New job, new song, new apartment, April Fool's Day

No, it’s real. There’s never a good time to just come out with it, is there?

I woke up the first morning in my new apartment in Los Angeles with a view of the Hollywood sign out my bedroom window and had dozens of messages from friends and family about the bridge collapse a few miles from my former home in Baltimore. Well, now’s not a good time, is it? That’s so awkward. Everyone just wants to know if I’m ok, and with this terrible tragedy, I can’t have news.

Then today I started my new job, and it was April Fool’s Day. Not a good day to announce anything either. Hopefully that all goes well, I’m as tired of the turnover in the job market as every HR manager and recruiter out there I just also haven’t been able to stay put for more than 1-2 years since the pandemic started. It hasn’t been my choice!!!

I dropped a new song. It’s on all the things. I prefer Soundcloud because it shows all the analytics on the display and having a Spotify page where every track shows < 1000 plays just feels delulu. Not the vibe I’m going for, really.

Otherwise I’ve just been busy with all the life stuff. January and February were almost 100% absorbed with a miserable grind of applying and interviewing for jobs. That sucked. I cannot emphasize enough how much that really, really sucked, even though I was confident that I could find something good and I had a pretty organized process in place for doing it at this point. 130 applications, 15 first touchpoints with different employers, 10 referrals, 3 final interviews, and 2 solid offers.

Negotiating was also a pain because even though both offers were good, they weren’t really 1:1 comparable. One role was remote, the other had originally been listed as remote when it was posted but wasn’t when I went to interview. I ran into that over and over again with job postings that did not at all accurately represent the reality of the job when I would go to talk to a person on a real team at the company about the role. However I also encountered a lot of super helpful individuals that I plan to stay in touch with even if I didn’t get hired, it’s much more interesting to go through these processes with enough skill to already assess where I could fit into an organization or if the work seems interesting or if I have common work experiences with the person doing the assessment. Just my experiences, I think the labor market is really just a big grab bag of stuff right now. I also know many people that have been applying all over the place for an extended period of time with little success, and I know they are smart and hard workers too just the market is as weird as it was during COVID without the crazy amounts of capital being thrown around by VC’s or entrepreneurs armed with PPP loans to spend down. Frustrating for all involved.

Definitely the biggest Life Update though is that I finally bit the bullet and moved back out west. I went to college at Arizona State back in the day and that has exerted a certain pull again now that more people in my social network from that era are working in similar roles. Then there’s also just the appeal of the mountains and the beautiful nature which, while I’ve found what I can out east, it’s just not the same. I didn’t realize how much I missed it until I started traveling again after the pandemic and then it was like I was missing a limb the rest of the time, like, argh, there’s nothing to do here unless I just go on vacation.

So I moved. I’m in California now, like all the other tech brats. I’m sorry. Employers hate it, parents hate it, realtors hate it, but it’s the shit. I decided to start in Los Angeles just because it’s big, basically, and I sort of know my way around from pre-covid travels. I know just enough to be dangerous, I guess. I made two trips to the Bay Area last year and it still felt pretty inscrutable to me even if I was very impressed by some of the companies I talked to out there.

Is Los Angeles a forever home? Do you really think you’ll settle down there? People keep asking. So many more people than I ever would have guessed, really. What does that even mean in this era?

Probably not. Parking is hard. It’s weird to interact with people who want to be famous. Everybody has dogs, which I like dogs, but it feels like a hostile thing, in a way I can’t fully explain. The dog is a deterrent against something, crime or other people’s children or food that’s not gluten free, it’s hard to even know. The way people don’t understand that it takes 200 hours of time spent together to make a real friend and not just hanging out once or twice is also very off-putting as a real adult and not a college student who believes everything is forever because they’ve never been burned. It’s a culture shock in many ways.

But I also suspect, as a tech brat, I will probably just stay in California as long as I can. Maybe if the price of a house doubles or triples again, I will have to leave. Or Donald Trump will win the election and completely take a dump on the state in a tragic and irreversible way. But most likely neither of those things will happen and it’s just the easiest and best place to make a living in my chosen field, and I will end up staying for a very long time. The other places I like are just as expensive now, but confer none of the same advantages, and the pull of having an obvious social network of friends and family to draw from is powerful too.

Anyway, what’s not to love?

Amtrak from San Diego to Los Angeles. What a way to spend a week of funemployment between jobs!