As I recently shared, I’m back on the job search journey again after over 6 years of happy employment, and boy oh boy, is the market is such a shitty place right now. About half the post on r/UXDesign are complaints. There was a thread about leaving the industry, that then got reposted into a viral post in LinkedIn, before eventually got reposted back into the sub again, truly a wild ride. And then there’s also this trend of visualizing one’s job search journey on Linkedin that spawns a bunch of follow ups.

This highlights just how low Linkedin is as a employment platform these days, but that merits its own post, on another day. Anyway, back to my own story. As I said market is completely flooded with shitty job posts, mostly low-paying jobs for entry level designers or low-paying jobs for superhuman designers with every skills in existence listed in the JD (for those who don’t know, these were probably made by recruiter who have zero understanding what’s the difference between visual designers and front end engineers). But once in a while, you spot 1 or 2 job posts for senior positions where the recruiters actually know what they’re looking for. Those are the ones where I sent out my CV to.

Most of them ghosted me, just like the people on UXDesign reported. And the ones who did respond are, well, not exactly stellar either. Today I’ll tell you about my interview process with a company whose name I won’t be mentioning here for obvious reasons, just know it’s yet another generic Singaporean startup.

I went through the entire process, didn’t get selected. That’s fair, I’m not mad about not being selected, it’s something to be expected in this journey. I’m mad because how much time that whole thing took. I went through 4 friggin’ rounds of interview (5 if you count the initial call with the recruiter), did a 2-part design assignment that took a whole week, with zero compensation for my time (remember I did this in a work week while still fully employed by my current company). I remember last time I was on a job search, Gears Inc. offered to pay for my assignment if I didn’t get selected despite it being only a 2-hour task, that is completely unrelated to the company’s real business. This one took over 20 hours to complete, included a 2-part design challenge that involves the actual features that the company is looking to implement in their product. I had to perform competitor analysis, best practice check and then present my work on 4 separate calls with the Header Product Manager, 2 different PMs and the tech bro CEO himself. Why the CEO is involved in the recruitment of a designer, your guess is as good as mine.
Now that I come to think about it, this might’ve been one of those companies that utilizes the interview process to score free labor.

After almost 6 years, I found myself on yet another sinking ship.

First time was back in 2014 when that internet media company went under and I found out they weren’t paying any employee social insurance despite deducting that amount from everybody’s paycheck.

Second time was in 2018 when DeNA sold off our game studio to a shitty JP offshore software development company and changed the whole management team to incompetent JP expats.

Now I find myself on the brink of the 3rd extinction.

During covid, my company’s parent company purchase another software development company in India. At the time, we didn’t pay much attention to it. Yet another M&A happening at the top level that us drones shouldn’t pay too much attention to, right? After all this wasn’t the first M&A they did. We never realized it was our death sentence. For the Indian center has many advantages that we did not: closer proximity to the UK (and thus better working time zone relative to the clients in the EU), they have an extremely high ratio of English speaking employees (English is still taught in school over there after all). Their staffs are far more open to learning new things and sharing that knowledge with the rest than the Vietnamese staff. We didn’t realize it at the time, but they were a friendly new colleague, they were a direct competitor with our company (since we don’t take on local projects after all, we depends entirely on the onshore team to feed us projects).

Ever since that acquisition, projects have gone dry in the S-shaped land. The management blame that on Covid, which is partly true, but we all know the root cause.

The Vietnamese staffs are just too stagnant.

Not only do we slow to adapt, we’re extremely resistant to learning new things. Even learning something as basic as English are considered a nuisance among the devs here. I keep telling them English is not only used for basic communication, with the recent breakthrough in LLMs model, it’s going to be THE most popular programming language soon. As a dev if you don’t want to become obsolete, you better haul-ass and get learning.

But apparently it wasn’t enough. Despite the management reassuring the staffs on every Town Hall meeting that everything’s fine, layoffs are being handed out left and right. More senior staffs that hold essential skills and can speak English well like me are being kept, but barely. It’s been 4 months since my last assigned projects, and things are looking bleak.

So I’ve switched to yet another cloud provider. This time it’s Hetzner.

While I prefer to self-host most of the services that I use (media server, team chat, password manager, CCTV etc.), I still keep my WordPress sites on a separate VPS. The main reason why I do this is because I prefer to keep all my self-host services containerized in docker, but the LAMP stack is one of the few things that runs just so much better bare-metal than containerized. You don’t have to worry about volume bindings, multiple db container vs single db container, PHP settings etc. Plus it never hurts to have a VPS laying around in case you need a sock proxy.

My VPS history:

Started with Google Cloud Platform, it served me well and taught me a lot about managing VPS. Performance was top-notch (it’s still Google after all). Google later revised their pricing which put it outside of my price range. I then looked into Oracle Cloud since I heard a lot of good things about their free tier VPS. Unfortunately though its performance was horrible for me. I couldn’t get any of the fabled ARM VPS with 24GB RAM that they offer, but for me I would be fine even with the micro 1 vCPU 1GB RAM instance, IF it worked. Unfortunately it was unreachable most of the time (I registered for the South Korean datacenter, it was before the Singapore DC was available). So I started looking else where, finally decided to settle with Linode’s nanode.

It worked, for a while. Until performance became a problem again. With the $5 nanode (1 vCPU, 1GB RAM) I was constantly getting database timeout errors. It was clear 1GB just wasn’t cutting it. Unfortunately adding just 1GB more RAM would’ve doubled the monthly fee to $11. I was unhappy with that value.

So anyway, long story short, I switched to Hetzner as per many recommendations on reddit. And you know what, redditors know their stuffs. For less than the price of a Vietnamese Starbucks I’m getting 2 vCPU, 2GB RAM, 40GB Storage and 20Tb bandwidth per month. This beats the absolute living shit out of any offer from Vulture, Linode, DigitalOcean, OVH etc.

The downside is of course, this pricing only applies to VM instances located in Europe. I suppose Hetzner has some sort of home turf advantage that enabled them to keep the cost down. They recently introduced a new data center in Singapore. I tried provisioning a VM there but the monthly cost is more than triple the price of Helsinki. But I can live with a little of latency if that means I can keep the cost at a reasonable level. Otherwise I’d just bring everything back to run on my home NAS.

So 2021 was over, a year I believe most of us couldn’t wait to forget. So much time staying under lockdown, so many losses. I can no longer count with my fingers the number of my friends on FB who’s using a black avatar (a symbol of grievances where I come from).

But, sad pandemic stories aside, this year also marks the 10 year anniversary of me working professionally in the graphic design field, and I guess it’s a good time as any to take a look back and see how things have changed, and reminisce about people whom I’ve met along the way, how they helped shaping the man I am today. I will not be censoring company names, as they are publicly available in my resume, as well as my LinkedIn.