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jobhunt

mailboxes on metal fence

How I organize my message flow

Email

I use 2 email clients at the same time: Thunderbird and Gmail.

  • Thunderbird: runs on my local system, it’s very fast, it shows me all the metadata of an email in the way I want, the email list is not paged, I can use it for high volume actions on email. These happen on my local system, and then the IMAP protocol gradually syncs it to Gmail. I also find that Thunderbird’s email notifications integrate nicer in Ubuntu.
  • Gmail: can’t be beaten for search. It also groups mail conversations. And then there are labels!
How to turn on Conversation View in Gmail

Gmail has several tabs: Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums. Gmail is usually smart enough that it can classify most emails in the correct tab. If it doesn’t: drag the email to the correct tab, and Gmail will ask you if all future emails of that sender should go to the same tab. This system works well enough for me. My email routine is to first check the tabs Social, Promotions and Forums, and delete or unsubscribe from most emails that end up there. All emails about the #jobhunt go to Updates. I clean up the other emails in that tab (delete, unsubscribe, filter, archive) so that only the #jobhunt emails remain. Those I give a label – more about that later. Then I go to the Inbox. Any emails there (shouldn’t be many) are also taken care of: delete, unsubscribe, filter, archive or reply.

Enable Gmail tabs
Gmail tabs

Google has 3 Send options: regular Send, Schedule send (which I don’t use) and Send + Archive. The last one is probably my favorite button. When I reply to an email, it is in most cases a final action on that item, so after the email is sent, it’s dealt with, and I don’t need to see it in my Inbox any more. And if there is a reply on the email, then the entire conversation will just go to the Inbox again (unarchived).

Send + Archive

I love labels! At the level of an individual email, you can add several labels. The tabs are also labels, so if you add the label Inbox to an archived email, then it will be shown in the Inbox again. At the level of the entire mailbox, labels behave a bit like mail folders. You can even have labels within labels, in a directory structure. Contrary to traditional mail clients, where an email could only be in one mail folder, you can add as many labels as you want.
The labels are also shown as folders in an IMAP mail client like Thunderbird. If you move an email from one folder to another, then the corresponding label gets updated in Gmail.
The filters that I use in my #jobhunt are work/jobhunt, work/jobhunt/call_back, work/jobhunt/not_interesting, work/jobhunt/not_interesting/freelance, work/jobhunt/not_interesting/abroad, work/jobsites and work/coaching. The emails that end up with the abroad label, are source material for my blog post Working Abroad?

The label list on the left looks like a directory structure. It’s actually a mix of labels and traditional folders like Sent, Drafts, Spam, Trash,… Those are always visible at the top. Then there is a neat little trick for labels. If you have a lot of labels, like me, then Gmail will hide some of them behind a “More” button. You can influence which labels are always visible by selecting Show if unread on that label. This only applies to top-level labels. When there are no unread emails with that label or any of it’s sublabels, then the label will be hidden below the More button. As soon as there are unread mails with that label or any of it’s sublabels, then the label will be visible. Mark all mails as read, and the label is out of view. Again, less clutter, you only see it when you need it.

Show if unread

Filters, filters, filters. I think I have a gazillion filters. (208, actually – I exported them to XML so I could count them) Each time I have more than two emails that have something meaningful in common, I make a filter. Most of my filters have the setting ‘Skip Inbox’. They will remain unread in the label where I put them, and I’ll read them when it’s convenient for me. For example, emails that are automatically labelled takeaway aren’t important and don’t need to be in the Inbox, but when I want to order takeaway, I take a look in that folder to see if there are any promo codes.

Email templates. Write a draft email, click on the 3 dots bottom right, save draft as template. Now I can reuse the same text so that I don’t have to write for the umpteenth time that I don’t do freelance. I could send an autoreply with templates, but for now I’ll still do it manually.

LinkedIn

I can be short about that: it’s a mess. You can only access LinkedIn messages from the website, and if you have a lot of messages, then it behaves like a garbage pile. Some people also have an expectation that it’s some sort of instant messaging. For me it definitely isn’t. And just like with email: I archive LinkedIn chats as soon as I have replied.

I used to have an autoreply that told people to email me, and gave a link to my CV and my blog. What do you think, should I enable that again?

a black cat playing with a rope

What are my preferred roles?

Definitely a halfling barbarian. Alignment: chaotic neutral.

Oh, you didn’t mean tabletop role playing but job roles? Riiiight…

I don’t think that this blog post will ever be complete, and it will always be evolving. But at this point, some of the things that I see myself doing:

Anything related to Continuous Delivery in software. From my perspective, that may include:

  • Test Automation – I’ve done this a lot, I liked it and wouldn’t mind doing more of it.
  • DevOps – I’m still not sure if DevOps must be a separate role, or if other roles can work better if they apply DevOps principles. That being said, I have done some devops-ish things, I liked it, and I would sure like to do more of it.
  • Software Development – There, I’ve put it in writing. I haven’t done this yet in a work context, but I like doing it and learning about it. And really – isn’t test automation also writing software?

Maybe you noticed that in none of these things I mention a specific technology. There may be tech&tools that I already have experience with, and you can read about that in my CV or on LinkedIn, but that is not what this blog post is about. I believe that technologies can (and should) always be learned, and it’s more of an attitude to work quality-driven.

Technical Storytelling or Technical Community Management
Storytelling can help simplify the complexities of new technologies. It’s a combination of technical skills, communication skills and empathy. It’s about supporting a community by creating helpful content, from sample code to tutorials, blog posts(*) and videos; speaking at conferences; and helping improve a product or technology by collecting feedback from the community. I recently read a blog post on this, and I can totally recognize myself there.

(*) Yes, the blog posts that I’m writing now, are also written with that kind of role in mind.

Also have a look at the roles that I am not interested in (but do get a lot of emails about).

people inside a bus wearing masks

What is my preferred region?

When recruiters contact me, I invariably get asked in what region I am willing to work. Well. It depends.
(scroll down for a map if you don’t want to read).

The thing is, I actually enjoy going from point A to point B. At the same time, if it is in much less than ideal situations (lots of traffic, or crowded public transportation), then I may get overstimulated, which leads to fatigue and lack of concentration. The least enjoyable commute was only 20km, by car, but it typically took me more than one hour. This was when a new bridge was constructed over the Scheldt in Temse.

The most pleasant work experiences I had, involved these commute patterns:

  • A 3km bicycle ride (about 10 minutes).
  • 30 km by car, with the first 15 minutes on almost empty rural roads, and then 25 minutes on a highway in the direction that had the least amount of traffic.
  • 5km, which I did on foot in 50 minutes (I was training for the Dodentocht at the time).
  • 40km, which I did with 5 minutes bicycle, 35 minutes train, 5 minutes walking. Ideal for listening to one or two episodes of a podcast. Doing the same distance by car would taken me about the same amount of time, in ideal conditions. And I can’t focus on traffic and listen to a podcast at the same time.
  • 6km, which was 20 minutes on a bicycle or 12 minutes by car. I preferred cycling, because I had separate bike lanes for about 80% of the way. 20 minutes was also an ideal amount of time to listen to one epidode of a podcast.

That looks like a lot of cycling, even though I don’t really consider myself to be an athletic type. It’s also eco-friendly, even though I don’t really consider myself to be an eco-warrior.

I’m not a petrol head, I don’t know anything about cars. 4 wheels and steering wheel, that’s about the limit of my knowledge. Currently I don’t even have a car, I make use of car sharing services like Cambio on the rare occasions that I actually need a car. At the same time, I do enjoy the experience of driving, especially long, smooth stretches. For example each year I go to a music course somewhere in the middle of Germany. That’s a 5 hour drive, not including stops. I absolutely love the change of scenery along the way. But but me in city traffic for an hour and I get too much input.

I have found a website where you can draw a map of the places you can reach within a certain time: TravelTime (the also have an API! ❤️).

This is a map I made with the following data:

  • Yellow: reachable by cycling in 30 minutes or less. That’s about all of the city center of Ghent.
  • Red: reachable by public transport in 1 hour or less. That doesn’t get me to Antwerp, Mechelen or Kortrijk, but Brussels and Bruges are just about reachable.
  • Blue: reachable by car in 45 minutes or less. That barely touches Antwerp. Brussels: the north, west and south edges. Kortrijk and Bruges are also within reach. Why the cutoff at 45 minutes? Well, I would need really, really good other motivations to consider Brussels. Some time ago I thought that 30 minutes would be my maximum, but it isn’t. I’d rather call it an optimum than a maximum.
TravelTime

Even with this map, I still have a personal bias. Most of my social life occurs somewhere in the triangle Ghent-Antwerp-Brussels. It becomes harder to do something after work when working in West-Flanders. It’s not a hard pass, just a preference.

I have more to tell on this topic, so I might update this blog post later.

photography of a persons hand with stop signage

Thanks, but no thanks

After reading a few hundred emails from recruiters, I see a couple of trends popping up. I’m being contacted for job offers that really aren’t relevant or interesting for me. Some of them may be attributed to automatic keyword scanning. But still. If possible, I would kindly ask everyone not to contact me for any of the following:

  • Freelance: I have never done freelance before. Working freelance means that I would first have to start all the paperwork to become self-employed, and at this moment I’m not interested in doing all that. Maybe that could change in the faraway future, but at this point in my life I prefer permanent positions.
  • C/C++ embedded development: At one of my previous jobs, I did testing on the embedded software of a smart printer. Testing. Not development. I have never written a single line of C or C++ in my life. I would probably be able to read and understand other people’s code, but I’m sure that there are plenty of people who are really fluent in C/C++.
  • Drupal development: A long, long time ago, I made and maintained a few small Drupal sites. I have also been to one or two Drupal Dev Days in the early 2000s. I think I still have a T-shirt somewhere. But in all that time, I only did Drupal admin, I never went into the itty-gritty PHP to write custom Drupal code. And I’m pretty sure that my Drupal skills are quite rusty now.
  • Node.js development: Oh dear. I did a few tiny Node.js projects: some “glue code”, some rapid prototyping. Nothing fancy, nothing production quality, never more than 100 lines of code. Let’s not do that.
    EDIT 2021-10-25: I may have changed my opinion on this one! More about this in an upcoming blogpost.
    EDIT 2021-10-29: it’s online: What are my preferred roles.
  • SharePoint development: With the eternal words of William Shakespeare:

Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

Hamlet, Act I, Scene ii

  • Quality Control Operator: This is typically a case of blindly searching for keywords and not verifying the results. I have worked as a Software Quality Engineer, so if you search only for “quality”, you’ll end up with jobs where you do actual physical inspection of physical products. Rule of thumb: if I can’t test it with an Assert-statement in some kind of programming language, then it’s probably not the kind of “quality” that I’m looking for.
  • Production / “blue collar jobs”: Yeah well let’s not do that at all, shall we? With all due respect for the people who do this type of work, and some of it is really essential work, but I don’t think that this would ever make me happy.
  • First line tech support: Been there, done that, got the battle scars. Never again, thank you very much.

Benefits for not contacting me for any of these: you don’t waste time chasing a dead-end lead, and I can spend more time on reading and reacting to job offers that actually are relevant, interesting and even exciting. Everybody happy! 🙂

black magnifying glass beside yellow pencil

So, how is the jobhunt going?

It’s been a long time since I last looked for a job myself. At job[-1] (7 years) and job[-2] (2 years), the employers contacted me while I was already working somewhere else, and at job[-3] I worked for 5 years, so all added up, that makes more than 14 years since I last did anything like this.

Job sites

I started with creating or updating a profile on a couple of job sites:

There are a couple more job sites that I know of but haven’t done anything with. Please leave a comment if you think any of them offer benefits over those listed above.

  • Viadeo (mostly French, so probably less useful)
  • Xing (I think they are mostly German-based)
  • StepStone
  • Facebook Job Search (I can’t imagine that any employer on Facebook Job Search wouldn’t also be on LinkedIn, but maybe I’ll try it to see if the search works better there)

I have also updated my CV and I’ve put it online: https://amedee.be/cv.

A torrent of messages

But then — I think — I made a mistake. The weather was nice, I wanted to be outdoors, trying to unwind a bit from the unusual times of the past months, and I disconnected.

Meanwhile the messages started pouring in, via email, LinkedIn (messages and connection requests), and occasionally a phone call from an unknown number. First just a few, then dozens, and just a few weeks later, already a couple of hundred. Oops.

The thing is, while I was technically available, I wasn’t yet mentally available. I still had to disconnect from the previous job, where I worked for more than 7 years, and I needed to think about what I really want to do next. Should I do something similar as before, because I already have the experience? Or should I try to find something that truly sparks joy? More on that later.

Strategies

Anyway, I had to come up with some strategies to deal with these high volumes of communication. First of all, not to get completely crazy, I defined a schedule, because otherwise I’d be responding to messages 24/7. There are other important activities too, like actively browsing through the job listings on various sites, or keeping up to date with current technology, or reaching out to my network, or having a social media presence (like this blog), or, you know, being social, having hobbies, and life in general.

One thing I noticed right away in many messages, is that people ask me for a CV — even though my LinkedIn profile is current. But I get it. And a separate document doesn’t confine me to the format of one specific website, and it helps me to emphasize what I think is important. So I made sure that my CV is available on an easy to reach URL: https://amedee.be/cv.

Then I made two short template messages, one in Dutch and one in English, to thank people for contacting me, where they can find my CV, and — for the LinkedIn people — what my email address is. That’s because I find it easier to track conversations in my mailbox. I can also give labels and flags to conversations, to help me in identifying the interesting ones.

LinkedIn

On LinkedIn, it went like this:

  • Read message.
  • Copy contact details to a spreadsheet.
  • Copy/paste the Dutch or English template message, so that they have my CV and email address.
  • If their message was really interesting(*), add an additional message that I’ll get back to them, and close the conversation. That’ll move it to the top of the message queue.
  • If their message wasn’t interesting or unclear, archive the conversation. If they come back after reading my CV, they’ll either end up in my mailbox, or if they use LinkedIn again, they’ll pop back up at the top of the message queue. But I don’t want to worry about the kind of recruiters that are just “fishing”.

This way I reduced my LinkedIn messages from about 150 to about 20. That’s 20 job offers that I want to give a second, more detailed look. Wow. And that’s just LinkedIn.

(*) What makes a message interesting?

  • It’s relevant.
  • The job isn’t too far to commute.
  • They clearly read my LinkedIn profile.
  • There is a detailed job description.
  • My gut feeling.

Email

Email is another huge source of messages. Fortunately Gmail gives me some tools there to help me. One of the first things I had to do, was to clean out my mailbox. Seriously. It was a dumpster fire. My Inbox had thousands (!) of unread emails. I used rules, filters, deleted emails (I think I deleted more than 100 000 emails), archived emails, and unsubscribed from many, many newsletters that had accumulated over the years. I am now at the point where there are currently 3 emails in my Primary Inbox, all 3 of them actionable items that I expect to finish in the next two weeks, and then those emails will be archived too.

Then, for any recent(ish) email about job offers, I labeled them as “jobhunt” and moved them to the Updates Inbox. That’s the Inbox that Gmail already used automatically for most of these emails, so that was convenient. (For those who don’t know: Gmail has 5 inboxes: Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates and Forums.) At this moment, there are 326 emails labeled “jobhunt”. I’m sure that there will be some overlap with LinkedIn, but still. That’s a lot.

I’ll be using Gmail’s stars, “Important” flag, and archive, to classify emails. Again, just like with LinkedIn, if an email isn’t really interesting at first glance, it’ll go to the archive after I’ve send them a short default message.

Phone

I get it. Really, I do. For some of you, talking on the phone comes naturally, you do it all the time, and it’s your preferred way of communication. For you it’s the fastest way to do your job.

But for me it’s a tough one. I wouldn’t say that I have outright phone phobia, but phone really is my least favorite communication channel. I need some time to charge myself up for a planned phone call, and afterwards I need some time to process it. Even if it is just writing down some notes about what was discussed and looking up some stuff.

It also has to do with how I process information. Speech is in one direction, always forward, and always at the same speed. You can’t rewind speech. But that’s not how my brain works. I want to read something again and again, or skip a paragraph, or first jump to a conclusion and then jump back to see how we got to that conclusion. Sometimes my thoughts go faster than how I express them, and putting it in writing helps me to see the gaps.

Calls out of the blue? I prefer to avoid those. Really. Especially the ones where people just want to get to know me. In the time it takes for me to do one such phone call (and I do take them seriously), I’m able to process several emails. So I very much prefer to focus first on contacts who have something concrete and actionable.

As mentioned above, I record contact information in a spreadsheet. I then import that information into Google Contacts, so that when someone calls me, I see their name on the screen of my phone, and not just a number. That also helps me to decide to pick up the phone or let it go to voicemail. I will get back to those that go to voicemail, but it’ll just be at my own pace.

Social media presence

I’m starting to put myself a bit more out there, by engaging in conversations on LinkedIn. I have also picked up blogging again, and I’m sharing links to my posts on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Besides my Facebook profile, I also have a Facebook page, but I’m not using that fanatically, because for myself at this point I don’t see Facebook as a professional tool.

On Twitter I have two accounts: @amedee and @AmedeeVanGasse. The former is mostly for personal stuff, and is mostly in Dutch. The latter is one that I created to tweet at tech conferences, but we all know how many tech conferences there were in the last 1.5 years… 🙂 Most tweets there will be in English.

Epilogue

I feel like this has become a very long blog post. Maybe too long, I don’t know. Maybe I should have split it up in several parts? But for me it felt like one story I had to tell.

If any of you social media gurus out there have some opinions to share, that’s what the comment box below is for. 🙂