Well, I am looking for a job again.

I am still employed, but my job is pretty precarious and I could use a better one. Frankly, that describes my situations since about 2017, and I am starting to realize that I suck at this. But truth be told, I am not sure I want to become good at this. The job hunt strikes me as a Hieronymus Bosch-esque hellscape, where everything is terrible and on fire. But to make matters worse, and to mix my metaphors just a little, it is also a Sisyphean boulder that needs to be rerolled up the hill every fucking day.

(Sidebar: I will never forgive Albert Camus for reframing the myth of Sisyphus in a positive light. Fuck right off)

Let’s get this moaning fest started. Every single job site is bad, but they are all bad in unique ways. Recently I have taken to use LinkedIn, and chief among their virtues is the fact that you can use ‘European Union’ as a fucking search term. More on this point later. But LinkedIn is nice principally because it is the least demanding of the job boards, but its negative is that because it does require little to apply for a job (just a few quick clicks in most cases), you are competing with all the people just as lazy as you. People who post jobs to LinkedIn seem inundated with replies. The Laziness goes both ways, and sometimes I have applied for jobs where the poster only put up a fraction of the job information. They then reached out on LinkedIn to tell me to finish applying for the job elsewhere

I’ve also applied for jobs on LinkedIn that were clearly scams.

There are job boards all over the place, and most of them are garbage that just comb the internet for job ads. The problem is, the code is not too discerning. Whoever programed these things must have really phoned it in, because I get jobs in places way out of my search criteria. But the problem is that the page brings up these jobs insisting they are in some other location. The job location will insist that it is in Florence, despite the posting being from Dollary-doo organization NSW, and it is only when I look at the logo (a fucking kangaroo. You Aussies love to mock yourselves) does it sink in that NSW stands for New South Wales. America makes this truly horrific, as there is an Athens Georgia, Paris Texas, Vienna Virginia, etc ad nauseum until you get to FUCKING “KING OF PRUSSIA”, Pennsylvania.

(Fun anecdote: I recently didn’t apply for a job because I assumed it was in Syracuse, NY. Then I took a better look and saw that it was indeed in Syracuse, Sicily. Yea, its that bad).

Indeed makes life inconvenient by geo-locking jobs onto different websites by county. It makes the jobs search that much longer that I have to do it country, by country, by country.

And this is already bad when I use google jobs to look. At least here I can use one god damn search bar consistently. But the problem is that I do not have a singular search term. I have search terms – I have a search Matrix. Running down the vertical column I list all the countries of Europe, and on the horizontal column I list all the job skills and titles I think would come up on a job announcement. This means that I have about 7 (skills and titles, but this is subject to growth and modification) x 20 (countries) which means that I have 140 different search inputs I have to manually put in. This could potentially take me all damn day if I were to let it. I sort through these search results looking for things that are remotely interesting, open the link for those in a separate tab, then go back to the search results. After I have collected enough jobs I want to actually apply to, I then give them a more thorough second look to see if I am actually qualified (“Candidate must speak fluent English, Russian, Latvian and Estonian”. Good luck buddy.) I usually eliminate about 70% of what I have found this way.

In the next post, I talk about the hell that is the actual applying to these jobs. Heaven help us both.