It’s been some time, so I figured that maybe it was time for another life update. For the most part, it’s been.. not great.

So, to start, I had lost my last tech job back in October 2023. It was a very sudden thing and to this day I still have no idea what exactly prompted the situation. I know that I worked hard and did my job - even my mid-year performance review was fine. I had an e-mail from my boss late on a Thursday night to have a meeting and next thing I knew, HR came in and that was it. It had been cited as performance, but again, it made no sense. I tried to understand what went wrong, and when I got feedback from my boss it all felt like it had to do with my ADHD. This realization made me think I needed to be medicated once again, which I had already thought of doing multiple times in the past. Unfortunately, there’s been a whole shortage of supplies for stimulant medications for ADHD and I still have yet to even get the medication.

Over the next ten months after being unemployed, I searched on LinkedIn, Otta, and ZipRecruiter. I had zero hits until I once again changed up my resume and even then it was an extremely low chance. I have only had a handful of interviews, one of which I was super close to moving to the last round only to be told “You weren’t senior enough” over the two most stupid questions I answered. Imagine being asked, “why not use thread sleeps during automation?” and “why shouldn’t you use xpaths to identify page elements?” and trying to explain the best you can, should you know the answer. Thread sleeping just interrupts the automation and can lead to longer execution times and disrupt the wait times that the web driver will implicitly have. Using xpaths isn’t forbidden, but it does give a level of unreliability because you expect it to not change, even though it’s possible at any point when the developers change the website HTML around.

After having all of those small interviews and not getting a job, I wound up applying to Walmart. I’ve been working there since July - it’s not the worst thing ever, it pays the bills, somewhat. I’m kind of honestly strugglging with money at the moment because the condo I have and car take up so much of my two paychecks that there’s barely much left after the fact. Overall, it’s impacted my motivation for side projects and activities.

Now it’s been more than a year since I lost my tech job and it has continued to be difficult to find another one. Maybe at the start of the new year I’ll have more luck, but it feels like time is running out and there isn’t much I can do.