After months of no interviews and not having reliable work since July, I got two phone interviews today, one for a full-time programming position I'd get trained for but likely have to relocate to do and another part-time contract gig in town that I could start quickly. Feels good to be wanted again and both in areas I've wanted to work in since I decided to leave higher education.
Update:
Well, unsurprisingly the part-time contract gig in town got nixed for the time being because of the Coronavirus. Expected it early on but still feels bad. Did the training interview for the other job and the interviewer was kinda a jerk and asked why I didn't cram for the interview. I didn't say any of these but the thoughts ran through my head:
A. there's a global pandemic going on.
B. this job is supposed to train me so why should I cram for the assessment of my skills?
C. 10 days might have gotten me the answers to questions but that doesn't mean I actually knew anything about those skills.
I've not heard back from the company but obviously now there's no way I'd relocate to train or to take on a job. If they offer me something I'd say I'm only interested in doing something remotely.
My goal now is twofold:
1. Find a remote job. Luckily, higher education and tech seemed to be needing a lot of these right now. A quick search of indeed and there are tons of remote/temp jobs posted online, a couple that cite COVID-19 as the reason for the openings.
2. Just go ahead and learn programming on my own. Being stuck at home with not much else to do I've finally ran out of excuses. I've started learning basic Javascript and it all makes a lot of sense so far.