Rosalia Rambles

Tag: unemployment

  • Redundancy Review: Day 321, “Career Uncertainty, Part 2

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)

    Good morning admirals and commodores, welcome to Day 321 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    Off the back of getting rejected for a job role I was pretty excited for, I continue to persist in my goal to write a daily series. Heads up that this edition might read a bit more like a rant in some areas, as I am going to be talking about career stuff as I briefly alluded to yesterday.

    About eight years of my life has been spent either aspiring and studying to enter the tech industry, or working in the tech industry itself. As a twenty eight year old, this means approximately one quarter of my life has been spent in the tech space.

    This started with me going to university to study Computer Games Technology, with the hope of becoming a games programmer of some description, either working on my own independent projects or joining some large studio to be a cog in the machine. Admittedly it started well, with both my first and second year having good results in what I was attempting to do with my coursework.

    Not without struggle though. My second year in particular was plagued with a lot of struggle and tense moments as things heated up, particularly in the first semester more than anything else. 

    Third year… was the hardest. The first semester had me navigating a lot of personal issues that impacted my work in a negative way that whilst I was still fulfilling deadlines and getting on with things, I was not pushing myself on working on things that were not coursework, which is definitely one of the things that you need to succeed as a programmer by improving your skills.

    With the gift of hindsight, whilst I knew how to navigate programming, I am not built to be a full-time programmer. The idea of spending a full work day sitting in front of an IDE (or more realistic to the modern day, an agent prompt window) did not appeal to me in the slightest.

    This issue was compounded when my second semester was interrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing things online, disrupting the deadlines I had and disrupting the flow of the group I was working with at the time, causing things to fall behind.

    I still graduated, with a First class degree no less, specifically because the module I scored highest on, as part of a course dedicated to building me up as a programmer more than anything else, was Consultancy and IT Management, which was around building a case study to upgrade a company’s IT infrastructure… which I feel reflects the current me pretty nicely, but is still funny to look back on.

    As is evident from my many previous stories, I did not in-fact go into programming full time. Whilst someone in my life at the time tried to push me to work on personal projects so I could put together a more proper portfolio, the drive was not there, and I should have admitted that way sooner, both to myself and that person.

    So I spent six months unemployed, trying to work on writing when I can but mainly resolving a bunch of personal issues more than anything else. COVID jobs market sucked, and I did have some interviews, but not much success.

    That was until I interviewed for the position of QA Engineer at Codemasters, which I have talked about at length in my Day 118 Redundancy Review. This set the trajectory for where my career has taken me today, with a year spent in the games industry until I pivoted into working for an XR company that specialised in both bespoke VR content and an educational platform.

    This is where I have spent the majority of my career, building myself up as a QA initially before my mentor Gabi took me under her wing and started to build me up as a producer as well… I should reach out to her again, especially now with shit hitting the fan again. She is one of the reasons I have as much resilience as I do today, and I still try to internalise one of the last things she told me when the company went to shit:

    “You are a person worth knowing.”

    I gave a lot of myself to that XR company, pushing myself beyond my limits and learning as much as I could with each project. I definitely pushed a little too hard in some instances, as I had to have at least two periods of leave that were due to the stress catching up to me… well, the latter one was purely stress, the former was due to me catching COVID and severely underestimating how long it took to recover – I kept coming back to work only to have myself punched back down by how sluggish my body felt, something I still struggle with today as I most definitely have some variety of Long COVID after catching it twice.

    My aim was to make myself indispensable, if a little neurotic in how I approached things. Stubbornness is a genetic trait I fight against every day, and it definitely affected how I communicated with my colleagues at times, both in positive and negative ways. Regardless, I made my mark, and navigated responsibilities I would have never considered in the year prior. 

    But now we get to the hard details, and that is what it is like to work within startup/scaleup culture. I will try to frame this with the positive aspect first followed by why it can cause psychological strain in certain scenarios.

    First off, team size. After coming from Codemasters where a single platform QA team would be around fifteen to twenty people at peak times with the greater QA team easily being one-hundred people and above, going to a company which never went above fifty people at the peak was certainly a cultural difference.

    The primary perk of this was knowing who you worked with well, especially after my part of the company got reorganised into a proper studio team where we would have a general standup and retro alongside project specific meetings. This meant I got to know people on a personal level, learning about their hobbies, how they prefer to work, and who I could ask certain questions of. A lot of my old colleagues were incredibly chill people, and very supportive of me as a trans person – one distinct memory I have is absolutely bawling on the shoulder of one of them after I had to dip from a company dinner because of a murder mystery actor making a rather crass transphobic joke, which I spent a fair bit of time not wanting to ruin his very nice jacket with my snot or tears.

    The main downside of working this way is that responsibilities had to be shared almost all of the time, often leading to moments where my plate would be filled with all different tasks that needed to be balanced or differing deadlines, requiring precision prioritisation in order to get things done, which I managed to do most days, but the stress definitely felt intense on some days, especially while I was working towards being a producer, often having to balance QA responsibilities along with my production responsibilities.

    To bring things back to the positive, this does mean I can prepare, practice, and perform a presentation in a relatively short timescale, something I utilised in a recent interview to do the above in around half an hour. AI might be able to do a similar thing, but I can do it much cheaper with fewer resources, like caffeine and painkillers as opposed to context and tokens.

    Second main perk is being treated like an adult in regards to working patterns. Codemasters offered me flexitime but this was a measured arrangement, where if I signed out early on any given day, I would need to make up that time later on in the week, or vice versa where staying late one night meant I could sign out earlier. Work is hard and intense within startup culture, but so long as the work is being completed by the deadline, I was free to work however I wanted, which is an absolute relief to an ADHDer like myself, as forcing myself to work on a pattern that is not mine does my head in.

    Downside of this all? Overtime was very rarely compensated, partially due to the fact my compensation was already pretty generous, but this meant any time I needed to stay late or start early often resulted in nothing but a congratulations, which was actually less than what I got in the games industry, as I got time-and-a-half for any weekend work and double time for any bank holiday. Flexing my life for the needs of the business was also a requirement, which became particularly annoying on the day after my partner moved in with me, where I was supposed to cook our first proper meal together but ended up needing to stay multiple hours past my usual finishing time to help get something out the door, which ended with no result anyway.

    (small aside: I do not believe in the discussion of wages being taboo. Possibly a Gen Z thing, possibly a leftist thing.)

    And finally, the thing that I cannot highlight any positive for, or even try to talk about in a positive way: layoffs, and funding.

    There is no way for me to discuss this part of working in a startup or scaleup without going overly negative, because this shit absolutely destroys lives, morale, and direction of a company. In my five year career, I have survived three rounds of layoffs, and being laid off twice. Two rounds of those layoffs have been in the XR industry, where I had to watch friends and senior colleagues disappear whilst I was still around, leading to some serious survivor guilt developing which got worse during the second round.

    No one can dodge mortar shells forever, though it seems appropriate that for someone who survived layoffs three times, it would obviously take the nuke of administration/insolvency for me to finally get hit, leading to where we are today with the Redundancy Review and the “season 2” we are currently within due to the second layoff.

    So, what is the moral of me running through this all?

    Because whilst I can continue on in the tech industry, and there is definitely a real possibility I stick around if a good opportunity arises, everything I have run through has worn me down bit by fucking bit, and I am done. The games industry is undergoing constant shifts with layoffs, closures, and cancellations, the tech industry is going all in on AI which leads to fewer opportunities being created, and pretty much all of my friends have told me to move away from startup culture for the sake of my own health.

    That leaves me contemplating going down the path of the starving artist, which has its own set of pitfalls and would lead to even more career uncertainty than I am facing right now….

    …but when has that ever stopped me?

    The world needs more LGBTQ+ artists making works public, especially trans artists to try show those falling victim to culture war topics that not only are we real people, we are also nothing like what the media portrays – I literally do not like going to the toilet in public at the best of times I am certainly not going to be doing heinous shit in a women’s toilet.

    I did not intend for this to become such a long piece, but the words kept flowing as I kept typing, but now we need to do a review topic. Something shorter than usual, and I have something just for that.

    This is a can of Poppi, a brand of soda that was launched in the US in 2018 as a “gut healthy” soda with it recently launching in the UK in Pret A Manger and Tesco locations. I saw it multiple times in my local Tesco express, but considering it is £2 for an individual can or £4.50 Clubcard Price for a four-pack, I never really had the impetus to try it until today, where I went to grab a meal deal lunch for my partner and decided to include it as the drink as repayment to myself for running this errand.

    And I am very glad it came as the meal deal drink because holy shit I do not consider this worth £2 for a can and I would be at a stretch to pay £1.12~ per can in the four-pack.

    Comparing Poppi to a standard fizzy orange drink in the UK, Tango and/or Fanta, it barely has any orange flavour to it, or even much fizz to it, kind of tasting like a squash made with an extremely flat sparkling water. I am someone who does not even like Fanta, but if I had to take the pick between Fanta or Poppi I would take Fanta every time.

    But it is a healthy soda, so obviously it would not taste as good as a processed and high-sugar drink.

    I will concede that point, but counter with the comparison I made. A glass of orange squash has more orange flavour, but would also have more health benefits in term of hydration and be substantially cheaper than paying £1.12-£2 for a can of supposedly “healthy” soda.

    Note to self, Robinson’s Squash for a future Redundancy Review topic.

    Just about 2300 words for today, the longest I have written in a damn while.

    Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope you are able to relax and that the Monday blues are not hitting you too hard.

  • Redundancy Review: Day 100, “Stories”

    (for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)

    Good morning playwrights and screenwriters, welcome to… Day 100, of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.

    There have been a lot of milestones on this journey, from marking months past the inciting incident, and to celebrating Day 69 the only way I knew how (immaturity), but Day 100 feels incredibly significant to me.

    It is difficult to consider how much my life has changed in the hundred days since I was first made redundant, and honestly, I have the Redundancy Review to thank for giving me a timeline to work from because otherwise I would not have kept track of how much time had actually passed, as it feels recent and distant simultaneously.

    But for all the hardship, all the good times, and the self-doubt that continues to pervade my system every day… I am still here. The story has not yet ended.

    And I want to dedicate today’s Redundancy Review to that topic: stories. It is a word I consistently use on this blog, with “storyteller” being my preferred title to describe what I want to do in life.

    Even if the current form of my passion for writing came to me later in life, I have always had a fascination with stories. To my best memory (curse you depression and neurodivergence causing me to forget things), I was always a kid who liked immersing myself in stories, either real or made-up. I remember enjoying creative writing assignments more than most, and even if I was not the best at literature analysis; discovering the story within a piece of writing fascinated me.

    Stories are an essential part of human existence – millions are generated every day by people around the world, whether they realise it or not. A lived experience will one day become a story you tell to others, the hardship of today will eventually become something you laugh about in the future, and the missteps you make now form their way into a cautionary tale for the future.

    This is the core of the Redundancy Review, the story of one girl trying to navigate her way through an ever-changing world whilst she grapples with her own life being disrupted drastically. Even if the schedule slips and I end up missing out a couple days of a so-called daily series, it still forms a part of the overall story about what I am going through.

    There will always be more stories to tell, and be they fact or fiction, I aim to be around to tell them.

    In a way that is what the review segment really is as well, a story. I never claim to be and do not want to be seen as a critic, because ultimately whilst I will give my opinions on the topics I talk about, there are far more qualified people than me to give proper critique. 

    I still aim to provide information for people to make up their own minds, but ultimately what I am doing is telling the story of the experience whatever I am talking about gave to me – hence the esoteric range of topics from music, gaming, and whatever I had for lunch on a given day.

    Which, yes, does defeat the purpose of this being called the “Redundancy Review”, but “Jobless Journal” would make less sense considering I am in full-time work currently and “Severance Stories” makes even less sense when you take into account it was the entire company imploding and several other of my colleagues getting caught in the crossfire.

    Anyway, back on track.

    Initially I was struggling to come up with a review topic for today, but a sudden brainwave gave me the perfect topic for today, given that it is a cover of a very popular Vocaloid song that specifically changes the ending lyrics to be a bit more heartwarming than bleak compared to the original.

    The song in question is Rolling Girl, with this cover being by Lollia and RichaadEB specifically.

    Content warning ahead: I will be discussing both the cover and the original which cover very bleak themes of failure, depression, and suicide. Read ahead at your own discretion.

    This song has appeared on a previous Redundancy Review back on Day 28, but did not give it the level of coverage it deserves due to feeling a bit shit at the time. Time to make this right.

    For background information, Rolling Girl was released in 2010 and was composed by famed Vocaloid producer wowaka, who sadly passed away in 2019 from heart failure at the extremely young age of 31. Rest in peace dude, and know your art is still being appreciated a decade and a half later.

    When it comes to the main bits of lyrical analysis, I will be using Lollia’s cover since that is the version I want to focus on, however I will link a version of the original PV here and a link to the Vocaloid wiki with approved English lyrics here for people to get the full picture of what Rolling Girl is as a song, along with using those approved lyrics for comparison.

    There is a certain sense of hesitation I get talking about this song, due to the themes it contains and how I relate to them, so I will try my best to do it justice.

    At its core, Rolling Girl is a song about someone who is failing over & over again, with these repeated instances eating away at them until it becomes far too overwhelming:

    “All the noise

    Slicing layers in her heard

    Has her screaming away

    Has her screaming away”

    This is a feeling I can relate to a lot with the song, when my brain gets full of negativity it feels like a massive cloud of noise that just eats away at me inside, though it often gets to the point where I cannot say anything at all due loud everything is to me.

    Throughout the song there are instances, mostly during the chorus, where the protagonist (Miku/Lollia) is talking to a figure. It is during one of these instances where I want to highlight a difference in the approved English lyrics to Lollia’s lyrics and how her creative input makes the song far more devastating.

    In the original version, the first chorus ends with the lines:

    “‘How about now?’
    ‘Not yet, we still can’t see what’s ahead yet. Hold your breath now.’”

    I interpret this as Miku talking to an embodiment of her depression, though I cannot decide what exactly I think the topic at hand here is:

    • Is her depression asking her if she wants to end her life, and she wants to hold on because she does not yet know what is coming?
    • Is her depression asking her if she wants to carry on, but she is too far in her own mind to see what is ahead so cannot provide an answer?

    I personally lead towards the latter, as I feel the original Rolling Girl works better with its ending to look at the earlier parts in a more hopeful manner to give the finale even more impact, but we will get to that soon enough.

    Lollia’s version leaves very little to interpretation, but I love how brutal and raw these lyrics are:

    “‘Are you better now?’

    ‘No, I don’t know how!’

    What’s the point in living if pain’s never ending?

    Please just let me stop my breath right now.”

    Holy fuck the content warning was definitely needed. The first time I heard these lyrics with this cover I had to pause because they are so insanely hard-hitting for someone who has struggled with depression, but they show the creative power of interpreting Vocaloid songs into another language to give them even more impact. 

    There is very little room for interpretation here, and I absolutely love that.

    Going to skip ahead a bit, not only because I feel myself quivering a bit talking about these topics, but so I can get to the bit I truly want to talk about: the ending.

    This will start with me talking about the approved English lyrics version on the Vocaloid wiki:

    “’How about now?’

    ‘Just a little more, we should see something soon. Hold your breath, now.’

    One more time, one more time

    ‘I’ll roll along again today’

    The girl said, the girl said

    Breathing laughter into the words!

    ‘How about now? OK, you can look. You must be exhausted too, right?’

    Stop breathing, now.”

    When combined with the PV, the most common interpretation of these last lyrics are that Miku has finally decided to end it all, with her embodiment of her depression comforting her in her last moments, commenting that she must be exhausted from failing so often, and finally telling her to stop breathing. A tragic end to a song that has hope spots earlier on.

    But… Lollia’s cover takes a different approach, one that gives an initially tragic song a far more hopeful ending compared to the original, though starting off in a similar way:

    “‘Are you better now?’

    ‘No, I don’t know how!’

    Maybe one day you’ll see how well I’m improving

    Please just let me stop my breath”

    Before erupting into something beautiful:

    “Not now.

    Just once more, just once more

    I will roll again today, I know for sure

    Oh that girl said, what she said

    Playing every word and playing to pretend

    ‘Just once more?’

    ‘No, no more!’

    ‘Take my hand and come with me’

    ‘Tell me your story’

    ‘Please just let me hold your breath for now.’”

    Over four years later, the way this version of the song ends has stuck with me, and how it completely changes the interpretation of the figure the protagonist is talking to. In the original, it is an embodiment of depression, waiting for them to give up but also providing comfort to them in their final moments.

    In Lollia’s version, it very much seems to be a close friend, not wanting the protagonist to suffer any longer, but also refusing to let them go through with suicide. Letting them stop “rolling”/failing, and asking to be told their story, saying that they will hold their breath for now, a line that can be interpreted as this person wanting to keep their friend holding for as long as possible.

    Quick picture for the thumbnail, with the touching tribute to wowaka at the end of Lollia’s video serving nicely.

    And we come back round to how today’s edition started: stories.

    Everyone has a story, through highs and lows, through happiness and sadness, through joy and sorrow. Everyone’s story deserves to be heard, and I want to continue telling mine through the medium I have chosen, for as long as I can be allowed to.

    For anyone reading today’s edition, thank you.

    For anyone who has been a long time reader, thank you.

    For anyone who has only just discovered me, thank you.

    Thank you for being here.

    Thank you for continuing your story.

    And thank you for taking the time to read mine.