Every time I look as job postings...

[wolfwings]

...I immediately feel terrified.

I've never, not a single time in my life had any resume I've ever written, cajoled others into writing, payed others to write, developed with books, web-pages, or other training manuals, ever get me an interview. Once, ever, I've gotten an e-mail saying, "Thanks, but your resume isn't useful. Please re-submit in XYZ form." That's the best response I've ever gotten from a resume.

At the same time, I really do think I'm just not employable at any of these wonderful tech-related companies. My instincts tell me that a web-comic interface is horribly coded, clunky, and looks like shite in a dozen different ways, but it works everywhere I test it, and nobody else ever seems to notice the levels of suck-i-tude.

Knowing all my artist friends, I know this 'reaction' seems like any other artist looking at their art, wondering how the hell they can charge anything at all for something that they see nothing but flaws in... and yet, I can't push aside that feeling, and the linked-in dread of 'what if I do get hired? Can I actually do good work, or will I just get fired in the first month, and on some magical black-list circled around in the back alleys between mega-corps that somehow makes sure I'll never work again?' Stupid thoughts, I know.

But I just can't stop thinking them no matter how hard I try.

In a way, I wish I was in your place, mira_fastfire, just because you're making so much more with your life. I feel that for all my natural talents, I never got enough proper training to hone my computer skills. You'll quickly surpass any skills I have, just because you're getting the practice, and books, and other collected knowledge I've had to waste so much of my time re-inventing in my life.

I just wish I could get over this terror of anything job-hunt related, so I could get a job that payed more than $15/hour again. The only time I did, I showed up in person with someone that already worked there that had arranged things, and waited until they gave me an interview. To be honest, so far ALL of my jobs outside of 'anyone with a high school diploma can get them' ones have been gotten for me by someone else arranging an interview without any resume involved, in my only other noteworth case not even being given a proper NDA or interview and all that until months after I'd already started getting paychecks, at the time of my first christmas bonus as I recall.

Comments

[drewkitty.livejournal.com]

It's a people skills thing.

Lots of idiots get jobs. You are smart enough, and insufficiently skilled at hiding it, to intimidate the HELL out of any HR rep or line manager.

Also, your tolerance for bullshit is amazingly low. This is not a compliment. Most workplaces are full of BS and someone who has no respect for BS is perceived (incorrectly) as having no respect for the workplace.

Talk to me more later about this. *hugs*

[otana.livejournal.com]

As harsh as it is, I think drewkitty has some good points. Job hunting is a lot about people skills, not qualifications. A good resume is important, but you can have all the skills in the world; if you're someone who won't fit into the workforce, you won't be hired. Perhaps you can find a book on interview technique, it may give you some skills to help you figure out how to schmooze your way into a job.

Or, go with a head hunter or agency. They are VERY good at doing the schmoozing for you, and they can sell you into any job.

[otana.livejournal.com]

BTW, I hope this advice is helpful and not just hurtful. *hugs*

No. Not hurtful at all.

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

I beg, plead, and bribe people to be bluntly, brutally honest with me. Because anything less doesn't get parsed.

I made this post because I needed discussions like this. The only reason I'm not following up with Andrew via comments, for example, is that I'm visiting him this week so we're discussing in person instead of on-line where we have a white-board and other people to provide demonstrations that are akward at best to explain in text. =^.^=

[spikedpunch.livejournal.com]

Trust me, I know how you feel....

[mira-fastfire.livejournal.com]

Have you tried taking a course or two of career-stuff at your local community college? Community college shouldn't be _too_ expensive...

Also, yes, you are at a HUGE disadvantage because you don't have degrees. The best thing to do might be to save up, go "back to school", and just...do what you have to do to get that degree.

*blush* Uhm...thank you? Let's see what I can pass down?

I hadn't noticed the coding suckitude until you mentioned it. Ohhhhh boy. Let's start at the top?

- Your doctype says "strict" but you've still got deprecated code -- like < p align = "center" >. To precent this, why not stick a verifier code on your page during testing? My class website with the code for that is here (http://teacherjohn.com/cabrillo/dm160b/tutorials/validatebuttons.html).
- Is there a reason you have both "class" and "style" attributes for your div class="chaplanginfo" ? Why not put the style stuff in the CSS sheet?
- I'm seeing a LOT of "style" attributes. Is there a reason you're not just tossing a lot of this into the style sheet?
- Is there a reason you using tables for layout instead of CSS?

Let's work with this to make the code prettier. :) Did you start with a mental image of what the page should look like, and then made the code work? Or did you start with the pure information?

Well...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...that wasn't starting from scratch on that example, to be honest. I was trying to do the minimal amount of changes to the existing Inverloch archive pages to convert it to the interface I'd designed, both so the original author could adjust things to make them 'prettier' however they wished, and so they could understand my changes easier.

But yes, there's a lot of cheating and standards-pillaging in there to get it to work across IE (especially here), Opera, (mostly on) Safari, and Firefox.

Re: Well...

[mira-fastfire.livejournal.com]

Ahhhhhhh. The original page used tables -- so you just used the tables and expanded it.

Oh, another thing I was taught... menus should always be lists. Use CSS to make the lists look as you like, but they should always be lists. It's a logic thing. A menu is a list of items, after all.

My teacher also emphasized standards-compliance. Make it work the right way...THEN hack it, not the other way around. XP You know about that? :)

I think the biggest change I would make with your thing is the calendar -- I'd make it a table. And I'd CSS almost everything, but that's me. XD

...and yay for IE 7 having PNG transparency support!! *dances*

Re: Well...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Spot on about CSSing everything. And thank GOD web-pages don't need to use clunky hacks to get IE to display alpha-channel PNG's too. I vaguely disagree with forcing the calender into a table though, because a table would take up more HTML-space without appreciable benefit.

And I originally did the 'per chapter info' block as a two-dimensional table, then I'd collapse rows and columns. Columns were how I set the language, rows were how I picked the chapter, since it's far easier and more supported to collapse a row quickly than a column in my brief tests.

But that broke on everything but either Firefox, or Opera (I could get it to work on one of the two, never both at once without browser-specific code, which defeats the entire purpose of using standards to me) and it was causing odd layout interactions so I abandoned that approach despite it 'failing' much more gracefully when CSS was disabled.

I adore standards, and for my personal projects I abide by the standards to the letter and spirit as much as possible (note my proud little yellow W3C-test icons), and am willing to lose some browsers that display things incorrectly.

But for the Inverloch page, working was more important than passing the W3C and other tests. In particular, getting IE6 and Safari to display things correctly took a LOT of hacking to the point I stopped checking standards and just checked what worked, but I couldn't ignore either in this case like I usually do.

My original implementation of the comic-archive interface was much simpler, though it used a lot more code-generated HTML as well so the simplicity is somewhat deceptive. Elements could be re-arranged and moved about easilly, and they relied very heavilly on CSS for their styling so that could be adjusted as well, but the Inverloch author replaced the style dramatically just before I showed them that version and asked me to re-write it to match their new theme and be easier to update.

The back-end Javascript code is very similair in both versions, the same 'core engine' such as it was, but you can see the difference between me modifying existing stuff, versus building something vaguely elegant from scratch. =^.^=

Re: Well...

[mira-fastfire.livejournal.com]

Collapse rows and columns? What do you mean by that?

I'm confused on why you used tables on the original layout. It doesn't look like you have many cells in each one. So why...?

*sigh* Ah, the joys of writing code to match a client's expectations < / sarcasm >

Re: Well...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's not the version that does it that way.

It was kinda a version half-way between the green and 'final brown' version I still have posted anywhere. I didn't keep a copy of the collapsable row/table trick since it just wasn't portable enough on the current generation of browsers.

Basically, you can flag entire columns and rows with distinct styles, then use Javascript tomanipulate those styles and hide/collapse the rows or columns. The 'Prologue/A Hunt/An Elf in our Forest?/Shattered Myths' sections were just individual cells in a large table, so I could flag all the columns and rows as collapsed by default, then only expand one of each to show the correct chapter in the correct language.

It's all in the CSS 2.1 standards, but it's really poorly supported at best unfortunately, especially collapsing columns.

[alohawolf.livejournal.com]

drewkitty hit it on the head, your also amazingly hard headed (which is not all a bad thing).

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Resume-writing is a skill. I know I don't have it. Job sites terrify me for the same reason: I will need to provide a resume. I will need to adhere to this format. I will need to sell myself.

I hate selling myself.

Every job I've ever had has been based on either connections, or on people seeing my portfolio and being wowed. My resume? It's shit, and I know it, and I have no fucking clue of how to make it not shit.

A bit late...

[wolfwings.livejournal.com]

...but you hit my problem on the head better than anyone else here actually.

I realized it when I was asked how much to help someone move a butt-load of furniture. I hate selling myself.