With the field still making its way into the industry, I am surprised that a Master’s degree in CS and good work experience is unable to help you land a job. Is there something else that is missing about why this is happening to you? On a related note, your experience and advice in handling corporate politics rationally would be very beneficial to the industry community here if you are open to sharing it!
I have been able to land interviews at a rate of about 8⁄65 or 12% of the positions I apply to. My main assumption is that the timing of COVID-19 is bad, and I’m also only looking at positions in my geographical area of Toronto. It’s also possible that I was overconfident early on and didn’t prep enough for the interviews I got, which often involved general coding challenges that depended on data structures and algorithms that I hadn’t studied since undergrad, as well as ML fundamentals for things like PCA that I hadn’t touched in a long time as my research work has been deep learning focused.
As for corporate politics and how to handle them rationally, I’m not entirely sure I can be much help, as to be honest, I’m not entirely clear on what happened to cause the situation that I got myself into.
Perhaps the thing I could suggest is to be tactful and avoid giving people an excuse or opportunity to side line you, and never assume that you can work with anyone without issue, because toxic or hostile managers especially can make you miserable and prevent you from being successful, and noticing such people in advance and avoiding having to depend on their performance appraisals is probably a good idea.
Most people in business seem focused on performing and getting results, and some of them are wary of others who could overtake them, and so you need to balance showing your value with not seeming threatening to their position. I was in an awkward position that my immediate manager and I didn’t get along, but the director of the department who originally hired me protected me from too much reprisal. However, he needed me to perform better to be able to advocate for me effectively, and it was difficult to do so under the person I was directly under.
Such situations can arise and get quite complicated. I wish I could say you can use the tools of rationality to reason with anyone and convince them to work cooperatively on team goals, but I found that some people are less amenible than others. Furthermore, if someone makes an attack against you in corporate politics, chances are you won’t see it coming, using a subordinate to strike indirectly, and those involved will straight up ignore your communications or give you the runaround in such a way that you won’t be sure who is actually responsible for what. Many meetings are behind closed doors, and there is a clear limit to the information you will have relative to your superiors, which can make it difficult to defend yourself even if you know something is going on.
I guess another thing I can add is that probably a large part of why I was able to avoid being fired was that I had substantial documentation, including a detailed research journal, and a spreadsheet of my working hours to back me up. When trying to be a rational and honest worker in the corporate world, a paper trail is protection and a good way to ensure that the compliance department and HR will be on your side when it counts.
Also, beware that if you let certain types of people get away with one seemingly small thing, they will see that as weakness and that you are exploitable. Know your boundaries and the regulations of the company. Bullies are not just a schoolyard problem, but in the office, they’re much smarter and know how to get away with things. Sometimes these people are also good enough at their jobs that you will not be able to do anything to them because the company needs what they provide. That is life. Pick your battles and don’t allow unfair situations and difficulties to make you lose sleep and perform worse. Do the best you can to do your job well, such that you are beyond rapproach if possible. Be aware that things can spiral. If you lose sleep over something that happened, and this makes you late for work the next day, you’ve given your detractors ammunition.
That’s all I can think of right now.
Edit: As an example of how clever other people can be at office politics, I was once put in a kind of double bind or trap situation that was similar to a fork in Chess. Basically, I was told by a manager not to push some code into a repository, ostensibly because we’d just given privileges to someone who had been hired by a different department and who we suspected might steal the code for that department (there’s a horse race culture at the corporation). Here’s the thing, if I did what he told me to, this repo would be empty and I’d have no independent evidence that my current project had made any progress, leaving me vulnerable to him accusing me of not doing work, or he could deny that he told me not to put in the code, making it look like I was concealing stuff from the company. If I refused to go along and instead pushed the code, I would be insubordinate and disloyal to my department and his managers, who he claimed had told him to tell me what to do.
With the field still making its way into the industry, I am surprised that a Master’s degree in CS and good work experience is unable to help you land a job. Is there something else that is missing about why this is happening to you?
On a related note, your experience and advice in handling corporate politics rationally would be very beneficial to the industry community here if you are open to sharing it!
I have been able to land interviews at a rate of about 8⁄65 or 12% of the positions I apply to. My main assumption is that the timing of COVID-19 is bad, and I’m also only looking at positions in my geographical area of Toronto. It’s also possible that I was overconfident early on and didn’t prep enough for the interviews I got, which often involved general coding challenges that depended on data structures and algorithms that I hadn’t studied since undergrad, as well as ML fundamentals for things like PCA that I hadn’t touched in a long time as my research work has been deep learning focused.
As for corporate politics and how to handle them rationally, I’m not entirely sure I can be much help, as to be honest, I’m not entirely clear on what happened to cause the situation that I got myself into.
Perhaps the thing I could suggest is to be tactful and avoid giving people an excuse or opportunity to side line you, and never assume that you can work with anyone without issue, because toxic or hostile managers especially can make you miserable and prevent you from being successful, and noticing such people in advance and avoiding having to depend on their performance appraisals is probably a good idea.
Most people in business seem focused on performing and getting results, and some of them are wary of others who could overtake them, and so you need to balance showing your value with not seeming threatening to their position. I was in an awkward position that my immediate manager and I didn’t get along, but the director of the department who originally hired me protected me from too much reprisal. However, he needed me to perform better to be able to advocate for me effectively, and it was difficult to do so under the person I was directly under.
Such situations can arise and get quite complicated. I wish I could say you can use the tools of rationality to reason with anyone and convince them to work cooperatively on team goals, but I found that some people are less amenible than others. Furthermore, if someone makes an attack against you in corporate politics, chances are you won’t see it coming, using a subordinate to strike indirectly, and those involved will straight up ignore your communications or give you the runaround in such a way that you won’t be sure who is actually responsible for what. Many meetings are behind closed doors, and there is a clear limit to the information you will have relative to your superiors, which can make it difficult to defend yourself even if you know something is going on.
I guess another thing I can add is that probably a large part of why I was able to avoid being fired was that I had substantial documentation, including a detailed research journal, and a spreadsheet of my working hours to back me up. When trying to be a rational and honest worker in the corporate world, a paper trail is protection and a good way to ensure that the compliance department and HR will be on your side when it counts.
Also, beware that if you let certain types of people get away with one seemingly small thing, they will see that as weakness and that you are exploitable. Know your boundaries and the regulations of the company. Bullies are not just a schoolyard problem, but in the office, they’re much smarter and know how to get away with things. Sometimes these people are also good enough at their jobs that you will not be able to do anything to them because the company needs what they provide. That is life. Pick your battles and don’t allow unfair situations and difficulties to make you lose sleep and perform worse. Do the best you can to do your job well, such that you are beyond rapproach if possible. Be aware that things can spiral. If you lose sleep over something that happened, and this makes you late for work the next day, you’ve given your detractors ammunition.
That’s all I can think of right now.
Edit: As an example of how clever other people can be at office politics, I was once put in a kind of double bind or trap situation that was similar to a fork in Chess. Basically, I was told by a manager not to push some code into a repository, ostensibly because we’d just given privileges to someone who had been hired by a different department and who we suspected might steal the code for that department (there’s a horse race culture at the corporation). Here’s the thing, if I did what he told me to, this repo would be empty and I’d have no independent evidence that my current project had made any progress, leaving me vulnerable to him accusing me of not doing work, or he could deny that he told me not to put in the code, making it look like I was concealing stuff from the company. If I refused to go along and instead pushed the code, I would be insubordinate and disloyal to my department and his managers, who he claimed had told him to tell me what to do.