Job Searching: It's 2026, So Why, Oh Why, is it so 💩?

Strap in, this’ll be a long read, as tbh I wanted this all in 1 place & not 5 sliced up posts.

If you choose to read this in 1 go, please let me know how long it took you. Fun game of who’s got the quickest reading speed and actually took it all in.

Jobsearching, eh..? This, really, really makes me go

IRrrwR IRrrwR IRrrwR IRrrwR IRrrwR

like a loyal German Shepard when they hear someone approaching your house, or maybe you think that sounds more like a Yorkshire Terrier, a Chihuahua or a Daschhound instead, in that it’s more yappy, which is why I picked that as the branding for 🔗#IRrrwR - Irregular / Ridiculous rants/rambles with Ryan!🔗 Because, well it just made sense.

Note: this post is focused around the “funsies” of UK Job Searching Experience from someone that really has better shit to do, like we all do & because of this ever increasing 💩cesspit of an experience well a wild Level 10 Pissed off Ryan has appeared (Did ya get the Pokemon reference…?) Be glad it aint a Level 100 Rampaging Ryan, that’s for sure 😜

This post is meant to be taken seriously, because I’m a deadly serious kinda guy, however in this I intend to my right to make use of every single fucking expletive possible where I see fit whilst adding a decent sprinkling of comedic flair throughout. Which I hope you can see already. Which is why this is intended to be both a sweet and sour post that I hope really makes you think.

You will learn things, you may even nod along at some or all of it. You may smile, or shake your head or fist as we go along. Yes this is long, and the choice is yours but I won’t blame you for not giving this your full attention in 1 go or throwing this to an AI to summarise.

However, If this does resonate with you & whether you are in the UK or not let me know one way or another. Perhaps with liking the post on BlueSky (because Twitter destroyed a large amount of cross-site social interactions by making API calls cost money) or on LinkedIn etc.

If this is too long and you got an AI to summarise it please share the summary with me & your thoughts as well to 📨[email protected]📨 as I’d be interested in what it spat out to you as a summary & yes I did create a mailbox just for this.

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WARNING: This post is not for the faint hearted, if you do not like people swearing, honestly with the use of 💩 in the title of the post, why in the actual fuck are you here and reading it….?

That said, Please DO Continue reading this post & let me explain to you exactly why this is, & whilst a totally different post you may actually also find this post I’ve written about 🔗The Power of Swearing - mhasl.me🔗 a decent read too about why swearing isn’t actually all that bad a thing, from Science’s Point of View.

However, if you want a more PG friendly version of this post…

Sorry, but that’s NEVER ever fucking happening. Capiche!

Actually it might some point in the future - I just doubt I’m spending the time in writing it, I may dictate it though & if I do it’ll be on a PG friendly version of this site most likely https://pg.blog.kilasuit.org or similar as I haven’t decided yet but yeah, the likelihood is about as slim as me not swearing in this post.

Note - you may read this, see that it’s over 21,000 words & be like - wouldn't the time Ryan spent writing this have been more usefully spent on job searching & applications. Maybe but somehow I doubt it when I’ve been doing the job search alongside this.

My Background & Lead up to today

For this post I am relying on my 22 Years of on/off Job Searching, a large part of it in the last few years (2022-2026) as well as (2015-2018) after a good few years (2018-2022) of successful, sometimes a bit stressful but mostly incredibly fun times with chances to meet and work with a number of awesome people. Misfortune has occurred & mistakes have been made along the way, as detailed in other posts on this blog.

Whilst mostly my experience is in the IT Industry, my Research into the world of work has covered many different areas and whilst a large part is across areas where I could take my Project Planning Skills and use them in other “potentially less interesting” areas, many of them still being within the world of tech. Or my Business & Consultancy Skills, however there’s a few good reasons why I don’t currently run my own Consulting business that is actually actively trading yet.

I’m 36 (at time of authoring this post) & I started doing all of this at 14, like many teenagers & their parents will be doing at this time of year about what work may be out there for them, now and in future. Just like there are all the people myself included that are unemployed and actively looking for work in different levels of intensity.

Some may be worried, about job displacement due to AI & whilst that will unfortunately happen to some degree, there are people like me, who are Much more worried about job exclusionism and dodgy employer practices by seemingly reputable employers. Which I could discuss about all these topics for a a long long time.

Granted, I’ve done plenty other things than just sit and research the trends of the ever changing job market across the UK (in my sector & or in local area each different time as I have moved around the country), over all those years, however, the trends are relatively easy to see when you are good at pattern matching, whilst also “jokingly” predicting the future requirements in my preferred markets as well as whilst keeping an eye on similar trends in my “area of expertise” in other countries too. Because, yanno, maybe my true calling is in Australia or New Zealand or Canada, or Sweden or maybe at one point it could have even been in Russia.

For background, in the UK (like other countries too) at 14 you pick your additional subjects to study alongside the core subjects, and I actually as far back as 2004 knew that Russian could really have been an interesting & important language for me to learn, along side French & German, or Spanish at school. I’d have then chosen to learn Italian, some form of the common languages in use across China, likely Mandarin & I would definitely been wanting to learn Japanese too. Though I never did manage to get myself to learn even the basics in them all. My school had offered studying Russian to me at 14, as an extra subject on top of my studies, but sadly there wasn’t enough uptake for it from others, so it wasn’t to be.

Note I knew all the way back then, that the languages other than English & those common in Western Europe & former colonies of those countries, would be not only useful to learn but important later on in life for the travels that I would have liked to do. The above list is of those that I personally felt then & still do feel now are important to learn, though there are plenty others too.

It’s also fitting time wise as with the UK PM Andy Burnham’s recent announcement that Education changes are coming in the years ahead with 🔗Technical subjects to be offered at age 14 to pupils - BBC News🔗 as this brings me to reflect back to my own education, where I studied Design Technology for both Wood & Metal Work, alongside Core & Applied ICT. But, perhaps I was lucky in going to one of the best graded state schools west of Birmingham & at at time when the Public Finances weren't being squeezed so dramatically, but this was 🔗 pre the 2008 financial crisis. 🔗

I learnt then what I deem to be the basic core computing skills in the Core & Applied ICT courses scoring 39 out of 40 in my final Core IT exam. Applied ICT taught me mainly the Office Suite, including at the time using 🔗 Microsoft Fucking FrontPage 🔗, which I kid, as I loved it then to build out simple websites using the What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor that FrontPage was. It, like many other tools & technologies (InfoPath for one) are now defunct, discontinued, & now somewhat useless technologies that I & so many across the vast ever-changing landscape that is the world of IT & Technology learned, sweated blood and tears to learn how to use and abuse them & as such have had to add them to the list of skills that, have been thrown away for good and we all dearly hope that they will never be needed to pull back out in our lifetimes, because some mission critical system, somewhere, still needs someone to diagnose these technologies when they go wrong or to migrate away from them.

Fast forward form school & I won’t dig deep into my background but I’ve worked for

• Burger King & McDonalds (Twice at McDonalds)
• Comet & Sainsbury’s (also twice at Sainsbury’s)
• Barclays & University of Manchester working on SharePoint (A Web Document Management & Content platform)
• Various Roles working around Cloud & Datacenter management in Microsoft Azure Cloud. Paid & Unpaid.

I’ve been out of work for longer than I wanted because some of the skills I have aren’t the ones that are being looked for in the market (nor do I want to learn some of them), plus my health has been pants for many different reasons & working away from home just isn’t currently something I feel up for anymore.

That said.

You might be reading this, you may have read some of my previous posts already (or go on to reading them from this) and be thinking WTF does Ryan actually know about this and why is his opinion worth my time in reading this post especially as he's been out of paid work for so long to which I would say, like the jokey teacher, who knows when he’s right,

That’s a nice phrase to use & an even nicer image that copilot made for me, which yes I cuda taken a leaf from Samuel L Jackson (the legend that he is) & added in a you motherfuggers but nah this phrase, when delivered the right way, I feel that this comes across more than well enough on it’s own.

However, let’s get on with this post, shall we….. (& I post this sometime well before I turn 40)

Sadly, Tech has made many things worse, not better.

I have to throw tech under the bus here. #SorryNotSorry

That’s because I am very much not inclined to throw people under the bus. Not even any of those Horrible Bosses (Great Films BTW!) that we may have experienced. Mostly because that’s unfair for the bus as much as it them. As well as everyone waiting on said bus.. I told ya ther’d be some comical bits throughout.

I say this, because we’ve had plenty of time to make Job Searching not only suitable & easy for everyone but unfortunately part of the problem is a mix of

• aged, old & no longer suitably designed tech systems
  • Job listings portals built on them or bad processes 😠😩😡
  • the “everything must be sendable by email”
  • or printed on paper in black ink
• made worse by bad job listings on these portals
• made worse by slow moving organisations in these processes
• made worse by “we get lots of applications so if you don’t hear back …..” nonsense

It’s frustrating when businesses have some systems & internal processes that were put in place many many years ago & are utter “piles of garbage” from what I’ve seen.

Much like some of the AI output is when you give AI blind unsculpted prompts as Mark Russonorussinovichivich recently said in a Hansel and Grettle Chat Tech podcast. Note that wasn’t a word for word quote & if you get those references then you deserve a pint of your choice, which I hope it’s not the blood or tears of all the adults stuck in the job search process or of the children that are yet to deal with this portal from hell, because Job Searching is SOUL DESTROYING on another level.

Also there was a genunine mistake there that I just left in for some humour & to see how well it breaks the algoirythm & shows a little bit more of my comical humour.

The above alone is enough to show that this post coudna beena wreetin by AI.

Anyways, it’s 2026 & everything about Job Searching in the last 2 decades (since I left school) generally feels like it has in a number of ways over that time slowly gotten so much worse.

Please let that sink in a second.

I a techy, feel we’ve made it harder. Not easier.

Especially as I'm a strong believer that technology, when used correctly, can improve our daily lives which I’ve stuck by ever since I had added it to my Microsoft MVP Awardee Page (back when I was one) & has been a statement that I have and always will stick to.

However tech now makes it easier for all manner of barriers to entry that are invisible, unspoken & unwritten, and in many cases these barriers may even be unlawful (hence them being unspoken & unwritten when externally facing) or may just be that the door that is awaiting opened is misplaced behind too many different kinds of gates (like Security Clearances for example)

Granted that’s not true in every part of the Job Search & Application, to Interviews, getting an offer and then accepting new roles, but it is in large parts of it & this post is to dig into a chunk of where I feel we have royally fucked up with this vitally important aspect of life.

This area, like searching for a home and dealing with estate agents - is another one of these areas of life that invokes #Level 10 Pissed Off Ryan & I really do not like him, and well lucky he only comes out in things like this, as I don’t often let him out and inflicting a view on the general public. Level 5/7 maybe, but Levels 8/9/10 aren’t shared in person & I keep these to myself.

One day I will take this post & the Estate Agents one in a different format as an episode on 🔗#IRrrwR - Irregular / Ridiculous rants/rambles with Ryan!🔗 the Podcast & Presentation medium that I haven’t yet got everything in place for it so that I can just get on and smash out a tonne of content. But I already plenty of ideas in mind, as this area, like the mess that is the housing market and finding a property, is absol-fucking-lutely worthy of me ranting about. So yeah, look forward to that or don’t, I really don’t care either way.

That said, heres my top 20 ish things that really do my fucking nut in and royally fuck me off about Job Searching today, and from conversations I’ve had and seen over the years, I am not the only one either.

This is especially true more recently, with many pointing some bits out but are less willing to call it out so profusely and succinctly and with a level of charismatic elegance of the English language in a manner that, may or may not, make you wanna follow Britney & Will I Am & Scream & Shout, like I do on a regular basis in the comfort of my own home & especially when ever I spend time Jobsearching.

The List of places where we’ve messed up.

This is a somewhat condensed list because I could go on and go and on and on… which I know you get the drift already, much like I know this post is starting to drift off course & into seemingly choopy waters and may feel like it’s gotten lost along the way.

1. Reduced in person job listings with an offline application process.

This one is a given, seeing as there has been an explosion 💥 of different types of technology over the years & more firms using tech in this process than ever before. Not all of it good either.

That said, Every Adult, from in their 20’s to my age and those a little older & many much older, will remember that you often would be able to get that first few jobs of your working career, which was most likely via walking into the places that had the job you wanted.

Perhaps you read about it in the paper, or whilst strolling around the high streets, yanno, like in hotels, cafes, bars, restaurants, estate agents 🤬 , or the places on the retail parks like electrical stores 💻, large supermarkets 🍞🥚 etc, by walking and asking for the on-duty manager & asking `“Got any jobs in, guy?” & getting a swift yes or no.

Now I’m more into my Jungle than Hip Hop, but lets leave that aside for now eh 😜😂😂

Granted smaller places may have no online presence, and there are bigger ones that actively avoid online (or have the least of useful online presences) because it’s simply not their thing. They still have their ways to advertise jobs & get their jobs filled, which is one of the joys of the word of mouth & having a large network of people you can engage with. But that takes time to build, at least from an authenticity perspective.

Today, though, the offline approach to the job search is something that seemingly we rarely allow, especially in thanks to many organisations requiring applications to go through not only an online job application portal that often does levels of pre-screening checks as part of the application process. but also other layers of checks, whether those be Right to Work checks or deeper level checks like BPSS, SC, DV, eDV etc.

I mean this is how I got my paper rounds & then my first job at Burger King, by directly asking the shift manager when I went in one night & IIRC he interviewed me there and then and I got the job. So I am sad to see the in-person element in many chains lost to the online job application process. Especially as most of these application systems aren’t really fit for purpose and were a massive waste of compute time, before layers of quite frank, abysmally shite AI integration have ended up being shoved into them.

I also cannot remember the last time I looked in the local paper for jobs. Mostly because well, I can’t afford to buy one.

Which is why I feel that local job listings, in the drive to get Britain working again might make sense for councils to mail some out & not just sent as emails or left online.

Yes this will incur the costs in printing and delivery, it also brings a very crucial question about one of our most critical services. That being Royal Mail & regular mail delivery (which is a hot topic in some places).

I feel it should be renationalised in future as I think it sad that this service is not owned by the people of the country it serves.

2. The Same ole “Copy and Pasted” Job Adverts that are Just Fucking EVERYWHERE 😡😡😡

If you have spent any time at all, in the last 10 years or so, looking for a job that caters to your specialist skillset, especially anything that leads to the world of direct/indirect Government Contracted work, you will, know this well.

Then unless you are incredibly & I do mean incredibly fucking lucky, that or you have no morals & will work for anyone as long as it pays the bills (more on that later) then you may have had much more struggles recently.

I am somewhat kidding, but I have a incredibly detailed and strong criteria for what I want to do, and the kind of place I want to work and a long list of those kinds of places that I don’t want to & technologies that I am not & will not ever get skilled in. Is that Career limiting or is it knowing what levels of nonsensical bullshit you aren’t willing to torture yourself with. Cos I know what my answer there is.

If unlike those of us that have been knocked around the block a bit you may not have needed to spend more than a week or two searching at a time. I do say, lucky you, and well done.

However if like me, then you will like me have likely found soooooo many job adverts that you have read, perhaps on 1 board, or on another & another & another, days weeks or months after recalling “OH I definitely have seen this before” and scuttle past it.

Sometimes this is because it gets posted, dropped and then reposted every time the markets get a wiff of anything that makes hiring harder/easier (like upcoming Gov budgets or yet more changes in the Prime Minister/Other National leaders) or at those certain times of the year when HR/Hiring Managers are like OOOH We need to spend this money else we'll lose it - which quite frankly shows what’s wrong in the world of many businesses but alas - that is a whole post/rant in it’s own & the pandemic and rising costs since have showed lots of upset to the health of UK businesses.

This practice, which I’ll call the Ejaculated Job Post that sticks onto anything and everything possible & comes around regularly for a 2nd round has, I estimate, wasted me in the last 2 decades more than a easily a week if not close to two just reading these exact same posts time and time again.

This is whether done when I’ve been researching the market for the funsies (because yes I have endured the pain of this reguarly even whilst in employment & not even really looking for myself, often as part of helping others) or as part of a genuine active search, like right now to some extent.

Annoying at best, especially if it’s a role that you’ve disregarded for whatever legitimate reasons that you may have, whether that range from the company is in a sector that you aren’t interested in working in, the job in a location that doesn’t fit for you, or just for whatever reason you just get that vibe from the ad.

Which leads me nicely to.

3. Adverts that are so incredibly hard to read.

Many organisations, are absolootley fucking fantastic at writing job adverts that read like, well, let me try and be kind here,

The task to write it fell to most disinterested person in the organisation, who was planning leaving anyway, who hated the hiring manager & their team, had been given the task to convert the real business requirements into a job spec, didn’t know anything that had been word vomited to them for the job spec in a meeting where they were half asleep & not really listening and then purposely made the role sound not only boring as fuck but like it had been translated through 20 different languages so that the actual meaning in each sentence was lost to the abyss.

Sound about right…..? Yeah thought so.

These roles have been written in such a way as to instantaneously disinterest anyone that can read, or leave them with the burning question of well they can't write a job spec for 💩 - I wonder how much of a mess they really are in & is that something that is worth my time & importantly my energy even going through the application process?

A Solid perfect 5/7 times, that answer is usually an absolute fuck no. If you understand that reference well done, you are part of the elites of the internet era that laugh a little at what can only be described as “playground bullying” but delivered completely and utterly online. Yeah that stuff sucks. But what’s worse than being bullied, is not being worthy of being bullied. Unless your scared of milkshakes (being allergic to them is not the same as being scared of them) then you deserve all the light-hearted bullying coming your way.

As long of course that we agree on what’s acceptable & “fair game” like me and my broken Teeth, or tired eyes or my irregular as hell sleeping pattern, or the places where I intuitively leave a misspealling to make you double take whilst you are reading all these articles I write like this.

Note: I say that in jest, as there is always a level of acceptableness with these things, and if you happen to disagree with this, well stop reading and throw yaselfs in the bin, or freezer or a cold shower and move on with your day. Cos i couldn’t give a rats arse, mainly because that’s not the sort of thing that I keep handy, as they to me are as useful as a chocolate teapot, actually no a chocolate teapot at least gives me hot chocolate, so actually that’s pretty useful.

Yes I am being harsh here, but if a job role is hard to read or seems nonsensical or even worse just comes across absolutely boring as fuck, then you’ve lost probably 80% of potential candidates in the age of those that have had internet since they were as young as 5. Which well, could be much of the potential workforce, although I do take note that I was privileged to grow up around technology & not everyone was.

Whilst this section has annoyed me to write, one of my favourite tracks has just come on whilst I am typing along to the beat. So I am a very happy Ryan at this moment, even if the whole purpose of this post, is because Level 10 Pissed Off Ryan decided that Enough is Enough and this post must be written.

It’s Bleeper by Nu:Tone, which BTW I Timesynced the lyrics to it on Musixmatch which you can read more about that process in 🔗Musicxmatch and the tracks I am adding or added lyrics to.🔗

Another is this amazingly calming track that was for a long period was my most listened to track month in month out (which is hard to beat) though I was in the top 1% of UK Spotify Users many years running (apparently)

And this leads me on to

4. The “Probably Does not Exist” Role Adverts

This is a bug bare as many recruiters over the years have been known to do this, same with many organisations. It’s kinda tied to #2 The Same ole “Copy and Pasted” Job Adverts that are Just Fucking EVERYWHERE 😡😡😡

Sometimes its for data mining purposes, like to be able to use your details alongside “other suitable candidates” when “a similar role may turn up” or orgs that think they are gonna land some funding so that they can take on that role that never materialises.

Frustrating, but hopefully happens less now than it once did. However, I somewhat doubt it, particularly as the cynic in me would say that there are some areas where thinking about this through the lens of national security perspectives (as an observer that has never held clearance, yet well, quite frankly ) this sorta thing is a given, whether it be for individual target profiling or it be for a tactical attempt into breaching one or many organisations by “character assumption” & deception practices

This leads me on to this 🤬

5. The “Hidden Behind a Login” Job Adverts 🤬

Firstly, shit, yes 💩, like this, needs nuked from orbit. For all but in 1 case.

Note: This post is directed for all jobs roles that are meant to be listed publicly & attract applications from literally anyone that is interested in it. Obviously this is not the case for those pesky accepting internal applicants only roles that also somehow manage to find their way on to the public internet. Those should only ever be advertised on internal sites & never on publicly accessible sites because they should not allow search engines to crawl them.

I literally, do not give a flying fuck we should not be going about building 10, 20 , 50, 100, 1000 different profiles on sites like these in the slightest.

Nor should you reading this, or your parents, grandparents (if they still are of working age and looking), your children, your grandchildren, brothers, sisters, cousins, the randomer that you walk past in the street or on a bus, train, plane or those you interact with online.

This is yet another layer of unnecessary & shitty barriers that ultimately end up stopping people, right there & they don’t click through & sign up & never ever intend to.

Because

Why, because these sites give us

• Yet another account that most people don’t fucking want! I know I don’t! (Bar some notable exceptions & even that is rare)
  • Even if the account is essentially hidden from them by the use of Identity Providers Like Google or Apple or LinkedIn or Microsoft or FaceBook or Instagram, TikTok or Twitter/BlueSky, Medium, Substack, GitHub. The list goes on and on.
  • Plus whilst it’s getting better, there’s still a large number of people where Tech ain't their thing and don’t want to care or understand what computer security hygiene practices are like different passwords.
  • Passwords have always sucked, but Passkeys aren’t the saviour that they are being flouted as either..
  • I could be wrong but I feel that not all of these platforms have Multi-Factor Authentication implemented & I couldn’t find ones I have used being listed in https://2fa.directory - which is a community directory for sites who do/don’t implement multifactor authentication, something that really should be there by default now it’s 2026.

This sort of pop-up forcing you to login, now shows up on numerous sites,

Indeed.com 🖕 (yes fuck you Indeed)

jobleads.com 🖕 (and fuck you too)

and so many more, which sadly slows down or stops a job search in its tracks.

Also the just picking these boxes apart, the emphasis being Continue with Google or Continue with Apple infuriates me something rotten & literally makes me 🤬🤬

• This is especially true when there’s a LinkedIn icon shown to the side, as if it’s inferior, although at least LinkedIn gives you a true social network built for the world of work on top of job searching. It has it’s issues like every social network.
• The Continue with email option really should be above the `By creating an account" line
• The Log in link should be another fucking button, for fuck sake🤦‍♂️ instead of being almost as if it isn’t really an option. UI & UX Designers that do 💩 like this really do make me wonder what data set of research data they are using to suggest this. Anyway - UI & UX rants are something that I could do happily do as a Ryan Rips the Shit outta your Site series which definitely wouldn’t be for the faint of heart - as you can probs tell from this posts so far. Let me know if you’d actually be interested in that or something similar.

There’s the phrase equal opportunities and this one single pop-up, being developed with a completely biased user direction here in that they want you to be using a Google Email or another Email, over using LinkedIn as the Authentication Provider, & therefore the subsequent Unique Identifier to Login to a site that, most likely is going to be no use.

Even with it’s utter bullshit 4.5 Star on Trustpilot, literally means nothing these days, especially with only 21.5k reviews. Many people just won’t review things & even if they do, you don’t always know if the review is authentic or not, which by that I mean, did they get paid just to 5 Star it leaving a warm fuzzy comment that couldn’t be further from the truth.

However, boxes like this should include the option to View Job without Signing Up because they stop the passive jobsearcher that perhaps is doign so whilst out & about and not really wanting to do a proper search.

Actually, I’ll go as far as to say, in future that they absolutely must do, and yes I have ideas as how to go about actually doing this.

Here is another example, using this search on https://www.cwjobs.co.uk/jobs/in-derby?radius=10

I got this

As you can see with this listing even though it shows the end client of Babki, the actual link in this advert pings you over to TotalJobs to then apply via that site.

Which gives this 🤬🙄

What is bad is that sometimes these jobs will then get cross posted across multiple job boards, with different recruiters listed in them (not the end client) with 100% exact same wording, sometimes at the exact same time, others weeks apart.

Yet with some really easy searching, I found the direct link to apply, which I passed on to a friend that may enjoy this, but game testing just isn’t for me, not right now at least. It might be some other time though.

Bypassing the need of signing in via either TotalJobs or CWJobs, or creating a Job Search on either of these sites.

Glassdoor

This is another one of these Job Sites thought it tries to add in a community feel with being able to see company ratings & Salary listings and forums.

That said, I’ve rarely used Glassdoor. Mainly because I’ve heard too many bad things about ratings getting removed from companies, whether or not that’s true, is not something that I ever cared to follow up on.

And now that Indeed & Glassdoor have joined together, well, we shall see, but I don’t really hold out hope tbh.

LinkedIn 🤷‍♂️ / 🙄 / 😒

Yes, the business and employment-oriented social networking service which I had to mention because at least LinkedIn gives a more social element to it than other services out there.

LinkedIn has an Easy Apply feature that helps on it’s platform, same as these others do.

6. The Job Advert is online, but the Job Spec’s details are hidden within a document

What’s worse than a bad advert see #3 or on a web page hidden behind a login….?

Yup, Key details hidden away in a PDF or a Word Doc somewhere linked that you have to download, open & then filter through them to get to the actual meat of the Job.

Councils & public sector are terrible for this due to the need to print these things out, so default to building them in Office Software suites like Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat.

Providing lots of wordsalad to stretch the job spec out.

But we also often throw anywhere for 10 peoples worth of work on single people and wonder why we aren’t getting through major projects on time and budget.

We’ve had content converters for as long as I’ve been in tech, and they are only getting better. Get everything in a web accessible format that isn’t a doc/pdf & ideally is easily exportable (more on that later) that gives all relevant information at once, not split across 1 or more docs.

7. The “Broken Job Application Portals”

This follows on from 5. The “Hidden Behind a Login” Job Adverts 🤬 because these, almost always require a yet another damn login to use 😑

I have yet to see a Job Application portal used that I have been close to liking. Tis a good thing I like my hair, else I may have torn chunks out of it dealing with them.

None of them have been anything near enjoyable to use, either. Most end up invoking a very brief Why The Fuck have I not slit my throat yet, then I wouldn't need to deal with this 💩 thought, every time I deal with them.

That may seem extreme, & you probably wasn’t expecting it or ready for it, but seriously, all of them suck. And no I am not suicidal, But I do often wonder closer to the realm of the “mental rollercoaster” that thoughts like that can make it seem that I am. I usually end up going and playing a game and letting others (including the bots) kill me in it & then the flip side is I start a long running scripted action and nerf it half way though. Oh how I miss doing repeated Dev Environment Multi-Machine Deploys & Cross Cloud Region Deployments only to nerf the machine it was invoked from.

If it takes me 15 minutes, let alone an hour to apply for your role by these portals, you’ve already lost me & probably 60-80% of candidates. Attention spans matter and people don’t have the time or patience anymore to do 100 applications on deadass crappy portals requiring a tailored Personal Statement about what you could bring to the role each time.

8. The Tech in use that auto filters applicants.

I really want to say to all businesses that use any tech that applies auto filtering of any kind to delete that crap outta their hiring process straight away.

I don’t care why you’ve added filtering especially if it is with an ATS (Applicant Tracking System) as to me all of them are shitty inventions that are part of the reason I think we gone fucked up.

Note the above was copied from 🔗 this post 🔗 by Rob Trent, which I found via his post on BlueSky.

This is really the main point about how tech has messed things up. The Job portals being a pile of wank is annoying but these things, they stop real skilled workers getting jobs.

For the funsies, I ran my CV through an ATS (Applicant Tracker System) Scanner, (not the one listed in the above post) that also had been shared recently, this time by David Saas as this has both a GUI, & CLI and is open source. I had to amend it to build using the available .NET 11 preview I have installed as part of building the latest preview of PowerShell, with some of my own minor additions (because yanno that’s what I do). But after that built and worked for me then this gave me

I was a little surprised that it turned out so positive, but then again I built my CV to be mostly usable for these tools in a previous run of building it out, back in 2015 and its been slowly edited to what it is today since then. I always get feedback on it, mostly it’s layout and quite frankly it’s written the way it is for good reason, TO STAND OUT.

Quite frankly this is one of the reasons why CV’s in PDF’s or doc/docx files need to go in the bin and for us to better adopt Markdown for this using tools like this 🔗Markdown Resume Creator website🔗 going forward as Markdown is becoming the defacto documentation format for the future and is underpinning lots of Content Creation too.

I use it for posts on this Website, which I also maintain a fork of a previously published theme that is used on this site and across my other sites. I plan on moving to Markdown and publishing my CV, that is exportable and importable from other data formats too. I’d rather not have a living document that is a docx/pdf in the near future, though I hope I can get away with not needing to and just get on to what I want to do and that is to get funding to build my business and hire people to join me on a multi-year journey dedicated in improving opensource software like PowerShell.

Yes, PDF’s and docs are visually nice, but they as you can see can cause issues in these systems for a number of reasons. The main thing being hatred of tables in them. But this is because these tools need binning themselves.

Yes, this even applies for those roles where there are “National Security” concerns for the role as whilst Auto filtering with these tools may seem “useful” in the sift process, just requires Security Clearance let alone requires active Security Clearance can be enough to stop applicants in their tracks. I know it has done with me in my searches over the years.

Not because my skills wouldn’t be of use in those roles, but because I like a little more freedom in my life, like being able to talk about the things I’m doing & working on, instead of having to be all “hush hush” & be all like “I can neither confirm or deny” in conversations, as I did enough of that in the 7 years as a Microsoft Most Valued Professional, and it well wasn’t as great as it is as just being able to say HEY WE Are Doing this & you'll hopefully get it by xyz instead of Oh yeah we did this.

Don’t get me wrong I could do the whole “Keeping quiet about my work` things again, but its less fun & I’d rather be in the open (for the majority) & not behind a gated wall, especially as there’s plenty in the open needing worked on. More on that later too.

Though also I wouldn’t mind that the current relationships I have that stemmed from my time in the MVP Program and as a Microsoft Global Community Initative Regional Lead can improve, especially those that I haven’t had as much time as I’d like with. for one reason or another.

But yeah, auto-filtering, nah not for me I’m afraid. Some things just need to be manually done.

Applicant scoring of their suitability however, is a different kettle of fish, which is still best done manually which kinda leads actually quite nicely onto

9. The “10 Years Experience Required” Jobs

Everyone will have seen some variation on jobs like this

For those of you coming here with no knowledge of the UK Job Market - £12.71 per hour is the UK Minimum Wage for all employable entities over the age of 21.

I’ve used the phrase “all employable entities” as the UK could have had a potentially had supposed “non-human” entity (I’m not judging either way) that was potentially employable as a Member of Parliament in Count Binface, shame how things pan out sometimes.

To businesses like this, if you are asking for that level of experience, and only paying minimum wage, your business really should not be trading. I can’t remember exactly what this was from, but yeah, this job should be lobbed right in the bin as it is. I don’t care that it says From £12.71 either, as they didn’t put the top of the pay range.

But I’ve seen these sorts of listings for jobs wanting 5 years (or more) experience of a 6 month technology like all the rage of newest JavaScript Frameworks or still in preview Azure/AWS Services.

It happens almost everywhere & well, it an absolute mess.

Like this one found from a company that should know better about a technology that hasn’t yet existed that long.

If many jobs are really needing multiple years experience then we have issues in enabling newcomers into the work force.

I’d rather spend time with people learning & getting their steps into the world of work, than requiring them to have years of experience. Passion and grit often is better than experience.

10. Those showing Zero Hours, Zero Salary or “Competitive Market Rates”

This is soon mostly, I hope, not going to be a thing, at least in the UK, so thank FUCK for that.

This for as long as I’ve been job searching has been one of the signals that straight up makes me go something like, NOPE or Shame there's no Salary listed, otherwise, it seemed like it was on the do more research, have a ☕ & decide on applying or not list, or in my case a item that is on my current Microsoft Planner board, however I’m thinking of rebuilding this over onto something else, if I am staying unemployed (or not properly funded) for a further extended period of time.

11. The “Benefits” Packages

Following on from the lack of detail in providing a useful salary, it honestly makes me wanna go yell at businesses about their benefits packages when too as many of these aren’t benefits, they are the absolute bare fucking minimum, which previous generations didn’t Strike or Riot in order to get them for nothing.

Things like

• 20 days holiday + Bank Holidays to equal the 28 days minimum required by law for a FTE.
  • This one irks me as you’ll see posts that state 22 days + bank hols (TOIL) + ability to buy more and you are expected to work out whether or not that’s 22 days of your choosing & the bank holidays on the day or whether you need to work those days. Sometimes this is easy to decipher, however just say 22 days + bank holidays (TOIL) + ability to buy more if you have to work those days or 22 days + bank holidays + ability to buy more if you don’t.
  • Your birthday as holiday or TOIL (Time off in Lieu)
  • Extra day per year of service - this should be a given & not a “look at us” point
    • No one should be forced into buying more days off especially when employers aren’t often allowing flex work patterns anyway.
• Pension - also required by law.
  • Do you give just 3% as required or do you do more like UK Civil Service Jobs tend to do at 28.97%.
• Paid Parental Leave inc Adoption Leave
  • This is required by law, wording like We offer generous needs to be explicit, because, well it just does, especially with Paternity Leave being either 1 or 2 weeks as a solid block. Which for 2026 still is utter 💩 & employers need to do better than this, but also it needs legislated differently too/
• Training Programs
  • I mean that’s a Mandatory requirement as almost all of us have to learn aspects of the job whilst on the job. Heck even all our surgeons learn as they progress.
  • Tell us how much time is to be given to Personal or Role Related Research & Development (P/RR R&D)
  • An example of this is being given work time to research anything that you want, that you can justify that is important to future work related to your current role, or potential future role/s.
• Sick leave
  • If this is mentioned and doesn’t include any details as to the amount - I assume Statutory Sick Pay which is still a disgrace tbh & a big cause of why many people end up on longer term sick, whether in or out of the workforce.

These are some more Hey we think this may entice you benefits, which for many may be totally useless & therefore they cudna giva fuck abootem which twas said in a Scots accent, eh aye.

Like

• Onsite Parking - However, unless the word Free is also there, then I’mma guessing your screwing me over like the private parking firms that are screwing over our nurses, doctors and us patients at our hospitals. Add the fucking Word, it’s not difficult.
• Access to discount schemes / bulk retailers
• Pool/Snooker Table/Room
• Games Room
  • Video Games
  • Board Games
• Open to all company social outings
  • Local Restaurant trials
  • Cinema Trips
  • Zoo / Museums etc
  • Conferences
  • Regular Team offsite get aways
  • Or get togethers for remote teams

For those more higher paid roles or more remote in location roles where they have a large dedicated area where workers attend

• Regular Onsite GP Checkup / Onsite Health Professional team.
• Onsite/Local Mechanic & regular car valet
• Onsite/Local Gym & Swimming Pool
• Onsite/Local Chef & subsidised (Partly/Fully) Restaurants
• Car allowances
• Flight allowances
• Onsite Childcare
• Bonus packages
• Relocation Packages

These all above are great.

But what I really want to see listed as a benefit, is something more like

• Charity Support

  • List any charities that an organisation supports & donates to.
  • Whether that donation having been in £ or in goods and services.

• Local Business supporters

  • List who you support & why because we want to know things like, what place does a decent meal in your opinion or which taxi services you recommend. Especially more so if it’s independent retailers & small family businesses too.

• Access to Internal Company Shop/s

  • Every business needs this as part of their asset management process anyways
  • Should have a You tell us what to stock and we'll get it model
  • Got something you need sold, we sell it for you.
  • IT refresh - here buy some of our equipment on the cheap.
  • This itself should be a side hustle for the business with internal only items as well as external sales being available too.

• Partnership & Stock Options

  • Because without the work we workers do, the bosses cannot profit, and this I feel should be a mandatory thing in all jobs. It would change the dynamic a fair bit and would open up a different kind of relationship to that of worker/employer. Which lots of businesses really do need.
  • What level is this at & does this grow with years of service…?

• Birthday Treat Allowance

  • Something like 0.1-1% Annual Salary
  • that can be “Spent” in the internal shop on you
    • like towards getting lunch/snacks/etc that the shop lists
    • or maybe that bit of tech that you had been eyeing up and need some extra £££ towards
    • or maybe an additional day holiday etc
  • or for you and everyone in your team - like towards a team meal out
  • or as a donation made by the business on your behalf

etc etc

• Friends and Family offerings

  • If you sell a product or service then freebies / reduced chargeable rates.

• Leaving Bonus Package`

  • This one I think will make people go Ya what....
  • That package should be things like if you leave then you keep all the IT Kit & if you have one the Car ect & a percentage of your annual wages so that you don’t need to Finish on a Friday & Start something new on a Monday.

I could say a lot about private healthcare as a benefit, having had it & not used it yet been stung by taxman for having it, so instead of rambling in this post, I’ll leave this as a #IRrrwR - Irregular / Ridiculous rants/rambles with Ryan! sometime in the future.

12. The “Not really Hybrid/Remote/Flexible” Roles

I’m lumping this all together as it’s all on point & I have previous experience with having unnecessary pushback on all these points. Including almost, almost taking legal action after leaving a role. Which in hindsight I should have done.

These annoy everyone looking for that kind of role, myself included. Now don’t get me wrong I loved my time working in offices at Barclays, University of Manchester, Dotmailer & Black Marble, I even loved the time I spent working at Burger King & McDonalds too, but I’m at a point where, for me due to my health, a commute of any kind, is not all that suitable. Not when you have Trains running with broken loos (which is more important to me than it should be for 36), and buses that never turn up, nor go where you need them to go. Doesn’t help I can no longer stand/be in the cold for long periods of time, again yay to a big decline in health post 2020.

Hybrid working is definitely not a case of 3/5 in the office.

Hybrid working may mean 3/5.

However, true Hybrid working is in the office when needed, not on a strict schedule.

I feel we need to call out Hybrid roles with the following sub-classifications in brackets for clarity.

• Hybrid (3/5)
• Hybrid (As & When) - this is how it SHOULD be.

And, FFS Stop lying to prospective hires Job seekers like with NONSENSE like this

“Remote with a max 4 days p/w onsite” 😂😂 I’m not sure that word means what you think it means

— Mark Wragg (@wragg.io) 13 August 2026 at 13:28

That’s not remote - that’s Hybrid (4/5 max)

Not hard is it. Lets get this showing more like this in future please.

Flexible Working Practices

This could & maybe should have been a whole point on it’s own.

Flexible, in it’s true sense, is not between 8-6 where lunch has to be sometime between 12-2, that’s bog standard basic decency for your workers that work in the typical working day.

True flexibility is using either

• an annualised hours approach
• the standard weekly hours being split across a 28 day period & you choosing when you work them.
• no strict “must be available between 10-4” or anything like that.

For some orgs this probably is not going to be super manageable but well 24/7/365 is a thing yanno and we’d get more of the work that needs done if we started hiring people to do hours outside 9-5.

I say this as someone that’s sleep cycle isn’t fit for 9-5 working anymore & quite frankly why should it be forced into that mould anymore when that kind of living actually makes me deeply unhappy.

But I’m also a real big fan of annualised hours contracts more than I am those that are focused on weekly hours. Because that has better flexibility built in by default. Flexibility that moves the needle of when & how workers work onto their terms, often giving better results than forcing into the mould.

Also fuck Zero hours contracts, they can burn in the depths of hell where they belong.

I would never ever give anyone working for me on of these, instead they’d get a lower than usual annualised hours contract, with payment terms giving them a regular payment whether or not they had worked in that payment period, followed with a top up amount for when they had. Working the details on that is something that Future Ryan can & will deal with. This is inline with how Salary & Overtime works already and is definitely manageable even if the IT Systems don’t allow for this right now.

And a double fuck you to orgs that don’t properly pay for overtime either, which an Annualised Hours approach prevents completely because well once all those hours have been work will have been worked already.

You don’t have that problem in roles where you are paid hourly either.

Though those roles you have to deal with the occasions where footfall is lower than expected and getting asked to “go home early” & those roles I don’t blame people taking the option of going home early, unless of course you need the pay.

13. The Difficult to get to / “Thousand Miles Away” Roles

What’s worse than a so called “Hybrid Job”, is those jobs that you find and go That would be great, shame it's so far away or impossible to get to to which instantly removes it from your list.

There’s far too much onus on the costs of getting to the job being a thing that employees have to deal with, when it’s part of the requirements of the business. I would happily have a lower wage if all my travel costs for work were expensible to the business. But that requires changes in legislation or bosses to just take that cost on the chin regardless.

Especially if like me you can drive but currently have no car. That stops me even thinking about applying. That and well I’ll be honest, I’m economically more useful to the country not commuting and staying at home, doing what I do. Would I mind a commute, definitely depends on the commute, or whether I could see myself living closer by, but also, I kinda like where I am in the country.

Though I’m not ruling out a potential move. But the bar is high for me to want to look at this because moving is as mentioned before one of those things that invokes the appearance of Level 10 Pissed Off Ryan & I’d rather see less of those appearances not more in future.

As it should be for you too (the bar for moving - not the moving invoking a Level 10 Pissed Off response). Especially to more expensive parts of the country/world.

Carefully think through whether a move is suitable and sensible, if it’s not both, I’d say maybe give it a miss.

But you do you, just be mindful of everything a move would mean for you. But don’t get me wrong, they can be the best of things or the worst of things. For me it’s been a mixed bag & right now after having been homeless (again) in recent years, it’s not likely for me at this time.

Time to Shake things up a bit.

Boom you made it this far! 🎉🎉🎉🎉

If like me you listen to Newscast by BBC then you’ll know the phrase "OOOSE with Stamina" which well this would apply to you and staying through reading this post.

Prior to this point everything is all about the pre-application & application stages with everything beyond this post application and you getting to the interview stages.

Well done. You deserve a sticker. But more Importantly go grab a glass of water. Your kidneys will thank you! Oh and a snack, as you need to eat something.

No one died, except maybe a little bit of you (maybe your patience with this post so far), the jobseeker or hiring manager or recruiter or anyone else reading has done in the lead up to this point.

14. The Dragged out Interview Process from Hell

Recently, Andy Burham, the UK’s newest Prime Minister, made comments about rolling back use of Teams/Zoom other remote technologies for interviews, because Virtual interviews don't show bosses your personality

In some cases he’s right, however if you wanna respect all involved in the process, their time & money lost and expenses incurred in attending any physical interviews, then he must have it mandated that the costs are to be incurred by either the business or the state & not the applicant. Irrespective of the applicant being on benefits or not. Because that is only fair as businesses should be able to add these to the costs involved with hiring. It’s what I would do if you were interviewing for me.

However, interview processes can vary drastically, for good reason.

Unless you are spending a full solid week or longer then really your personality isn’t coming out & may in fact need partially or fully hidden, which is something that I know I’ve faced in past roles, interviews and sometimes just living out my life. Because we often misjudge & misunderstand, especially in a quick interaction like an interview - which is why I have previously written about 🔗The Interaction Notes Family - IINs, DINs, FINs🔗 and how these are of use to us all (yes #SorryNotSorry for yet more reading materials)

Many interviews, irrespective of role can & should be able to be completed in 1 or 2 short interviews which typically should be 30min to 1hr each & are ideal to do remotely. Whether that be just a phone call, or via a video call. However many managers (& applicants) prefer the in person element instead of the remote options, especially if the role is either complex enough to warrant it, or there are legitimate business reasons why conducting remote interviews is not suitable.

Where it can be suitable, remote really should be the default, but in the arranging of any interviews they should also offer it as being possible to do in-person too. Unless that makes no sense.

However, if your organisation is much more complex & deep in its requirements to do 4 - 6 rounds of this, this needs to be listed as part of the Job Listing UPFRONT with NO FUCKING EXCEPTIONS as failing to do so is disrespectful to the applicant’s available time. Applicant’s that get dragged through multiple stages are in my right mind, more than able to issue a payment request for not only any time in the interviews but a justifiable amount around them, like for travel reasons. Especially if the hiring team is based overseas and there is an in-person requirement to the process.

When you get past 2 interviews and closer to a 20 step interview process, then there’s a good chance you’ve already scared off people permanently.

I say this, because some interview processes can last years, even if a large part of the process that could be seen as interviewing, wasn’t formal & actually called as such. This is often the case with jobs where it takes many years to gain the experience & relationships needed for more formal processes to start. This typically is as part of volunteered time towards solving an ever increasing amount of common goals that the team one may be joining, needs to spend to be deemed a viable candidate.

Though, we do have to be mindful of where we draw the line at how much of our time we can keep on volunteering like this, as there comes a point where, due to no fault on all parties, it crosses that line where it there is the prospect that it could be argued as accidental cases of modern day slavery. Ya may think that’s far out but for people spending the majority of their lives like this with no formal contracts aren’t because they don’t want them, but that there’s plenty more important things* to be getting on with than dealing with contracts, like the actual work.

This is because whilst sharing common goals is great, especially over extended periods of time, for relationship forming, and trust to occur, the waters get murky. This is where it is imperative for those of you reading this, to go and find any and all of the many Millions of people giving up their free time as one of the 🔗 Different Types of Code Maintainers - blog.kilasuit.org 🔗 as without us all, Things are gonna get ugly though it’s not just software developers that the above all applies to.

Where the magical barrier of what amount of time is acceptable to volunteer vs what amount isn’t & boarders is well that’s a hard question to answer, but one we must regularly reassess and attempt to answer, especially when it comes to interview processes.

I know I struggle with that question & well, that’s partly why an articles like this then gets written.

However this article need be a reminder that

• I know my rights
• I know what’s up with me
• I know what’s wrong with the market
• I know what’s wrong with the markets view of me
• I know what’s wrong with my view of the market

Yet,

• I still have plenty better things to be doing than just simply partaking in a broken system that basically may as well be saying to me “go away” & come back later, when I can make it LOUD AND CLEAR we need changes & fast.

15. The “Application, & then the Interview” that you wish you’d not gone through with.

I used to say that every interview is worth having however after doing lots of them during 2022 & 2023, however, I certainly can’t say that is truthful anymore. In fact there were interviews that looking back were done for both of us (me the applicant & them the employer) did as a manner of tickboxing & to fill up some time. There were some though that were really good but on the whole for me then, and at other times, I don’t regret them, I just now think about what I could have been doing instead of having them, and not wasting my time or others in the process.

I’m sure plenty know this feeling (a certain Andy Burnham comes to mind, same as Boris and many others too) & whilst thankful for those opportunities they feel somewhat wasteful.

Have I learned more about interviewing, about fitting in the mould, or have I just because of these further become more aligned with wanting the I work on the things I feel important as and when, even if that means not being economically active & signed off from seeking work to be able to do so

16. The “We went with an internal applicant” / “Project has stalled”

Here is a post that I saw on LinkedIn about this exact process & well read it yourself

I did ensure to get permission before posting, as can be seen with this comment.

This post sums up what is going wrong because we have fiscal rules that are causing issues in all areas of life not just the FUCKING JOB SEARCH & HIRING PROCESS.

You might read that and think it sums things up compared to this post, which is why I wanted to include it.

17. The Job that, well, we won’t/can’t really discuss, for “reasons”

I think many people may have either have one of these or know people that have one/more of these.

Sometimes that maybe for national security reasons, it may be due to various NDA’s (Non-Disclosure Agreements) like those that are as part of any pre Employment Tribunal or other legal Settlements or it may just be because those jobs aren’t worth expending any time discussing because the employers should never be mentioned again.

There definitely are plenty of them out there that’s for sure.

Do I have some that I cannot discuss, of course, others that I won’t discuss & some that, maybe one day things will change and I’ll be able to discuss things properly & openly without real fear of a backlash. But for that I think ther’ll need to be some further changes in wider society first.

18. The Job that you Stick out at even though you hate it.

I know that this point potentially will resonate with many people.

You stick it out because “It pays the bills” & well Papa Roach has some lyrics for your

In your heart and in your mind, you can't find the conclusion
Lifestyle and obsession
Diamond rings get you nothin' but a lifelong lesson
And you're pocket book stressin'
You're a slave to the system, workin' jobs that you hate
For that shit you don't need
It's too bad the world is based on greed
Step back and see
Stop thinkin' 'bout yourself, start thinkin' 'bout
There's no money
There's no possession
Only obsession

Present yourself, press your clothes
Comb your hair and clock in
You just can't win, just can't win
The things you own, own you now

Take my money
Take my possession
Take my obsession
I don't need that shit

I don’t think it ever got to that point that I hated the job I was doing in any of my previous roles, mostly because of the people that I was working with, which has rung true in every job.

Sure there have been ASSHATS that I wished I didn’t need to work with, but on balance they probs thought the same of me too so 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️

Sure I’d have days where I’d think Really can't be fucked with x & their bullshit today or I hope no-one speaks to me today but as long as I had some work that I could see was beneficial in doing & reasonably fun in doing so, like cleaning the Fry Vats at Burger King & McDonalds (Yes I actually enjoyed that), or rewriting the exact same Azure ARM templates from 1 client to another, then I never really minded.

I’ve just got to the point where my own mental workload is so vast that it’s frustrating not to just be working on this & doing so in a way that meets my needs fully.

The Job search is an area where whilst I’d rather just be doing the things that matter to me & wider society, I do stick it out, even though I hate it, same as the housing hunt.

I’d rather not be wasting my time on these things, cos well there’s plenty of fires to put out already, & I’m kinda good at creating them too, not gonna lie (no houses have been burnt down yet, even though I kid I wish this one would)

Cos yeah Imma Firestarter,

but am also a Firefighter too, (did I mention I’m also First Aid trained)

and like the dood that I am, who isn’t comfortable unless able to be wearing one of multiple hoodies or hats in every day life.

Cos fuck suits - hence you being here and reading this on blog.kilasuit.org - because I really do feel that every suit not worn is a soul that is happier for not having to wear it, unless it’s the birthday suit of course 😜.

19. The Job you love and don’t want to leave

This is what we all are aspiring towards.

I think I’ve found it a few different times in my life & then 💩 hit the 🪭 (shit hit the fan) for one or another reason. Whether that be professionally or personally, or both at the same time.

Some of us never get this, others get it early on in life, or somehow come to find it later in life.

I know that right now doing my bit is what is keeping me happy, at least enough for now, however this really really isn’t enough to satisfy the fire in my belly.

20. The Job Role that gets made redundant

This one is the one that hurts people the most & I HATE IT.

It can be hard to take redundancy as anything other than a kick in the groin/stab in the back. Even when it’s not a personal decision and done from “On High” as we would say in the political world.

I’ve been through multiple different rounds of redundancy in my life, with my first job at Burger King being made redundant when they decided to close the Restaurant I worked at & then multiple that happened at Barclays (to others not my teams) & then the one that I took at UoM so others could stay.

Often I feel these could be avoided entirely, and I am really glad of the protections we have in place in this country around being made redundant. Because it sucks in the US & I regularly see them and go WTAF about the employers doing them.

So yeah fuck redundancies, as most of the time they aren’t helping the business, just hurting the people there and stretching them thinner time and time again.

21. Those periods outside employment for whatever reason.

Too many employers dismiss people because of this. To them I say, I genuinely hope your management teams change their minds about this and come to terms that not-employed != not working - I mean just ask anyone that builds their own website/content etc

Also plenty of people are drained from trying to survive as it is. I know I am.

Somewhere, Sometime, For Some reason, the Cycle ends up repeating itself.

Once again, well done for getting this far. I hope you’ve been enjoying this and learnt a few things so far.

It’s been draining, but fun and kept me smiling whilst putting this together. Whilst this started back on the 30th July because of this tweet

Thanks for the reminder on this @andyburnham

I'm gonna be adding about the 2nd part into my blog post on Job Searching & why it's so 💩 in 2026

However the first part is actually something that should stay as not to waste people's time. https://t.co/4OWBBvOL0D

— Ryan - building & breaking & jumping around (@ryanyates1990) July 30, 2026

This has been one of those things I wish I had blogged back in 2016/2017/2022 etc etc so that I could just write whether it’s got better or worse.

It feels like a major weight has been lifted in getting this written down, which is currently all that really matters, even if you haven’t read it all.

Calls To Action

Here are my Calls to Action because quite frankly this absolutely 💩 process needs a major revamp & redesign as the whole process involved with Attaining a Job from both sides of the fence, is abysmal and painful.

The Age of AI will make this worse, before it gets better.

For Jobseekers

Depending on your technical skills I have different paths for you to follow here.

For everyone.

Bare with the 💩 that is the Job Search Process, for now at least, yes it is a nightmare, a mess that in some places is getting worse and worse daily & others where there are glimmers of hope that it’s FINALLY improving. However lots of people got complacent with what was and not how it should be, which is why it’s a steaming hot smelly turd that is waiting to be flushed right now (only for the next one to take its place)

I say this, because in future this whole process will get a major shock to it, with many finding that it completely flips for them & they will almost never need to search for work again, hopefully because they landed a forever job & not that they became unable to work.

Or instead of being a part of the world of Job Taking, they instead become a Job Maker & share their vision on something new with the world & find a way to drag along some people for the journey.

• Maybe you’ll find work that needs done and isn’t a long drawn out application process & you can get on with right away.
• This may include for many, jobs will be coming directly to you, if you get things set up properly that is.
  • Whilst having accounts on platforms that post job listings behind a login may help you find something, what you really, really need is to be able to showcase your skills, and determination for getting the job you want, not the job that will do for now.

Setup the following

• Get a Dedicated Phone (unless your phone supports multiple Sim cards) & Number just for job searching.

  • Doesn’t need to be fancy, but being able to turn it on/off helps.
  • Pay as you Go with some credit is all you need.

• Dedicated Job Searching Email Address (for now)

  • Have it auto-reply to all received emails with a message like “Thanks this is a loosely monitored email address and I may be slow to respond”
  • This allows all the Job Search stuff to be away from your other more critical things, like emails you may be getting from banks etc.
  • Email Platforms like gmail, outlook etc, allow aliases, but I don’t recommend using them for this.
  • Use Rules/filters on these emails so filtering them is more useful.
  • Better yet, learn about how to make use of process automation technologies like Zapier, PowerAutomate, IFTTT as well as those that you can build and run yourself.
    • I know those points above seem like lots of work, but this is the core of how businesses work, whether they use AI or not.

Spend time on your CV/Resume or whatever the fuck every different country wants to call it.

• Don’t use a fancy generator with colourful themes for this.
  • As annoying as it is, Hiring managers still want Printable documents so boring plain Black text on white works the best.
• Yes maybe use a tool like the Markdown Generator I listed above but be mindful that’s tailoring to these god awful systems we need to bin.
• Get a HUMAN to read it, not an AI, as much as it may feel like it is of use.

I personally have not and will not spend time tailoring my CV for every role I apply for. I also will not spend time on separate personal statements that are tailored to individual applications.

I also don’t think that you should have to either, & well, lets hope that changes in future.

For the more technical minded

If you are up for it, spend some time and Build a Website that details what you want to do and why.

• There are many Platforms that allow you to do this easily and will allow you to host this website on them for free. Like how this site and all my other current publicly facing sites are hosted.
  • I recommend that for this that you buy a domain, (like I have done) and have your Job Email address you use for JobSearching linked to it.
  • This does open you to the world of managing Infrastructure like WebSites, Email & more, which even if the email & website is hosted for you, you get to learn about how the web works a bit more, which is both useful & incredibly fun.
  • If this post Inspired you to build a website, then let me know about it in the comments.

Search out and try sites like lennysjob.com & this interesting Python based Job Radar builder (which I have yet to play with)

Note: Inclusion is not equal to an endorsement - I haven’t tried these sites. However Lenny added a Thread on X (Twitter) about it that you may wanna check out & make your own thoughts and opinions about & the Job Radar was brought to my attention by a fellow UK PowerSheller.

For those thinking about business & personal branding.

• Learn about Social Media Marketing.
  • As painful as Social Media can be, it’s not going away anytime soon.
  • Set up separate profiles where it makes sense to.
  • Investigate tools out there that allow cross posting. I myself have built tooling that now no longer works. Sadly.
• Learn about Search Engine Optimisation (or as the US People would write it Optimization 😩)

Be authentically you, yes this may mean others may choose not to work with you or make it harder for you to find work, but I say there’s enough work to be done & more coming in the future too, for that to really actually be a problem. Getting paid for the work, that’s a different story.

Write to me about your experiences

If your Job Search has been painful I want to hear about what things have been painful

Send them to 📨[email protected]📨

Whilst I won’t say that I can’t ensure to reply to them all (if I even get any that is), I do intend to be adding a post on 🔗Mhasl.me - Mental Health Affects Someone Like Me🔗 about just the strains of being in an extended Job Search can be on people, and that post could do with other peoples views on it too.

Note: I intend to make use of submissions to eventually try and help form future policies like detailed below on ways forward as a country & also what can we do in the community to maybe help make Jobsearching less shit for us all in the future.

Also when I do get round to the conversion of this to a IRrrwR Podcast/Presentation I may include them too. That is if I get any.

For the techies in the room.

Whether you build these platforms or are just the ones that are using them, we need to do something that doesn’t bring out Level 10 Pissed off responses from me or others in the future. Because not only can we do better, it’s embarrassing to see these portals as they are.

SO Please FFS lets build a better more useful set of Jobsearching tools, that don’t invoke a kill me now response or the Level 10 Pissed off Ryan types of responses. The ones mentioned above are a start, I wanna see more of these please.

Firstly -I won’t lie and by saying that I think we should kill off the Job Alerts by email systems - they all SUCK ASS & email isn’t the correct place for this as a process anyway. Mostly because you are limiting how much data you send via email and forcing yet more multi-clicking to get to the end place. Same can be said for some of the API’s that are out there.

• Yes email can form a part of the process, we all know that managing your life by Email is not a great experience and things get lost. Which is why every platform out there has Emails Alerts that duplicate the alerts & notifications they send out.

I ideally want in future to see tooling that allows all Jobseekers to have their own easy build & deployable portal (ideally self hosted but hosted would be fine too) that has realtime access to only the jobs that jobseekers themselves say that they actually want to do. It can then mail out their own standard responses for jobs. However, that’s a bigger project than just email management as it would involve spitting jobs to any platform of choice (Slack, Discord, Matrix etc) and allowing them to manage from there.

This needs to use a fan-out and pull back mechanism that is set up using Developer API’s - similar to those Adzuna Jobs has & I am using currently (a post on how will be coming soon!), even if I am annoyed that they only currently give 500 characters in their description & intend to reach out to them to see if they’d increase this at all.

Because 500 characters is not really a lot for a job. In fact it’d be great to move jobs to Markdown for the Job Spec (See more later) and have these files returnable over the wire as a highly compressed binary object which then can be decompressed & queried fully.

Hence…..

Using single dimensional text heavy driven Job Adverts

I know you’ll read this and go “but they aren’t single dimensional” - however let me explain what I mean by this.

It is 2026 & not only have we had relational data structures in well definable & queryable formats for, how long now.....? we’ve also had varying different methods in getting information across the wires that is the internet for, again HOW LONG NOW.....

Yes lots of adverts will have

• lists
• that
• are miles long
• with the 300 things they think that they need
• not the actual things that they need

And for some reason that’s all we’ve stuck with & we put 1 or more sentences together that lumps things together

This is an example of what would be better to me

Ohh - Look a Table With Columns of Desired Skills as opposed to a bullet list

Skill Desired	Amount of Use	Expected Skill Level	Training Provided (Y/N)
PowerShell	Every Day	Proficient	Yes
Rust	Future Goal	Learner	Yes
Blogging	Ad-hoc	Any	Yes
Azure AKS	In-PreRollout	Interest in or prior use of	Yes
terraform	Removing	Ability to read	No
bicep	implementing	Ability to write or desire to write	yes
React	infrequent	read & write	yes
Azure Administrator	daily	Passed Exam	Yes if not already Passed
GitHub Copilot	daily	working to exam	Yes
Active Directory	infrequent	proficient	yes
Presentation Skills	Regular	Able to Tell the Story	Yes

Note this uses specific technogies & not generics like Infrastructure as Code tooling like terriform/bicep etc. This also is so much quicker at getting the workload of the role across.

Now I actually like the idea of these tables being able to be managed and injected into the end JobSpec from any other source & well actually it’s quite easy to do this & getting easier too.

We use tables to reduce word salad & make Requirements Much More Visible - Please use them going forward even if that means ditching aged systems that don’t support them. Yet almost every job advert STILL looks like they are written to be scored on to stone tablets to be found in the ruins of this age of humanity by the next age

• yanno, after we supposedly succumb to mutually assured destruction via all out Nuclear War.
• I say supposedly as I still firmly believe in rational thought, as well as the systems of checks and balances that would prevent that potential outcome from happening. You can bet that I would do all I can to ensure that outcome is not something that our future generations would have to care about. But that’s certainly something that’s Above my paygrade as they say.

They are like this post a wall of text (but plain & BORING ) & to many people will get the following response

This really infuriates me, especially for tech jobs, because they fall foul of trying to tell the reader what the role will entail whilst, in many cases, using just words in a bulleted list to do so, but in a wordsalad way that totally looses peoples interest, or is that just me as I want to get to the damn point.

Even simply putting some numbers in a job posting makes it more dimensional than being a wall of text, which ultimately makes the advert fall foul of 2. Adverts that are so incredibly hard to read.

For example the age old % of time spent doing different tasks in a role is a great way to differentiate and make adverts appealing & not just words for sake of words as 20% of you would have given up reading this sentence & probs 70% said “fuck reading this for an hour” when they saw the word count.

Job Task	Rough Percentage
In-House Private PowerShell Development	20
Open Source PowerShell Development	25
Blog site management & development	10
Azure Management & Development	20
Other work as required

This is exactly what people want to be reading when they look at Jobs.

We’ve failed to properly to equate skills & experience to actually relevant jobs in tooling today

This one is frustrating as 💩 for me, because I’ve lost count the number of non-relevant wastes of time I have had shown to me like this

This is I know made worse personally with being in the Cloud & Datacenter Space (yay to my 7 Years as a CDM MVP for PowerShell) yet never having actually done any work where I needed to touch a physical server.

Also AWS, like GCP & Terraform are tools & platforms I have less than ZERO interest in working with. Sorry but I just don’t.

It’d be like asking an Italian Chef to ditch Italian and become a specialist in Asian Foods, which yeah for some that may be a nice break, but for me, I got other more important things to be doing than learning in those areas.

So whilst some of my skills could be transferable into those platforms and tools, I personally haven’t got time or desire to deal with them and they interest me less than my Urine or 💩 does. #SorryNotSorry but I can’t not be truthful on this. Cos I ain’t got the time for that, at least not at this time.

It makes me not want to use the platforms when they keep throwing me things I don’t want like this.

For Managers, C-Level Exec, Directors & Business Owners (whether currently hiring or not)

Here’s just a short list of things you must start doing.

Be honest with people, because no organisation, whether that’s a company doing business, or a party doing politics, is perfect, they all have their demons, but

• Be upfront with your businesses shortcomings, Things like

  • We had a rougher last year than we had forecasted & this slowed growth
  • We abruptly changed direction middle of last Quarter
  • We parted ways with skilled part of our team earlier than anticpated

• And the wins, however small

  • We recently had the best quarter we’ve ever had.
  • The SMT went to the casino and won one day and this then created room for 2 new jobs
  • We finally found the key to open the office windows - especially in the summer months.
  • We attracted a squirrel around the office which distracted our lead developer just before a cruical build failed on him.

• Strong held opinions

  • Whether they be comical like We ONLY drink Yorkshire Tea here or more stringent We ban laughter during everything other than breaks & lunchtimes or if you Can't accept DnB and were looking for Jungle or you don’t allow bluetooth devices etc etc.
  • Or more realistic No drinking till Friday Lunchtimes or just all out No drinking ever.

• Make use of different ways to throw out your We are looking to recruit for xyz role type posts

  • The age of the Text based posts on jobsites is going to die eventually
  • A Video likely gets the best engagement, especially on platforms like Instagram, Twitter (or X as SpaceKaren aka Elon Musk has rebranded it to), TikTok, FaceBook, LinkedIn, YouTube, BlueSky, Twitch, etc etc

• Remember your business is dependant on your staff

  • They deserve to feel treated like adults and not children
  • They deserve to feel like you actually listen & aren’t just fobbing them off
  • Without them, you can’t sell your goods or services to others.
  • So pay them properly for their skills
  • Most importantly show that you actuall care about them. Because well you are legally bound to do so.

Stand the fuck out from the crowd. Be Bold use Italics and please underline important things, optionally using different font sizes and colours too when you are listing on your site.

Oh and yes before the Accessibility people shoot me down, we need more of the abnormal styling choices being listed in this manner so that accessibility tooling can be improved as far too much of the interwebs is built with accessibility being an after thought, even though Accessibility is a big issue that affects us differently.

But yeah business owners you need to do more to entice people to work for and with you, starting with better joblistings.

To the Jobs Board builders like Indeed, LinkedIn Reed, Workday etc etc

Please lets get modern jobs listings that aren’t just listed on your sites and that alerts aren’t only sent via email & like mentioned old and dated.

It’s 2026 & the age of AI tooling - so lets get your teams building out API’s that skilled individuals as well as Joe Blogs chatting away to ChatGPT can query for data - like Adzuna have done which I was pointed to by this post by a Fellow PowerSheller - Adam Bacon and have recently been adapating the code that he provided, alongside authoring this post & much more. I’ll post about this properly hopefully soon enough & ideally, in the next week or so. Once writers fatigue has worn off that is.

Why, do I ask, no demand this….?

We don’t want shoehorned into dealing with your messaging constraints from your mail server to ours - I say this as both an Administrator of my own Mail Service who having worked at DotDigital (Cross Channel Marketing Automation) knows that the sending & receiving of email is a difficult service to get right for everyone, whilst it still has it’s place, give us developer minded individuals what we really want & that is a better interface than your websites via an API we can query ourselves & pull down the data in a format that for us allows much greater flexibility.

I can much easier & significantly quicker do the data analysis that is appropriate to me around job listings & jobs I actually want to apply for when I can pull down all the raw data & mess with it myself than I can by trawlling through your pages when they are listing only 20 adverts at a time and often including things that are a NOPE NOPE NOPE

Luckily with the tools mentioned in this post, there is brightness in this being more accessible and easier in the future.

To the Current & Future UK Governments

I’m going to say, well write this bit as clear and as kindly as I can, & don’t really care if people say that this may have been Better Left Unsaid (as Hoobastank sang) but this has been hurting/irking me for some time.

The World is Changing and whilst I am taking this One Day At at Time (Nu:Tone ft. Lalin St. Juste) on what seems to be The Longest Road (deadmau5 feat. lissie - morgan page remix mixed) that is getting off this extended period of life outside of paid work, it is like Nelly Furtardo said I live my life by the moon is incredibly fitting especially as UK Businesses are far too much 9-5 for the reality of the world & I am a night owl.

Should I be forced to fit around a faulty system, that wrongly punishes & doesn’t fully support visionaries & dreamers

Enter Shikari - rightly said in Gandhi Mate, Gandhi

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think the primary purpose of your life, of my life and the entirety of the human race is just to blindly consume to support a failing economy and a faulty system.

I don’t think we’re supposed to sit by idle, whilst we continue to use a long outdated system, that produces war, poverty, collusion, corruption, ruins our environment and threatens every aspect of our health, and does nothing but divide and segregate us.

Yeah those are deep & meaningful words that are well beyond just the scope of Job Searching: It's 2026, So Why, Oh Why, is it so 💩?

So just when it comes to jobs we need some radical changes in this area & here’s (just) a few thoughts.

Creation of a Open Source Developer Fund.

I wrote about this in My 2024 Wishlist which you can read about in https://blog.kilasuit.org/2023/12/27/my-2024-wishlist/#better-open-source-funding

There I was generalistic, of what it should look like.

Here I’ll be more specific.

Open Source Development is crucial to the UK’s National Security. Almost in the same way it’s cruical that we have food, or energy to heat our houses.

• You need people like me contributing to these projects & making our own especially whilst we are out of paid work (for what ever reasons that this may be)
• We need to be able to afford to make use of the tools like the AI tooling
• We need to be able to quickly partner with organisations like Microsoft, GitHub and more
• We should be able to apply to this easily whether in or out of work, whether or not we have a business etc.

As an individual in/out of work claiming Universal Credit, regardless of the LCW / LCW RA banding.

• This should be a new Universal Credit Open Source Developer (OSD) Banding that when awarded would unlock
  • Extra Universal Credit Element of upto £500 per month, for a 3 month period and reviewed every 3 months.
    • This amount actually would mean that I could on just Universal Credit afford to eat properly, pay all my bills, reduce my debts, and importantly start replacing old dated equipment that slows down my ability to help in these areas.
  • This would help all the people I see in tech that are out of work and have been displaced already.
  • This should then also unlock help & funding towards running local meetups focused on any and all open source technologies, with messages of local events being shared via the Universal Credit Journal. These can be in person, or remote, but my experience is that it would be best for them to be in person.
  • Whilst helping provide training and support to those to start thier own businesses properly for find a job for existing businesses.

The award should be open to all individuals that have a verifable account that proves that they are working on Open Source technologies already.

Once people move into employment, this amount moves to a Grant for the business that hires the individuals, whether that be their own business or an already established one.

It should be open to individuals from 16 onwards. It would have tiered payment amounts based on thier age, and what technologies that individual is contributing to.

This however requires DBIST to define technologies that the country defines as needing developers in this country to focus on them.

This should be a program that runs on a rolling 12 monthly term. With the aim to help a little bit more to those who like me could take time out from general job searching & help with maintaining and improving the technology that is in use today.

It also helps with leading onto this

Creation of a National Jobs Board & a Job Specification Document.

It’s time we had a proper National Jobs Board, with a Job Specification Document that is fit for modern day Britain whilst future proofing us for 2030 & beyond.

Instead of 300,000 different definitions of what a Job Listing is and how it should be defined, we need a single clear Job Specification that can be easily submitted to nationally hosted and managed infrastructure.

• It needs to be the total opposite of this article lol.
• It needs to list real key useful data (that everyone will be looking for) upfront that isn’t hidden 3 miles deep in the spec.
• It needs a freshness indicator on it, i.e is the Job Listed still being actively recruited.
  • It should easily track when it was last updated, by who, and list the key contact points for the role.

This, then can be used on all company sites, including specialist & custom coded Job Listing Boards.

As this is about how Businesses tell the market “hey we are recruiting” the remit for this should fall under Department for Business Innovation Science & Technology for issuing the tender to market to come up with this, with it having appropriate Developer SDK tooling and integration by current platforms in use.

Then we can get rid of the Email alerts that push just a sentance or two and 20 most likely not suitable jobs into our emails.

This leads me nicely onto

It’s time to Disband, not Reform, the DWP

Unlike The Blues Brothers where they get the band back together (If you haven’t watched it please go watch it), I feel that it’s time this particular band parted ways.

This part of the post got written in part because it had been sat in my mind for too long. Also, for too long, I have felt very strongly that the DWP (Department of Work and Pensions) has served it’s time & it’s purpose. Both of these things also coincide very strongly with not just Jobsearching but Job Making. Which is why I am including it here.

By too long I mean since before 2020. Like way way before 2020.

There are so many stories out there where DWP has, time and time again, failed people, whilst being disgustingly dragged through the mud in the press because of systematic failings in the 20 years that I alone have had to deal with it on/off. Some of these occasions are because of the simple fact of can't please everyone and everyone likes to take a dig where they can and those “Dosser’s on the dole” are easy targets. As are all those that are disabled and are for whatever reason unable to work, whether permanently or temporarily.

Therefore, I don’t think it has a great future and well, Governments needs some modernisation and to do this I think the binning of the DWP, with it’s full remit being merged elsewhere across government. This ties in with recent changes that Andy Burnham has made to move Department for Science, Innovation & Tech into Business Innovation, Science and Trade too. I wonder if it will be part of a bolder Manifesto Commitment whenever Andy actually decides to take the country to the polls.

Note: I am not saying get rid of the Staff at the DWP, on balance most tend to be good to work with, & have in my experience mentioned themselves that they feel their hands are tied behind their backs most of the time with the implementation of processes that they must follow.

They should be given the choice of transitioning into wherever their role would end up living post the disbanding of the service.

Some losses may happen, however there will be other roles across government for them.

We then as part of the disbanding of DWP, need to move all current benefits to a single system. This should be tied to wellbeing metrics & are more humane & understanding than that the DWP has been in past & is currently feeling like in some areas still today.

We also need to move away from GDP as a metric because we aren’t measuring unpaid work that falls outside of GDP metrics. Plus GDP is an aged and quite frankly absolute wank and useless metric to be using.

I feel that to do this properly for the future, would mean that all benefits management would need to move under either the Department of Health & Social Care or are moved entirely to a new Department.

Note: I would be willing to discuss this with this or successive government officials but take a read of my post on 🔗Universal Basic Income - the way to a healthier nation! pt1 - mhasl.me - Mental Health Affects Someone Like Me🔗 for a starter. I did want to add more to that but I’ve been somewhat distracted with other things, like being homeless.

Work Remit - Moves to Department of Business, Innovation, Science and Trade

This just makes sense.

You cannot tell me otherwise. Especially with a creation of a National Jobs Board & a Job Specification Document.

But please do try, as it’s healthy to hear others views on things like this.

Benefits whether in or out of work - Option 1 - Department of Health & Social Care

The Department of Health & Social Care - could look after all work & non-work related benefits, moving across in time from the fractured maze of am I elegible for this, or am I not into the simpler, much cheaper to maintain & vastly more manageable for UK Citizens to navigate, by moving to the model using a Universal Basic Income, based system, that focuses on wellbeing metrics first, placing physical, mental, societal & financial health all together, more on that in 🔗Universal Basic Income - the way to a healthier nation! pt1 - mhasl.me - Mental Health Affects Someone Like Me🔗.

Yes this lumps more under a department that is seen to be overstretched and struggling, however, Financial Health is a health matter, irrespective of work capability or not.

Having a department like DHSC (Department of Health & Social Care), that looks at the full you, past, present & future, should in theory be a cheaper department to run, due to less cost spent when things go wrong.

Though that means lots more diagnostic hubs with 24/7 appointments not just having them run a 9-5 operation. Which requires more staff.

But then again we need more 24/7/365 working practices and not stuff like GP’s running services like 8-6pm online book an appointment forms. Make a response 8-6 sure, but the form should be available 24/7/365.

Heck just having 6am - 8pm for things like GP’s would make a huge difference for the country.

Benefits whether in or out of work - Option 2 - New Department of Personal Financial Health (DPFH)

You could instead move it all to a new department.

This should be a department that is soley entrusted for further financial growth of personal finances, mainly because it’s a mess to get this done in a way that cuts through all the mess of long-term financial planning.

This means Universal Credit, JobSeekers, Employment Support Allowance, Personal Independence Payments etc all move under this area, as does all other benefits that are managed whether centrally in Government or those managed at local levels too to reduce the costs to provide these services.

Pensions Remit - Option 1 - New Department of Personal Financial Health (DPFH)

Yeah throw all things pensions into this group.

Pensions Remit - Option 2 - Department of Education, as part of multiple Financial Education Courses

This also, just makes sense. Though it also does in the DPFH as above.

Pensions, gotta love and hate them, whether its whingers about the triple lock for state pensions or that private pensions are locked away except in exceptional circumstances. I don’t like how pensions are, and in hindsight well I may have done my financial planning somewhat differently.

I am though lucky in that I knew lots about things like Pensions & Consumer Credit Agreements (thanks MoneySavingExpert Forums) and compared to others can hold my weight in a courtroom on all sorts of manners, that is if I decide I’m expending effort on attending, and being nice whilst doing so, or whether instead Imma let the process do it’s course and then deal with the ramifications at a later date.

Business Startup & Growth Funding

DWP has been absyml for me and looking at starting my own business. Perhaps DBIST will open new avenues.

I don’t really know if it’s a case of it being a Ryan issue or just not knowing the right things to be asking in my engagements with the DWP.

I can’t help but feel that we need a big bold radical change going ahead ASAP to be fit for 2030 and beyond.

One where stuff like the Start Up Loans from British Business Bank can provide a loan that is closer to £250k, not £25k.

I say this because £25k today doesn’t really start a business with a growth mindset from the start, that actually can grow and adapt properly.

At least not in the world of Tech that’s for sure, cos we could easily spend £25k in Cloud Services in a month.

Especially if we want to be bringing people along for the journey. It may do for smaller startups of family run businesses, but most product development cycles can cost much more than that amount.

It definitely won’t stretch if you really want to build a business that will last & weather the storms of future global market movements, whilst buying all the equipment & subscriptions needed for that business, which doesn’t include staff costs either.

Sounds a lot doesn’t it, £250k, though it doesn’t stretch when you have to think about things like

• hardware costs like Servers and hosting & maintaining them.
• annual salaries of any staff you hire (that isn’t just paying peanuts either)
• Building leases for staff to work from if you have an in person element.
• Travel costs to clients or future offices in the UK or overseas
• Insurance costs.
• Any goodwill that your org plans on doing in the community.
  • Like all that I do today & have been doing for over 12 years now, with no intention to stop, either. But I want to be able to do more, not less, dammnit.
• Training and benefits packages
  • I want to take on Apprentices having been one. I’ve already researched the particular Apprenticeship programs that I’d put people through as part of their roles. Ideally with everyone in the business being on an apprenticeship that suits their respective role.

Never mind any consulting fees that you may incur as part of the setup and inital months and years of the business.

However, not having the right level of funding behind me, is what has constantly stopped me dead in my tracks, in properly setting up Re-Initialise - 🔗Announcing: Re-Initialise!🔗.

Because I wanna do it right, not half-arsed.

Unfortunately, IT Consultancy & Software Development isn’t a cheap area to get into and stay in and be efficent in, so in my view it’s not possible without large upfront investments, at least not for the things I want & for some of the projects I have in mind already, need to pre-invest in, to work with going forward.

Even low ball estimates for me to do this the way that I really want is closer to £2m in inital outlay. Granted, I also have a good 3 if not 5 different and much cheaper options than that but this is a costed initial outlay that I’ve worked and reworked a good number of times. But all of those options stop other high impacting projects in the future.

I know what you are thinking £2m is a lot of money, but securing things like securing offices to work from, IT Equipment & Cloud Services, Staff working on Apprenticeships, Benefits packages, Insurance, Community travel costs and more. It all adds up. Not to mention properly budget planning for the years ahead, especially as this will not just be a single business venture either.

Until I can secure that amount, or one of the smaller ones that would allow me to pick one of the “cheaper options” I will continue doing what I’m doing, not running my own business that is actively trading, whilst not hiring staff on a multi-year apprenticeship with the funding for their roles already secured, because I don’t want to hire with “we may be able to keep you for the duration of your studies” being a possibility.

I’ll also keep on with writing posts like this one.

However, it saddens me that to kickstart a plan that is as ambitious as mine, not only requires this level of funding but is unlikely to get it. I wish this sort of challenge would be much easier to navigate, but everytime I come back to this feeling that it’s so out of reach that I keep putting off spending too much time in trying to make it happen.

Maybe, though I just haven’t had the right conversations. Especially as this business venture of mine will be unique (though every venture like this says that) and intends in it’s first 5 years of trading to grow from just me, to directly employing 25 staff, then growing to at least 50 by year 10 scattered around the UK.

I already have places in mind where I would be looking business to grow into from it’s initial starting hub.

Downfalls of doing a “shake up like this”

I can already hear people saying no not another major government shake up and IT system redesign project, because it is likely destined to fail however, I say to all those people calling for welfare reform & cutting the benefits bill or throwing out soundbites like cutting PIP or anything else that takes aim at the world of UK benefits. I will forever hold & reserve my right to call them for them attacking disabled & abled people the way they are. Because these people (sadly across all parts of society and HoC) forget they are one bad day away from being disabled themselves.

I am aware that to many it seems that we currently don’t have the funds for doing things as big as this either but heck we have to do something as the state of this is dire.

Yes, shake ups as big as these have downfalls.

Mostly, because they take too long to implement. I mean just look how long our Infrastructure projects like HS2 or Roadworks take, let alone those replacing a Department like DWP.

Because of how long they take, people loose sight of the benefits of doing them in the middle of them happening, and then other 💩 hits the 🪭 and budgets get cut and then projects get canned.

Sadly, it will need to be a phased transition that likely would take multiple different parliment terms to complete, which is in itself is a multi-year project. But really, does it need to be that long?

However, we need real useful cost savings in the running costs in actual £ spent, as well as reducing peoples stress levels when dealing with them. This you do by reducing the unnecessary complexity of the systems we currently have managed and scattered all over the damn place like the proverbial throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks & for how long cos that’s what our current systems feel like to me, across the board.

You also do that by reframing the language entirely. What costs more in the long term - money in people’s pockets paying ever growign bills and putting food on their tables or not doing so.

Hint it’s the latter, not doing so.

Not only can I speak from personal experience, I also have seen from many of my friends and some family as well as plenty of forums and posts out there just the amount of unnecessary stress caused by the DWP whilst trying to fulfil it’s current Social Contract & responsibilities under that contract. A contract that in my eyes it’s failed the British Public, time and again. However, the contract was unfair in the first place as wasn’t properly aligned to welfare metrics, which is why we’ve had such a mismatch of different benefits over the years.

This is in part to the constant bitching across the House of Commons & in the media about the "cost" of the welfare bill.

What is always forgotten about in these crys is that the human cost of bad experiences with these services.

Here’s just a few things that need rolling back to how they used to be.

What the fucks that have happened that have pissed me off along the way

Things that have happened in previous years from DWP/wider Government have pissed me off too

Council Tax Benefit cut in 2013

I don’t agree with those out of work & claiming State Benefits having to pay Council Tax. Never have, Never Will.

I doubly do not agree with Councils managing anything to do with a benefit either.

Why were these changes made?

In 2013 council tax benefit was abolished and replaced with a scheme which was to be written and administered locally by each individual council. The government immediately cut the funding for this by 10%.

Since this time, we've been faced with further cuts in funding as a council and so unfortunately, we're facing increased financial pressures. These changes were introduced as a way for us to save money while not having to cut essential services.

The government has made it clear that councils should look to maximise locally generated income to help manage the situation, and to support the continued delivery of key and critical services now and in the future.

The above was taken from Shropshire Council’s website on 17th August 2026 & quite frankly was a mistake for 2 main reasons - it increased the cost at the local level, as well as made things difficult at the national level for those people potentially moving across council areas causing unneccessary headaches along the way.

Talk about going backwards & making life more complex when not needed. This is a case of bad devolution & not good devolution.

Let’s change this with a Council Tax Benefit element being reinstated as part of reform to Universal Credit.

Councils should not be managing anything to do with this, when they are abhorrent with their debt collection practices that Martin Lewis has rightly called out, though in my words, they are abusive & should be ripped to shreds.

Absolutely Fuck off Councils with taking people to court for missed/non-payment after a few months.

Creditors under CCA (Consumer Credit Agreement Act) can’t do this. So why the abolute fuck can councils get away with doing this.

You can fuck off and keep fucking off & go throw yourselves in the bin especially whilst people are out of work, you can really fuck right off. Just like how you aren’t allowed to charge Students, you shouldn’t be allowed to charge those out of work. I said what I said, whether you like it or not.

Universal Credit Limited Capability for Work Rate removal in 2017

Through penny-pinching, which was the Conservative Government’s favourite thing between 2010 & 2024, I feel has not only failed lots of our citizens, myself included as I’ve previously been awarded LCW (and currently retrying for it wasting my time & the time of Doctors & DWP Staff) but it’s failed our businesses that require people to be out and spending more, not penny pinching to get by.

I will always be of the opinion that this has put a dent in people’s lives, as well as hurting the taxpayer by dragging people through dehumanising processes.

An extra £158.76 per month (as it was back in 2017) - or now equating for inflation should be almost £200 would help people in this group.

Reduction in Universal Credit LCW RA rates for new claimants in 2026

One of the things announced that IRK’d me in last Government under Sir Keir, was this reduction.

This also doesn’t make sense with current cost of living changes. However, let’s see what comes of the Timms Review of PIP, which I did apply to provide evidence to the Timms Review but wasn’t chosen.

To all the “people” using the “Taxpayers” phrase & “reducing the benefits bill” or calling claimants “dossers”

Right. Let’s get somethings straight shall we.

• We so called “dossers” that are dealing with the DWP at this time are taxpayers too, no matter whether you wanna use the “but we pay more” cry like a spoilt brat that never learnt properly about sharing.

• Like it or not, we are just getting our moneys worth (& yours) out of what is a complex & partially broken system that isn’t fully fit for purpose and that by using it, instead of not doing so, ensures that for those that come after us (which could include your judgemental ass, you morons, if your life goes to 💩 ) aren’t subjected to an even worse and unfit for purpose system that would make you wanna have a hissy fit because of it.

• Particularly due to issues like it being almost impossible to get money out from things like Pensions.

• You need us, the current service users, to use the services but also to cry out & demand the “right changes” to them.

• Otherwise you get stuff like the removal of the Sure Start centres and other much needed services, like the NHS for a start.

Remember that fact & remember that we those of us dealing with this system aren’t “dossers” at all as for the most part claimants are in work, or in short-term periods in-between paid work, or have suffered health issues that prevent all work, most work, or just some work that leads to longer term periods out of work.

So respectfully those that ever use phrases mentioning things like “It’s not for the Taxpayer to pay for this” I’ll just say this

You are lucky we aren’t in the pub on a evening discussing this topic because, you’d be told quite clearly what I really think when I hear people sayin 💩 like that.

Yes you have a right to your opinion, even if it is an opinion that is built on falsehoods or just a down right cuntery persective.

Granted, I’d try to be more tactful & have a reasonable debate with you, until I either decided to fuck off or decided to kindly suggest that you do the off fucking.

So where does that leave us

Well in a 💩 place really.

But I have hope. I mean that, I actually do.

My Words Directly To Andy Burnham

Congratulations on the move in your Career from Mayor of Greater Manchester to MP for Makerfield and now PM of the UK.

This post, was over due, and was the result of your words about Teams & Zoom based Interviews during the summer period.

Rebuilding Britain, not only for now but for 2030 onwards is going to be a huge task. But one that I have hope you can manage and achieve with support inside Westminster & the machinery of Government whether in London or Number 10 North, & dare a I say it, elsewhere, like perhaps here in Derby.

I was meant to have attended Manchester Tech Festival when you spoke at it in 2025. Sadly for financial reasons at that time (whilst on Universal Credit LCW) I couldn’t manage to get the funding that I needed to be able to make it there in a wasy that would be comfortable for me. It would have been amazing to have met you then, but it definitely would be great to meet you in the future as I’ve had a lot of respect for you over the years & I’m sure that our paths will cross in future one way or another.

This is an open invitation for you, others across the Cabinet & the House of Commons, like my MP Baggy Shanker to come have a remote or in person discussion about the life of being in the public eye, and what sort of toll it can/has taken on you. This will be a publishing of my Podcast 🔗#IRrrwR - Irregular / Ridiculous rants/rambles with Ryan!🔗 but focusing on the 🔗Mhasl.me - Mental Health Affects Someone Like Me🔗 side of it.

I particularly want to host yourself and Baggy, Baggy as he’s my MP & we share similar stories of how Apprenticeships helped us in our early career days, but yourself because I wanna touch on some things you’ve already shared, like how Alzhiemers has affected your family, like it has mine & how I’ve seen it affect others too. Same with the likes of Depression & Cancer and how these have really have had an affect families all across the country.

If you’ve read this, then you’ll know that there will be lots on any agenda if we were to speak, as I have plenty I would like to discuss with you & your wider team of colleages in the House of Commons.

This offer is open ended, especially as I still have lots to do to get #IRrrwR up and off the ground with Episode one, though it’d be pretty kick ass to say that for my first guest in an Episode I managed to sit down with the UK Prime Minister, wouldn’t it.

Lastly, If you are actually still reading

Again from Papa Roach (Between Angels & Insects)

I just wanna be heard
Loud and clear are my words
Comin' from within' man, tell 'em what you heard
It's about a revolution
In your heart and in your mind, you can't find the conclusion

Possessions, they are never gonna fill the void
Take it away and learn the best lesson
The heart, the soul, the life, the passion

& Rage Against the Machine - Killing in the Name

This post is brought to with the Rage and Passion of all my idols from the world of music, those still with us and not with us, and me channelling my inner rage to this long drawn out post.

We need to fix what is broken. The Job Search Process is just one of the big things that is broken.

We only fail, when we aren’t willing to tackle the hard big things.

Was this one of them “better left unsaid” things..?

Was it, as Hoobastank (& others) have told us that this was

Or was this much needed?

Has it changed your opinions and made you think…?

Do you agree with the things that I’ve said? Or do you have counterpoints to what I’ve said? Particularly on the contentious point of the disbanding of the DWP into other Government departments.

No matter which way you swing when it comes to all of this, this was one of those things that I have been sitting on for long enough now, & needed it off my chest, & penning it down like this, is more useful than it being just contained to me and in my home, or with some of the conversations that I have where this point is discussed from time to time, or written about 🔗Universal Basic Income - the way to a healthier nation! pt1 - mhasl.me - Mental Health Affects Someone Like Me🔗

Even if this wasn’t of use to you, it was for me & I hope it’ll get problems out there fixed, sooner rather than later.

Now that this is done, I can in future look to make a much shorter post about whether or not the level of 💩 is the same, better or got worse.

However, now that it’s done, I can also (at some point) get this published out as an 🔗#IRrrwR - Irregular / Ridiculous rants/rambles with Ryan!🔗 which they will be making their way to you at somepoint in the future.

A rare(ish) insight at a Level 10 Pissed Off Ryan 🤬

Yes this is a rare(ish) insight at something that invoked the Level 10 Pissed off Ryan response, and yet, yes I’ve spent lots of time in the writing of this to post which helps me get myself back to a more suitable calmer, thoughtful place.

Thanks yet again, to being forced (to essentially waste my time on this instead of other ) under UK Universal Credit to spend 35 hours a week, researching the utter shit-show & applying to things that may be fun, whilst knowing deep down that most organisations aren’t going to give me the chance I need, due to my health getting worse.

Please, enjoy the rest of your day, week, month & year, and I hellas hope you have better luck if you ever are thrown in the immensely choppy waters of the Jobsearch Oceans & have better luck in circumnavigating your way off what at time feels like being stranded on an Island, with barely any food, and not a friendly passing boat in sight, whilst hiding away from all dem nasty pirates aka the Debt Collectors that wanna rob ya whilst your struggling away.

Oh and did I mention 🔗Off ya Fuck Debt Collectors, for a bit, PLEASE!🔗

I hope the next big entry in this blog will be back to the tech and not something similar that invoked this level of time and attention.

I’m off to do what I always do, sit here in my room, holding myself together, doing a number of small but important things (in the grand scheme of things) to keep myself not only occupied & distracted, but not constantly thinking the harder deeper & more challenging thoughts.

So Thank Fuck for Music & for all My Happy Tracks & the DJ Sets I’ve accumulated over the years, because without some of them, well I may not have got through the hardest of the times I’ve been through up until this point.

I dont add this often, but if you thought the depth to this post (regardless of how sweary it was) as well as the comedic touches that I’ve tried to bring in to this content is worthy of a coffee/pizza/beer etc, please have a read up on my Donation Policy for how you can send something my way.

Because yes I am struggling to get by. Whilst that may be partly because of me being picky about what I want to do going forward, that’s only because I’m still rebuilding myself after the pandemic, loosing my dad to cancer in 2022 & 2 car crashes that year, being made homeless in 2023, loosing my Nan last year & my health kicking me further and making my ability this year, to attend Uni something that wasn’t possible.

I’m sorry if this got a bit too messy, OTT or too political, but for something as important as this it’s hard & complex as this it’s not easy to keep writing on this in a way that is in the boundaries of being PG, and well it wouldn’t be authentic of me to have not penned this the way I have.

Here’s a silly song to end with.

Anyways, Chow4Now people. Until Next time of course.