Small Goals
I’ve got news, and it’s good and hoping that it will be good for my poor neglected blog as well.
As people here are well aware, I’ve been trying to get into iOS development really hard over the last year. During the last two months I’ve applied to dozens of iOS developer positions across the country looking for someone who would take a chance on me. My constraint was I needed to be able to keep my family here. I don’t mind travel, but if it wasn’t in my home city then I needed to work remote. This last part made it a huge issue. Unless you’re mid to senior level finding remote work for iOS developers was much harder to find then I expected it to be. Just within 30 days I had applied to over 40 open positions, and my job alert emails were telling me of 100’s of open positions every day. But none of them were here, and the entry level or even just above entry/junior positions wanted you at their offices.
Don’t get me wrong, I totally understand why. Being in an office at my level has loads of benefits. To be able to learn from people there and participate in standup meetings and coding work onsite is invaluable. Being able to find someone to mentor you and help you grow and getting that personal handling while learning and growing are all reasons why being onsite during the early stages is important. But it’s much harder when you can’t move and your city isn’t really a tech hub.
After AWS, I took a job that I thought was one thing and turned into something else. I thought I would be challenged more, but it wasn’t and I ended up dreading waking up and going into that office. It wasn’t the people, it was the work. Also, this triggered a bunch of stuff with my anxiety and depression which didn’t help. My work suffered, my work ethic fell and I am ashamed of my performance at that job. They deserved better, and in the end it didn’t work out. I know my faults in this one, and I am trying not to repeat my mistakes.
So where am I now? I found a position with a company that is allowing me to push myself in a VERY positive way! I’ve been brought in as a DevOps engineer, but they are letting me work on the mobile application! It’s not native iOS development so there is a learning curve, but I’m 100% committed to getting into this as well as trying to ninja my way into doing native development for any future applications they have! It’s all C# and Xamerain development, so I’m trying to learn this while still keeping up with my iOS/Swift development.
~Jesse