2022-10-09 Work ≠ Done

What I Did

FRONT-END:

Quite a few improvements to my job-seeking guides.

1. Preparing for a Job Search
2. Making Job Search Plans
3. Crafting Your Employee Image
4. Hunting for Jobs
5. Interviewing
6. Closing the Deal

• Deciding on College
• Prolonged Unemployment

Further, a few new companion guides for the tech industry specifically:

• When to Quit: How Do You Know Your Job Sucks?
• Goal-Setting: What Do You Want In CS?
• Image-Crafting: How Does a CS resume look?
• Job-Hunting/Training/Researching: How Do Tech People Job-Search?
• Non-Technical Interviewing: How Do You Prove You’re Good at Computers with Speaking?
• Closing the Deal/Negotiating: How Do You Land the Job?

I decided to postpone anything about technical interviewing because, honestly, I’d have to be more savvy on programming before I have any authority on the matter.

BACK-END:

I’ve expanded on iCoULdfAiL a bit. One of the most prominent things I’ve done is capture how many pages I (approximately) have left.

My new system with iCouldFail is amazing. By abstracting away components unrelated to the finished product (i.e., it’s already inside a WordPress instance) I have removed any barriers to shifting the information to a finished state.

AdequateLife is basically done now, minus the edits my Snooby Woogers has graciously been contributing. I still need her rubber stamp on things, but I’ve pounded out everything else.

Gained InSite has also been fruitful. I’ve pounded out all my Philosodata, and it took a surprisingly small window of time to get it done.

The trouble I’ve encountered, however, is that I employed a “future bin” for most of the content I have to work through (more in the next section on that). For that reason, I have to advance forward through GIS with the following procedure:

1. Go through all the GIS essays front-to-back, editing to a more conformant less-tinfoiley-than-2020-me rigor of quality. Should take me a few weeks.
2. Pound into the “dump piles” I made for myself and put them into the finished essays (i.e., Specialization/Cities, Fear, Purpose, Stories, Understanding[!], Pedagogy, Creativity, Decisions, Personality [unmade], Influence, Culture[!], Small Groups, Large Groups, Trends). Should take me a month or two.
3. Go through all the rest, which should take me a week or two and be relatively quick compared to the other 2 steps.

I’m also in the process of training for the next step in my equally burgeoning and transitional auto insurance career, so my timeline may move slower. Assuming your ego can withstand it, it’s better to aim for the impossible and get near it than go for something reasonable and cut out any potential for greater.

What I Learned

When organizing something, you must make a few decisive choices when you encounter something that’s nowhere near the “box” it’s supposed to be in:

1. Ignore that thing and hope it goes away.
2. Stop what you’re doing and drop that thing into the right box.
3. Pile that thing into a “goes somewhere else box”.

#1 isn’t a good idea. #2 is time-consuming if your transit load is below the full threshold of what you can carry, though it’s often standard practice for computers because of how fast they are.

#3 is usually optimal. From there, your sorting can click along pretty well if you stay focused on the domain you’re in, then you’ll take a break whenever you feel like it and you have a full load to take somewhere else.

In the domain of pure information (i.e., website content), the carrying threshold is vast. You may have limits on heavy data (e.g., games, movies), but it’s functionally infinite for smaller-sized data (e.g., photos, text). This creates a unique problem of never having the scarcity of needing to move things to somewhere else and simply resides on how bored you get doing whatever your primary task was.

Of course, this creates a risk if you legitimately enjoy what you’re doing there. Later, you’ll look up, notice a gigantic pile of things to do, then twitch a bit and throw in the towel.

I’m now picking up that towel, and marching into this thing whipping at what I can. The best part about home-based hobbies is you can soil yourself without anyone knowing. It pays that nobody is paying me for this.

What I’m Doing

Working in an insurance office right now while I build my corpus of essays. I’ve been distilling and thematically unifying all my creative works:

• Tidying up edits all over AdequateLife:
  1. Body maintenance
  2. Fun improvement
  3. Handling hardship
  4. Disaster prep
  5. Adequate data
• Then, moving to GainedInSite:
  1. Philosodata
  2. Meta-concepts
  3. Facts
  4. Animal perception
  5. Subconscious perception
  6. Habits
  7. Conscious perception
  8. Processed thoughts
  9. Decisions (with a new essay on personality)
  10. Actions/consequences
  11. Interpersonal
  12. Social groups
  13. Large social
• A venture into TheoLogos:
  1. Universal Christian facts
  2. Christian disciplines
  3. Christ’s influence
  4. Christ and society (with a new essay on cults)
  5. Christ and the future
  6. Alternative Christian perspectives
  7. My potential heresy
  8. Spiritual data
• And, finally, to the latest creation of NotaGenius:
  1. Human messiness
  2. Engineering
  3. Law
  4. Business – General
  5. Business – Money
  6. Business – Entrepreneurship
  7. Business – Management
  8. Nature
  9. Math
  10. Possessions
• Finally, after all this, I will feel sufficiently ready to plow heavily into TechSplained.