I don’t like to write about myself, it’s stupid and boring in my opinion, but in this post I will tell you the main lessons that I learned from my own job search as a tech product manager. They can be helpful to others, and they can also be interesting insights into how the world actually works.
LESSON 1. "Entering is always easier than exiting." Or, as the American writer Kevin Kelly put it, "In all things — except love — start with the exit strategy." This is the most accurate wording of this lesson. Yes, it's so unpleasant to leave, especially after 2 years of working with your teammates, especially who you hired. For some reason, there is a feeling of "betrayal" and awkwardness. But work, as another smart person from the Internet said, whose quote I did not write down for myself, is not a family. And I had to go through this lesson with a creak of my soul. So prepare an exit strategy, or at least take into account its inevitable relevance. How to combine this with dissolution in work (and this is an ideal job, because in addition to money which are overrated it gives meanings and stable positive emotions which are underrated) I don’t know yet ... I’ll write when I find out:)
LESSON 2. Finding a job is a job, rather boring and dull. Yes, to get somewhere *there*, you need to submit 1000 applications, complete 100 test tasks, go through 50 interviews for 2-3 rounds and not make a mistake somewhere between all these stages. For top managers, I heard you need to go through up to 10 stages per position. It is kinda clear that the more requirements, the tougher should be checking. But what if we're wrong? What if the way to find talent is not to thoroughly score them, but to give hope to underdogs and develop them? Risky? But responsibly and long-term reasonable. The same Tinkoff in which I work makes a One Day Offer, which reduces the hiring time of software engineers to a record 1-2 days. Well, in general, ideally it's better to create own strategies and games, and not jostle in existing ones.
LESSON 3. People help. Yes, even random ones. Yes, for free. And yes, not all - but many. They helped me edit my resume (10 times, xD), advised resources for preparing for interviews, held a career consultation and even played a test interview! And all these are random people that I was looking for in the mentor search bot from Anna Buldakova (now the bot is moving to her digital service) and among my network in Linkedin.
LESSON 4. You can learn almost everything by yourself. And yes, it's free again. It's clear that I learned about semi-technical, semi-business things, but nevertheless - for free, by myself, with the help of the Internet and Twitter, heh. Most of the things I learn about come in handy now, a couple of things came in handy at interviews, so in this sense we seem to live in the most meritocratic time in our history, although there is still room for the improvement for world in this regard.
Conclusion. When they say that a good university teaches how to study, it is true. Learn, be challenged and beat until knockout. I would like to know about a couple of things like emotional attachment or search of meantors earlier, so I'm fan of idea of "school of life", in which people are tought not how to earn 1000000$ per second, but how to navigate life yourself, faced with all its manifestations - from finding a job and interests to managing love and building democracy.