Tech Talk
The next big thing By Michael E. Duffy
A funny thing happened to me a recent Monday morning. After more than six years of working on Kingdom Maker, a mobile game, I got laid off. In some ways, it didn’t surprise me at all. My former company was looking for a partner to help pay for the marketing of our free-to-play game, and it fell through early in the month. A free-to-play game has some
to be underestimated. LinkedIn appears to offer anyone with a free basic account a free one-month trial of any LinkedIn Premium service, So, I gave them my credit card and signed up for LinkedIn Premium Career, which is the premium service aimed at job seekers like me. It usually costs $30 month-to-month, which seems like a reasonable expense while seeking a job at my level.
An annual subscription is $240, a 33% savings, but being out of work for at least eight months seemed too depressing to contemplate that option. On the other hand, if I manage to land a job in the next few weeks, I don’t even have to pay! One of the interesting features when applying via LinkedIn is “Top Choice Jobs.” You can mark up to three jobs at one time as your “top choice,” as a way of signaling interest in a particular position. LinkedIn also makes heavy use of AI- based
difficult economics: You have to spend money upfront to acquire players who will spend money as they play over time—it’s estimated that a mere 2% of players generate 80% of your revenue. You don’t want to spend huge amounts of money to acquire players unless
you’ve demonstrated a healthy positive return on ad spending. And, alas, the company is still working on that. So, to buy more time and hopefully reach that positive outcome, about a third of us got the boot. It’s a bit of a shock, of course. One day you’re in the thick of things, and the next, crickets. You suddenly stop, and the company moves on without you. I imagine the first day of retirement is a bit like this. Fortunately, the company is providing a reasonable severance package (two weeks of pay, plus an additional week’s pay for every year of service), so I have some time to find the Next Big Thing. Plus, I’m not the sole breadwinner in the family. All things considered, an annoying hiccup (he says, fingers crossed). So, you close up Slack for the last time and lose access to your company-based Google services like mail and calendar. No more tracking tickets in JIRA. Instead, you open up your 7-year-old resume in Google Docs and get to work finding a new position. Now, a number of people have asked me—as I am of a certain age—why don’t you just retire? I usually joke that I have to pay for my wine habit somehow. But the truth is that I don’t really have any hobbies—even this column pays me a bit of cash—and I truly enjoy programming. My wife isn’t ready to retire yet, so why not keep working a few more years? And remote work (if you can get it) removes the biggest downside of work: the commute. As I was getting my resume in shape, I updated my profile on LinkedIn, changing my status to “Open to Work.” Presumably, this signals job recruiters who come across your profile that you’re actively looking for a new position. What it actually seems to do is generate a lot of interest from people who write and update resumes for a living. What I thought was a flurry of messages expressing interest in my availability turned out to be requests for my resume so that they could critique it. Ah, well. But the power of LinkedIn when you’re looking for work is not
features such as drafting cover letters and improving your profile. Premium also gives you access to some additional search filters, which can be useful. If I enter “Senior Software Engineer” (my last title) into the search box on LinkedIn, there are over 11,000 results. One nice feature is you can now search for jobs in the “remote” location, which, after working at home since 2019, is certainly a personal preference for my next position. That narrows the search to about 3,000 positions. Adding my experience level and desired salary narrows it to a more manageable 382 positions. I’m still tweaking my search to improve results. I’ll probably have more to say about job searching in my next column, especially if I don’t land a job. If you’re hiring for a technology role in the North Bay, check me out on LinkedIn (just search for Michael E. Duffy) to see if I might be a great fit. I’ve been successful in three different industries (gaming, healthcare information technology, and medical device development) both as a CIO/CTO/GM and an individual contributor. Plus, you already have my writing sample. g
Michael E. Duffy is a senior software engineer for Atlanta-based mobile gaming company Global Worldwide (globalworldwide.com), who lives in Sonoma County. He has been writing about technology and business for NorthBay biz since 2001.
October 2024
NorthBaybiz 33
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