Hunting for work - like every other stupid man and his dog

Well the recession seems to have hit London harder than I though.

I've been looking for contracting work the past week and the pickings have been... lets say slim. Last year there seemed to be more jobs than people to fill them and the money stupid. This year is another story. The market is very slow and there are less jobs and more people to fill them - its ultra competitive and mildly depressing. The interview process sucks and there is always my nemesis to face - the arbitrarily-useless-impractical-academic-technical-question-test.

"What are the N methods for applying X to Y?"

Er, gee, let me just consult the infinite store of knowledge I have in my head... oh wait, that got full sometime around 1998 and has been dropping the useless redundant pieces of information ever since. In reality we would all use the INTERNET to remember that. (That would be cool if we could use the internet to remember things, as an extension to our memory!). Anyway, there always seems to be someone better and brighter than me, or at least someone who has memorised every manual that is out there!

So anyway, there might be light around the corner. Someone liked my CV and sent me a technical programming test to do at home.

"Here, make this work in less than 2 hours"

That's my kind of test. A real problem to solve. I thought that I really screwed it up, but looking at it now there was at least 5 hours of work there, and I got it almost working and with great test coverage, which turns out they really wanted, maybe, cause I passed and fingers cross it looks like there may be a job there.