Hey, I did that for my GCSE English Language/Literature too!

I've been searching for a proper job for a while, though I suppose I'm atleast lucky enough to have some kind of job whilst doing so. Going through college I always felt good knowing that A-levels in Maths and Physics would look good on a CV, but now it seems like most of my less intellectual friends who took easier courses have higher paying jobs than me. Bah.

I would say, Nate, that you might want to wait a week for each response before you send them another email. Whilst you might see it as pestering remember she's probably a busy person and would appreciate having her memory jogged. If you start the email by apologising for 'pestering' her or whatever, I'm sure it'd be fine.

Well, I contacted them and they rejected me. I am annoyed. For one thing, literally every single rejection I've had in this period of jobhunting has occurred after a long wait and me emailing them asking what's going on. Why the hell wouldn't they just tell me?

Secondly, I don't know why they rejected me. Let's put it like this:
If they didn't like my resume, that's fair enough - but I was told based on my resume that I looked like a good fit.
If they didn't want to pay for me to move internationally, that's fair enough - but we'd discussed this and I offered to pay my own way.
If we chatted on Skype and they thought I was a twat, that's fair enough - but we'd only communicated via email so far.
Which leaves one explanation: They saw the code I wrote for the programming exercise they set me and didn't like it. No explanation. But it was not a difficult problem, I solved it fine, and I can't think of any other way I could have implemented the solution. So now I've got no idea what they disliked about it.

The last few years have been tough. Having interviews and nothing coming of it can be get disheartening. Voluntary work is definitely good for getting you started and you'll get to meet lots of interesting people. Keep your passion alive because it's all too easy to lose faith and get depressed... but focus on the good things and keep striving for what you want to achieve.

so i just applied for yet another piece of shit shit-shoveller monkey-with-fucking-cholera-could-do-it simpleton dogsbody job because i'm a stupid cunt that can't do anything at all it would seem, and was turned down within, like, an hour of applying. i genuinely thought i might get that one. obviously fucking not.

apparantly they had a 'massive response' and there were others with more 'relative experience'. what more fucking experience do you want? who did they choose to scrape shit and milk cows for them then? a fucking brain surgeon part-time rocket scientist?

we were told back in college that we would be like gold dust in the future, because the farming industry is/was dying etc. this doesn't feel like gold dust. what a bunch of liars. i fucking hate this fucking stupid backwards embarrassment of a CUNTry. and myself, obviously, fgor not being able to even stand a chance sticking my arm up bovine anii for ever and ever amen sdngiosdngio;sernoghug

seriously. i'm so sick of this. are they telling kids in school how fucking incredibly hard it will be to find work once they leave school? are they training them or somehow helping them in preparation for that VERY REAL prospect? if they aren't, they should, because i had none of that goddamn shit. fucking drooling morons MURDER MUDERAEOPGASDGNSDG

In my experience, it's like this: jobs are hard to come by SO GO TO UNIVERSITY DEAR GOD GO TO UNIVERSITY IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOU WANT TO DO JUST FUCKING GO TO UNIVERSITY.

Oh and if you're not that smart or you don't want to go to university then just go smoke pot and get drunk or whatever it is kids do these days because was don't give a single fuck about your performance. Just don't pull our over all grades down too much, because league tables!

This all sounds lovely, I can't wait.

i can't afford uni. and i'm not getting a student loan/indebted for something i don't even need. and i don't think i'd be able to even if i wanted. and i really am only any good as a labourer.

and i have no idea what that second paragraph means.

Yes

Please tell me how I'm going to go to Uni when I'm not allowed to go back to Uni until I pay off my fines to Uni which was in no way my fault and the only reason my parents haven't told me to fuck off yet

I love America's education system lul

sorry, i'm not trying to be a dick, it just bugs me when people say "go to uni lol" and i have to repeat "i can't afford it" like a broken record of a parrot.

i must be very insecure.

The best part is that nowadays education doesn’t count for shit – it’s all to do with experience and connections. How many cashiers and baristas and waiters have degrees, I wonder.

Having a degree has actually made it harder to get work, as I'm 'overqualified'.

Having no connections and a flawless cv, with plenty of voluntary work and self study under my belt, I'm a living example of the corruption of the system.

It's the fucking narks, maaaaan.

Also MA I was agreeing with you not disagreeing with you, the whole thing is a fuck tonne o' bull shit!

I don't think Scrabtrapman was actually suggesting that you go to uni. It's just that schools and society puts that pressure on, despite the fact that it's becoming pretty clear that uni graduates aren't doing all that much better in the job market. Hell, I've got a fucking PhD almost and I've been unemployed and jobhunting for five months now.
EDIT: I guess it took me ten minutes to write this post out. STM posted in the meantime.


Having said that though; it never rains, but it pours. I've got more job interviews coming up than I can handle.

• In two days time I've got an interview for a company in Seattle that already rejected me for three different positions. This time they have sent a bunch of people down to Melbourne to interview people locally in-person and emailed me out of the blue asking if I was interested. Hopefully my wit and charm win them over.
• In two weeks I have an interview for a company in Amsterdam. Not just the company; the interview is there too. They're flying me up for a couple of days to decide if they like me and simultaneously to try and convince me that Amsterdam is really nice and I want to move there permanently.
• I had a phone interview two days ago that lasted all of ten minutes and the guy asked me two questions about myself. It was a little ridiculous. After that he sent me a coding exercise - which I think I did quite well in, although my history with previous coding exercises is evidence that I'm not a good judge of that - and I'll hear back about more interviews in a couple of days.
• Another company sent me their coding exercise the other day. It's really quite complicated and difficult and would require me to do a shitload of research to work out how to solve it. Not sure if I'm going to get the time to do it, and I suspect that the difficulty level (and the fact that the wage offered is far higher than any other job I've applied for) is a sign that I'm underqualified for it.
• I got an email this morning offering me a phone interview on Tuesday morning.

All of this has happened quite suddenly in a short amount of time. Other than one short phone interview with Amsterdam, I hadn't had any interviews for a month and half!

But you can always not mention all this stuff on the CV you send

apologies i'm stupid

my CV is fucking embarrassing. i have some qualifications and experience, but to be honest i think i've done more voluntary work at this point than paid employment. that's fucking terrible, man. maybe that's what turned them off. believe me, after a while, you can end up feeling kind of bitter doing voluntary stuff. yeah i want to do it, it gives structure to my day, but i'd really rather be doing a real job where i actually get paid and don't feel like such a drain on 'the system'. you know, like back in the good old days. when people had jobs. and worked. and got paid.

Nate, perhaps you already heard it, but when coding for "coding" exercises one of the main point they look at is if the code is easily readable and maintainable.

If you write the best algorithm in the world but no one can understand it you are not doing it right.

*shrug*

I'm generally good at commenting anything ambiguous and using good variable names. It's all about communicating my ideas to them, after all. Beyond that, though, maintainability has never come up as a matter when I've discussed it with them. They're always much more concerned about efficiency/Big-O complexity/smart stopping conditions/whatever than anything else.


I had four consecutive one-hour interviews for a company today. By the end of it I was pretty damned dead. I think I went well, but history has shown that I'm not the best judge of that.

Well if the discussion goes that way then indeed it might be that they are more interested in those aspects. I just know that during my interview they told that they like the "readability" aspect a lot. Just toughed I would share ;)

Slave Labour is now officially legal in the UK again for the first time in quite a while. The government call it the Help to Work scheme. It basically amounts to the government paying Work Programme suppliers for not doing their jobs and giving them free labour. Also interesting to note is that the Slave Labour scheme is double the amount of hours that maximum community service is. Unemployed people are now worse than petty criminals, also financially less secure than actual criminals.

If you live in the UK and support or can't find time to form an opinion on a chunk of the population being exploited for no pay then you're human scum and I don't like you anymore (And probably never did).

well at least we get barcode tattoos instead of branded like cattle. a lot more civilised.

Yeah, readability is definitely important, but I think it's more to do with the ability to communicate your ideas and, relatedly, the fact that it's irrelevant how efficient my code is if no-one can judge that.

They still get paid the dole, right?

This is the point where, if Labour still had a spine, they'd fight it tooth and nail, not today though. How I wish Attlee was alive to see this. Also thanks for bringing me up to speed on this WoF, I liked that volunteer page and I'll see what limited support I can give from across the pond. :P

That's an oxymoron. Jobseekers is a benefit you get for looking for work. It's in the title, and well below the minimum wage for twenty five hours a week. Less than one third of it.

*shrug*

They should change the title, then. I'm not saying it's a good idea, mind. Just that calling it slavery is a bit over the top.

I don't know enough about how it's implemented to express an opinion, but the UK is far from the first place in the world that work-for-the-dole programs have been implemented. It's gone reasonably well here in Australia.

I remember school training me for a future in a job market that ceased to exist the very moment I graduated.

Have you heard us called the "lost generation" yet?

No. If this was doing community service for the dole then my jimmies would be well and truly rustled, but that's morally okay.

Selling our time to corporations so they don't have to hire actual labour is SLAVERY and I refuse to refer to it as anything else. This is exploitation and a clear violation of human rights. We will literally be working for free to support a system that destroys actual jobs.

Also I'm currently in the process of getting a voluntary placement as an administrator working for a charity for the blind. If I'm still unemployed by the time I exit the Work Programme next April, I'll be forced to quit my (Job and qualification level relevant) voluntary placement to 'volunteer' myself for a scummy company the DWP has a contract with and there's nothing I can do about it. My chances of getting relevant experience will cease to exist.

But.... they are paying you. They could just let the benefit run out after a specific amount of time, and then you're on your own. It sounds flawed, but it doesn't sound like slavery.

Benefits are not pay. Benefits are a third of the minimum wage.

It's slavery.

Sure.... but if you've gone two years without being able to find any work at all then it seems like there is a problem somewhere that the government can't fix for you, and maybe the best way to get you to fix it for yourself, is to force you to work for the money that they are giving you. You aren't required to do the work. You're just required to do it if you want some money.