Funemployed 🤷‍♂️

- published on 2022-01-03

Hi all 👋

Happy '22! 🥂 And no, not "2020 too" 😉

Regardless of where you're coming from, hopefully you'll make the best of this new year! I for one had a rather "eventful" 2021. From juggling a ton of personal matters to an unpleasant work experience, I knew I had to make a change to stay sane. For starters, I've decided to resign from work (even in the middle of some interviews) as I needed some time to recuperate. Not to come across as pessimisic here, there is a silver lining though, especially since I want to start off on the right footing for '22.

At an undisclosed company I've been working at for the past few years, there have been heavy organizational changes every year via mergers, product pivots, and etc. I get that these kind of outcomes are expected after mergers, but really as far as having a new CEO appointed from an affiliated company, C, inevitably forcing bias/politics over companies A and B (which are bigger than C to begin with)? Expected bias as in laying off the talented staff from companies A and B, and pivoting the product's focus to match C's. On top of that, leadership decided that it'd be wise to mash-up our two main, large flagship applications despite completely different architectures/technologies forcing our engineering department to vaguely provide estimates and uncertainty moving forward. Yes, instead of starting a new project from scratch... and not to mention, all of this happened right after a huge rebrand to start making the products more universal to its users.

After dreadful hacking and tedious tasks that lasted months while shifting from Scrum to Kanban sprints, my wellbeing was so damaged to the point that I've decided to resign right before the holidays to plan my next steps and start off '22 on a better note. Perhaps a few of you have experienced work transformations like this, but again, I couldn't tolerate such volatily during this time. So instead, I've been looking for a more stable and secure role in a promising industry 👀

While interview prepping, I was finally able to catch up with some of the latest and greatest technologies in my field (native Android for the most part) to redeem the lack of allocated tech debt at my then company. Still a WIP (as of writing this), but here's a little fun rundown of what I've been working on so far: https://github.com/DaveNOTDavid/arch-component-sample - make sure to read the README since my progress is divided into respective branches based on certain technologies used!

Currently hiring or know anyone else looking for Android Devs? Connect with me on LinkedIn for starters 🙏

- Dave