lack of employment
So I definitely shan’t be going on Monday. Or Tuesday. Not just because of the obnoxiousness of their telling me to turn up 50 miles away on my first day, but also because it’s not really the job I applied for. That would have been okay. But the job I got seems to be a generic engineering graduate programme. I am not an engineer. I do not want to be an engineer. I thought I would just be in software. It turns out that this is not the case. There is nothing wrong with this if you are so inclined, but I do not want to spend the next months of my life in electrical engineering or hardware or production to “see how it all works”. I do not care how it all works. All I wanted was a normal coding job for 6 months to two years so when I see jobs paying large sums of money wanting x years of commercial experience, I can say I have it. This is not that job.
I feel really bad about it. I feel like I have wasted the last three months. I feel like I have failed my first job before I even started. I worry I panicked and made a rash decision. Clearly the fault is not just mine, they have misrepresented the situation and dragged it out for months and then pulled something I can reasonably describe as “ridiculous”, wasting my time as well as their own. I don’t think they do it on purpose or to spite people. I think to them it probably seems perfectly clear that when I accept a position in one city that I am able and willing to travel 50 miles to another city on my first day. And I’m sure to them it was blindingly obvious that applying for a position advertised as a graduate software engineer programme should actually lead to a general graduate engineering programme. But those things aren’t obvious to me. Or, I suspect, to many people. I should take this as a general clue as to how they operate. I should conclude that were I to work there I would have to deal with this kind of hassle on a daily basis. But I still feel like it’s my fault. Like maybe I should have tried harder to make it work or something. I feel like I failed somewhere.
And now I have no job. It surprises me to find out I felt safe and secure knowing I would be starting on Monday. It surprises me that I now feel very insecure knowing I have no job lined up. The jolt out of this security may be what is making me feel bad.
employment
So I am supposedly starting my job on Monday. I got an email today confirming the start date, and then later another one saying “Oh by the way, please can you make arrangements to be at [50 miles away] on the first day”.
I am a little bit pissed off. In fact I am a lot pissed off so forgive me for writing so much (or don’t read it).
I’ll let you into a bit of background information I’ve been keeping quiet. The way I found out about the job was because my dad works for the same company (different department). He had no part in my being offered the job or anything like that, and the truth is I never wanted it anyway. I never wanted to apply but he pushed me into it. I never thought I’d get interviewed, but I did. I never thought I’d get offered it, but I did, and once you’ve been offered a job paying £25k as a graduate, you can’t really say no. Like most other things in my life I kind of stumbled into it without realising/trying/thinking too much about it.
But were it not for my dad I would still be waiting for a start date. I only had official confirmation today, and I only got it today because my dad hassled some people last week and got something moving. Before then, I was treated with “okay, I’ll chase that up for you”, followed by long periods of silence. I forget exactly how many times I have heard the phrase “I’ll chase that up for you”.
Literally, it has taken them three months to give me six days’ notice for when I start.
And now, a few hours after the first email, I get this email telling me I need to be 50 miles away Monday morning. To a driver, 50 miles isn’t a short distance. To a non-driver like me, it’s an absolutely epic distance unless it happens to neatly coincide with railway tracks, which naturally, it doesn’t (and to be honest, the train isn’t the biggest killer, it’s the 3.5 miles of walking to and from railway stations, TWICE, yes seven miles!)
So I have three options:
1) Tell them “I’m not doing that” and see where it gets me
2) Stay in a hotel nearby/Attempt to navigate trains (this isn’t going to happen)
3) Don’t work for them.
The first option might even be fine. It might be that they’d say “well actually it’s not really necessary anyway”.
I should add somewhere around here that the job was explicitly advertised as requiring no travel.
But I am wary of their travel requirements because they had my dad going there twice a week for months. They simply expected it of him and he had no real choice if he wanted to keep his job. The way he got out of it was to take another job within the company. Therefore I know I have to say no if they ever casually expect me to start doing anything unreasonable. But on my first day? That’s not ‘casual’, that’s taking the piss.
All things considered, do I want to work for this company?
NO.
I do not.
Unfortunately my dad doesn’t like this idea. It is a pain he works for them because he wants to be involved and to sort everything out. He wants to phone up the person who sent me the email and see if it’s all really necessary. I am finding his interference annoying and incredibly embarrassing, and I am also conscious that he has had to interfere every step of the way, which is not a good reflection on the state of things.
He sees that I have been unemployed a long time, and here is a decent offer of a job (well kind of) and I should be willing to put up with whatever hassle they throw my way. I don’t see it like this, I see it that this company is messing me around and being very unreasonable, and another few weeks/months of unemployment makes no difference in the long term anyway. He thinks I’ll find it very hard to find another job because I have had so few interviews, but the truth is I never really looked as hard as I should have because I never really knew what I wanted to do. But I have a better idea now.
hmm
So against my plans the interview went rather well and I am at risk of being offered the job. But I don’t want it. It’s not really me, it’s not what I see myself doing. And they are a tiny new company who appear to have taken on more work than they can handle and so they would expect me handle a very high workload for a well below average wage.
It’s kind of weird because I get the impression that to the 3 other programmers working there it’s a bit of a good deal for them because they don’t necessarily have a degree. One certainly doesn’t and I’d be surprised if the other two did. I don’t mean to be elitist, it’s a nice route into work for a competent hobbyist php programmer who can’t afford university and wants to get into web development, but I’m a competent hobbyist programmer with two degrees and some pretty broad skills.
I’m also slightly bothered about what having that as the first post-uni job on my CV will look like. It may typecast me into php development which I really really don’t want to get stuck in. I mean if you have a couple of years web development in C# then you can probably apply for a C++ job quite happily, but if you have a couple of years web development in PHP then they’re going to be sceptical unless you can produce recent examples of code you’ve written. Which I can do now, but if I’m working full-time then I’m unlikely to produce much if any new code. PHP has a lot of negative connotations because it’s a scripting language intended to have a low barrier of entry, and these aren’t entirely unfounded. It just seems like starting with a php job is a bit like saying “I want to be a rally driver … I can already drive better than most people so I’ll start by getting a job driving buses”.
I am wondering if I later plan to get into harder science disciplines whether having experience only in softer ones will reflect badly on me. It’s all very well saying “but I have a degree in maths”, but if all I’ve done in the last 2 years is PHP then they’d be valid to question whether I really still had those maths skills. So maybe I should really be heading towards engineering jobs… which should make it easier to move around later on, if I want.
Obviously it would have made more sense if I had considered this before applying for it.
