Why everyone hates job searching

Since graduating college, I’ve found myself giving career and job search advice to everyone I meet. Congressional interns, fellow students at my software engineering bootcamp, former mentees and students, people I met on the bus, the boyfriends and sisters-in-laws of classmates. Since I was a little kid, I was obsessed with deciding what I wanted to be when I grew up, which back then meant picking between Olympic figure skater and marine biologist.

I’ve had a lot of jobs (restaurant hostess, cold calling for fundraising donations, driving a van to take international exchange students to the grocery store, teaching Pilates), and at least three careers (lawyer, software engineer, and technical writer). Over time, I realized that I found job searching if not easy, then at least exciting, but many people find it overwhelming and scary.

Finding a job feels so high-stakes, especially in a late capitalist society where necessities like health insurance are tied to it, because there are long periods of unfavorable job markets, and because our identities are often intertwined with our careers. And when people are overwhelmed, they are often frozen in paralysis. The more important but hard something seems, the more likely they are to do nothing and let inertia drive.

A skill both engineers and lawyers use regularly is learning how systems work and using those rules to their advantage. And job searching (or getting promoted or pivoting to a new career) is a task within a system that has rules like any others.  

I tell my writers second drafts are always better than the first. Writing is an iterative art. You’ll never get it all right the first time. You improve by trying again and again (like everything in life).

So, consider this my first draft of getting 10+ years of theories and conversations on job searching and career growth out of my head and out where maybe it can help more people.