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Official Pit Job Search/Employment Thread

ipitytheblue said:
Employed folks of the pit, I need some perspective. I'll try to keep this short and sweet, but it's really hard to fully describe.

For context, I'm a PhD student who opted to exit the constant turnover of teaching and research assistantships and seek the stability of a full-time job while I write my dissertation. In case any of you know me, yes I'm still working on this and also shut up. I was fortunate to land a well-paying job (at least for someone who has never made any real money) as a scientist at the university. I've been there a little under 6 months, 1/3 of which was routine onboarding.

The situation I've found myself in is this:
1) The team needs to produce a new round of deliverables by summer.
2) To do this, they need to use a coding pipeline that was last run in 2021. It has not been maintained since then.
3) The last person in my position is still around but has moved to another team. My supervisor was formerly in my position but never ran this pipeline.
4) Very important: Everything in this organization is bespoke and custom. All the pipelines, models, functions, etc. were built and maintained in-house. All of this code was written by someone in 2017, patched up to keep running by 2-3 people since then, and hasn't been overhauled ever. Google cannot help me.
5) There's a smattering of team-specific materials online but it's sporadic and hasn't been very well maintained. Organizational updates are also documented online but not in a way that's easy to follow. Mostly, people who have been around just "know things" from being there.
6) They hired me, an outsider, to more or less learn the organization, learn the overall process, learn all the details, debug the whole thing, fold in new data, and produce new estimates.
7) No one seems to know how large of a task this is, not least for an outsider.
8) Leadership, looking at the progress I've made and looking at our deadlines, are starting to panic. They ask what resources I need and I don't know what to tell them because my whole thing thus far has been running code, finding an error, tracing it back somewhere, either fixing it or asking about it, and learning that "oh yeah, that thing changed two years ago" or that the problem is a user-written function with a deprecated parameter hard-coded inside. In other words, the resource I need is institutional knowledge, which I'm gaining quite rapidly but only through the process of grinding away at this shit.
9) The only real advice my supervisor has given me is to work harder/faster/longer because our boss really wants to hit these deadlines. He's very anxious.
10) They've warned me to start working overtime now to avoid sleepless nights closer to our deadlines.

My problems:
1) Obviously, I'm not having a great time. It's clear to me that it's their fault their shit is in bad condition and they brought me in with no other instruction but to "fix it" but do it faster somehow. I don't see how it's possible to just make things happen faster.
2) My mental health is important to me and I really don't want to carry their anxiety.
3) I have no time to finish my dissertation or otherwise live the life I want to live.
4) I'm union and technically am contracted to 40-hour workweeks (the employees unionized in 2021 because the org had a terrible reputation due to operating like a tech company even though we're public employees).

Considerations:
1) By now, I'm sort of an expert at this particular thing. At least more so than anyone else not in the org. It would take 6-9 months to get anyone else to this point.
2) They'd be fucked if I quit and I don't want to leave them in a lurch because I'm a decent human being.
3) I'm thinking hard about what I want out of a life and job and while making money is great, I don't want to opt to spend my precious time doing this/feeling this way.

In the evergreen words of David Byrne, "How do I work this?"
Click to expand...
Don't have any insight other than thoughts with you and also "this is why they unionized"
 
I wanted to see if I could "fix" my resume so it would load better into applicant systems and the only thing I found was advice to put it into a new format, but all the suggested formats suck. When I ask my recruiters why I see applicants resumes that look like junk, they say basically it's just a raw feed from the system so who cares about the formatting. I admit that makes me think our recruiters suck more than it makes me think, I shouldn't care what my resume looks like to make sure it loads.

Anyone have this issue? Anyone have a fix?
 
Deacon92 said:
I wanted to see if I could "fix" my resume so it would load better into applicant systems and the only thing I found was advice to put it into a new format, but all the suggested formats suck. When I ask my recruiters why I see applicants resumes that look like junk, they say basically it's just a raw feed from the system so who cares about the formatting. I admit that makes me think our recruiters suck more than it makes me think, I shouldn't care what my resume looks like to make sure it loads.

Anyone have this issue? Anyone have a fix?
Click to expand...
Look up wonsulting. I’m not entirely sold on the AI aspect but they have some templates you can work off of. They also try and rewrite bullet points if you need help with that. Like most things on the internet, there is a free version and then you pay from there. Another option is this guy Greg Langstaff. He does a lot of resume templates too.
 
BarcaDeac said:
Ok job search advice.

I had my 3rd round with company A yesterday, fully expecting to make it to the final round, a chat with the CFO. The past few rounds I've interviewed on a Tuesday, heard back on Thursday to schedule the next round. Hopefully is the case here.

Had my first round with company B last Tue. The recruiter said the decision of whether or not you move on is completely up to the hiring manager, who will reach out directly, but she liked my odds. Said it could take a week or two to hear back. The hiring manager was out of the office last week so presumably back this week but obvi has other stuff to catch up on.

Would vastly prefer working at company B, better work, salary, growth opportunities, etc. And I mentioned that on my phone screen last week. But, I'm worried their process could be too slow where if I got an offer from A I dunno how long I could sit on it while waiting for B to move along. I know that if you have an offer in hand at one company you can use that to speed things along with another. But I don't have an offer yet, hopeful for one, just that company A is way closer to the finish line. Should I reach out to the company B recruiter yet or just wait it out.
Click to expand...

You’ve had to talk to these folks 3 times and you’re still not done ? Fuck that


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
TimmyClutch said:
Look up wonsulting. I’m not entirely sold on the AI aspect but they have some templates you can work off of. They also try and rewrite bullet points if you need help with that. Like most things on the internet, there is a free version and then you pay from there. Another option is this guy Greg Langstaff. He does a lot of resume templates too.
Click to expand...
What part of it are you unsure of?

I have been using an AI tool that my friends are bootstrapping to help me with my job search. Things I like: dashboard for tracking, I can quickly and easily get suggested modifications to my resume for each job, and custom cover letters / networking messages. GenAI is really helpful for reducing the time it takes to do all of these things, even factoring the time it takes to review the output and modify to my liking.
 
leftcoastdeac said:
What part of it are you unsure of?

I have been using an AI tool that my friends are bootstrapping to help me with my job search. Things I like: dashboard for tracking, I can quickly and easily get suggested modifications to my resume for each job, and custom cover letters / networking messages. GenAI is really helpful for reducing the time it takes to do all of these things, even factoring the time it takes to review the output and modify to my liking.
Click to expand...
I am just entirely sure that the AI bullet points are always better or as descriptive. For in-house legal, numbers are really tough to quantify, and to me it feels like AI is always trying to put numbers into bullet points on resumes.
 
TimmyClutch said:
I am just entirely sure that the AI bullet points are always better or as descriptive. For in-house legal, numbers are really tough to quantify, and to me it feels like AI is always trying to put numbers into bullet points on resumes.
Click to expand...
That's fair. I'm going to guess that most people using AI for resume help are in tech or tech adjacent and the expectation for bullet points is some quantification of impact. I find that using AI can help incorporate key words or phrases from the job posting into the bullet points that, in theory, can articulate a tighter experience-job description alignment.
 
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