Unemployed

I’d like to preface this with a little background on me as far as it concerns my professional life. I have had a full-time job since I was a sophomore in high school. I got an opportunity to work for a company called DATAllegro right after I graduated high school. This posed a tough decision for me; I was all set up to go away to college, but this was the industry I would be hoping to get into after I graduated. At that point it was between starting my career or going to school so that i could start my career later. I chose both. I have an inherent quality that gives me a need to do whatever I do well, and I knew that I would not be able to do well at a full time job and full time school at a university, so I chose to attend a full or near full load at a community college while I worked. This decision means I don’t have my degree now as all my friends come back from college, but I feel like i have a very well-rounded career so far. A few years into that job at DATAllegro, Microsoft bought that data warehousing company and I moved to do a very similar job for Microsoft. Skip ahead a few years again and my team was laid off. I could provide more information there, but it’s not really necessary... and that brings us to unemployment.

I would also add that this coincided with the breakup with a girlfriend I had for a while and before that I always had a girlfriend - something i was determined to avoid for a while. I can break down what I have experienced in unemployment into 3 phases. The first phase, after getting over the initial shock, was:

Irresponsible Overcompensation

As I said I have always had a full time job and that meant I never really had a chance to do things my friends did in college like drink on weeknights, drink every night, not worry about the future, and basically just live in the moment. I was lucky enough when I got laid off that it also included a severance that I could survive on. A smart person would be frugal and make it last as long as he or she could. By my calculations, I could have lived off that money for 6 months or so, not counting unemployment, without any really serious changes to my lifestyle. Instead, I just set my ‘give a damn’ to low and tried to look at my bank account as little as possible and not turn down a single opportunity to have fun - and have fun I did. It started out with the most expensive trip to Vegas I’ve ever had which was also my first bachelor party. I’ve gone down to San Diego for the weekend (my new favorite place outside of Vegas), and had a lot of good times barhopping at Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, Downtown Fullerton, and even Chino Hills. I’ve been to concerts, I made new friends, reconnected with old friends, and have probably been a pretty bad influence on my roommate who I assume has been balancing my egging him on to go out with the reality that real people don’t go out drinking every night then just go to work the next morning and have a super-productive day. It’s also worth mentioning that I tried for a girl when I first got laid off that I always liked because, well, why not.

Sidebar: a bit of advice for guys, you can ask 10 girls out and even if 9 of them say no you will still have 1 more than the guy who didn’t ask anybody. Rejection is a fact of life and isn’t something to be afraid of: and although I still say 9 because that’s what I’ve always said, The real-life ratio is generally much better. You’ll never know unless you try.

Anyway it was short-lived basically because I forgot that I was supposed to play the game (ugh), but I am so content with myself for trying.

I learned a few things about myself during this phase. I have a lot of different groups of friends and I can have different kinds of fun with all of them. I know which of my friends are down to go out on a whim and which ones aren’t. There are plenty of girls out there that are interested and at risk of sounding conceited I’m not a bad looking guy. Anywhere with any of my family is somewhere I want to be. And that 6 nights of heavy drinking in a row is pretty much my limit - that 7th night was rough.

Boredom

Phase 2, although I could see it coming, approached faster than i expected. You see up until now I had not been trying very hard to find a new job. I was having fun and not worrying about the future. Sooner or later though that future starts to creep up on you. I looked a little more seriously at my bank account and you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you how much money I had spent in the month and a half or so in phase 1. The realization hit me that this money wasn’t going to last forever and I would eventually need a job again. It was even more than that though, I missed working and doing things that mattered. Sure i could organize my junk drawer one more time, but there’s no satisfaction there. I could no longer spend a day sitting on the couch watching TV. To overcome this (still having enough money to not be super serious on the job search - meaning I was still applying for jobs that paid $150K+) I picked up some real hobbies that were more or less responsible. Golfing is a semi-responsible one. It’s a lot more expensive to golf a good course than most non-golfers think,but I started golfing a lot wherever i could and I have to say I progressed very fast for how long I’ve been golfing. Golf is a great way to escape from life because there is so much to think about every shot that you don’t have time to think about anything else. It is also one of the most frustrating things you will ever do at times. It’s a nice way to learn how to handle failure because if you can’t pull yourself together after a bad shot then the next shot will only be worse. Then I started surfing. I got a cheap board and my brothers old wetsuit and just started going out by myself in the mornings. This was very beneficial because when i would go out at 7 in the morning I would get home and be ready to start my day before I would normally even wake up. I eventually found a few people to go out with me, but it’s something that I’m ok doing alone. I definitely think it is something I will stick with after I get a job again. Lastly I started playing indoor soccer with some Chino Hills friends. I have never played a full game of soccer in my life, but I figured it would be a fun experience and so far so good. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess we have the funnest team out there :).

The Search

is a lot harder than i expected. Even occupying a lot of my time with all these new hobbies i still don’t feel fulfilled, especially intellectually. I am very passionate about a lot of things in the tech industry and the fact that the closest thing I can do to be a part of it is to stay up to date on all the news is very weird to me. I started programming some apps for windows phone, but it’s very frustrating when your computer that you haven’t used in years because you always had work computers is slower than molasses and you can’t spend the money to buy a new one. I have basically come full-circle and I want to go back to work. I started looking on sites like Dice and basically just blasted out my resume to a bunch of companies. The problem with sites like that is it’s almost all recruiters who basically are a lot like used car salesman. They don’t want to find you a job, they want to sell the jobs they have. After trying to fit you into the 1 or 2 jobs they have on hand you probably will never hear from them again. It’s very frustrating since you invest time into meeting and talking to them and they always sound very positive until you get in the interview and realize they had no idea what they were talking about when they explained the job to you and the ACTUAL job isn’t a very good fit. Then i found Craigslist where the people posting are the actual people with the job. I got into my first interview, not realizing at the time that it was my first “real” interview ever, and it seemed to go pretty well. I hear back a day later that I was the perfect fit for the team/company/job, except the fact that it seemed like I didn’t have enough project management experience and another guy did. I was dreaded to hear it, I knew exactly the question in the interview he was talking about and I gave a bad answer more out of a misunderstanding than anything. If I had answered that one question how I knew I could have I would have gotten that job. I sent an email explaining myself already knowing it was too late. This is the kind of things the job search is littered with. I got on a phone interview once and the guy basically started out by saying “I have a guy on my team that has the same experience as you and he’s failing miserably”. That’s where you just throw your hands up and go oh yeah this is gonna go great. I tried to sway him best I could, but it was a pretty short interview (after the recruiter had basically said i was in for sure).

I have some good leads now, but it’s been a rough road in phase 3 for sure. Some days I feel very discouraged and some days it seems I’m in for sure. People like me and my experience, but it’s hard for me to convey hard much of a hard-worker and just generally smart guy I am. I have really been working on that lately so that a prospective manager knows that I have never failed at any project I’ve taken on in the past and i don’t plan on failing in the future, starting with unemployment. I am dedicated to finding a job now to fill this void in my life.

At this point i have been unemployed for 4 months or so. I have gone through pure bliss and pure boredom. I have spent THOUSANDS of dollars during this time that I wouldn’t have even had time to spend if I had a job, and I am going to be strapped for cash pretty soon, but I don’t regret any of it. Getting laid off has been one of the best things that has ever happened to me. I have always felt a little sorry for myself for missing out on the whole “childhood” thing - ie. college, but this summer has basically been that time for me. I haven’t had the chance to be this irresponsible for as long as I can remember and it felt good. I think that I have truly changed as a person during this time for the better. I think even after going back to work I will be able to enjoy life more and I understand people a little better. I’m not sure where I’m headed at this moment and while that was very scary when i first got laid off I’ve come to terms with it. When writing my farewell email to my friends at the company I ended it with a quote which at the time was more of a joke to make myself feel better about losing my job, but I truly feel it now. I’m going places and it feels good to know that.

“The world is my oyster”