wasn’t vibing anymore with the major demo that was the MSP market.

I think it was back in February when I had a particularly hard on-call period, where I had escalation after an incident after a 3 am call. It resulted in me having a few 90-hour weeks, and that sort of broke me. That’s when I started to take the next steps and looked for a new gig. It took a while, and the economy still isn’t great, but luckily was much better than in 2023. Eventually, after a few months, I finally found a great fit. Over at Octopus Deploy (specifically with their newly acquired company Codefresh), working more with supporting cutting-edge ci/cd tech.

Either way, I’m a lot happier now.

Takeaways from that time.

Some of these might be warnings, chunks of advice, or notes on things I should be doing moving forward. It’s the partially filtered-out mess of my weekend ethereal mindscape. So don’t expect it to be organized.

Red Flags to look out for both work and looking for work.

  • Be wary of vague descriptions of on-call periods. If they’re not straight up with this you’ll likely land into the following scenarios. You’re either in a position where you have to dedicate a week out of the month or every other week to supporting on-call pings.
    • Small teams are usually the smoke for this kind of scenario. If there are fewer than 4 people on a team with an on-call component, 9 times out of 10, you’re going to be doing 1 to 2 weeks of primary on-call due to holidays.
  • Too many hands in the pot during interviewing. If your direct report is going to be the CTO or a Director, sure, they should probably meet you during an interview process, but if you find yourself meeting with the front-end team, backend, infra, hiring manager, sales eng, and the founder during their interview process, run.
    • During my interview period, I’d get to the end, and I’d routinely didn’t get a position. After all, they found someone who “fit” their company culture a bit better because someone somewhere said something weird about you. These companies tend to have diversity/inclusion issues because of how this kinda process is constructed.
    • Startups who do this sort of chain interview process will almost always have some absurd organizational issues.
    • Not properly warning you about what kind of technical test/interview you’ll be going through is also a major red flag. Had that happen with a major company that dealt with single sign-on technology, and I genuinely wasn’t prepared for it. Super shitty thing when you’re 5 interviews deep.
  • No clear promotion pathways!!
    • If you don’t know what your career progression could look like, run. You’ll be stuck in that title forever.
    • If they take 10 months to change your title after a title change, run. Genuinely, this is the kind of task that should take a month at most. Not 10.
    • No shadowing, or mentoring is also a sign of that.
  • Diversity isn’t talked about.
    • Oof, this is a big one. I’m a trans woman, well. I’m an intersex trans woman, which is a loaded term, but for most people, I’m usually the first trans woman they’ll work with openly. It’s insanely awkward being out, and knowing about the other folks who are out in their personal lives, but never mention their partners at work. It’s super fucking awkward to deal with that, day in and out. I usually had to use my guy voice at work otherwise the clients wouldn’t take me seriously, and that was intensely taxing physically, and mentally. Never do that again.
    • No other women on the team is a massive red flag.

Things I should have done during my last job:

  • I should have worked on more projects independently of work.
    • My frontend knowledge kinda sucks. It’s my biggest weakness, and I could have addressed it during that year. Now, I’ve been learning Svelte, typescript, and other junk during my interviewing period, but I need to keep it up.
      • Subgoal: redo this website with reactive elements in Svelte using skeleton UI.
  • I should have created more boundaries and advocated for my team more.
  • Finished a few of my projects that got sidelined due to work volume. While I shouldn’t feel too guilty about this. There are some onboarding automations I really wanted to complete and I guess I could in the time I have left, but it would have taken too much cross-team coordination to finish up.

Interview Period Takeaways

  • There were times I wasn’t considerate enough to my partner, and I stressed her out because I was doing interview projects that would take weekends to finish up at times, leaving me with very little free time. Next time, if it’s not urgent, I will always take a week’s break between different interviews.

  • Focus on what the full process is going to be like, sometimes they’re a little vague on everything, but the key points are trying to figure out points you need to put time into the process vs not. Behavioral interviews don’t need crazy prep, technical ones do though.

  • Utilize my community and friends more. I should have hit up my network for help finding job openings and coordinating study sessions.

Final Notes for myself

  • Worklife balance is key. Don’t burn out. Don’t do that thing you do, and take on too much shit. And don’t bring homework after work.
    • I’ll be ritualizing my work shift to home more, fully migrating into my office, and avoiding it after work.
  • Work on my weaknesses, and improve these items over time. Please don’t neglect the things I’ve identified.
  • Be kind to your partner. Elevate her, don’t vent at her, and bring work home, even if it’s a hard day.
  • Improve my environment, one thing at a time, don’t just work towards experiences, work towards home goals, and contribute at home like you do with your personal work.
  • Finish those books you were writing you asshole. You’re sitting on finished FanFics as well which should have been edited by now.