Profoundly Helpful

I'm having bags of fun in my ongoing quest to find work. Due to my ongoing failure to find gainful employment thanks to (presumably; maybe I just generally suck) an extremely niche and slightly outdated skillset (nine years C++ for mobile phones running Symbian/S60 when 90% of the programming jobs market seems to be C# and Java for web development), it's been suggested that I try to consider other areas of employment I wouldn't mind working in.

What, like being an Astronaut? I've always wanted to be a spaceman.

No, something more realistic.  How about customer services?

How about you just go find a big old rock and hit me in the head with it until I stop thrashing? That'd be a lot less messy and painful in the long-term, trust me.

I've done customer services and I've done helldesk roles and I hated every single moment of it. I hated getting blamed for other people's problems when I'm there to help them fix it, I hated dealing with people who were congenitally incapable of following simple instructions and yet who still somehow managed to earn an order of magnitude more than me. I hated getting left to clean up the mess because some salesman completely misrepresented the product and the customer was finding out just how badly they'd been done over. Basically, I hated dealing on a day-to-day basis with people who made me feel miserable about my job and by extension, myself.

Ooo, poor baby Zinc has to face up to living in the Real World where life isn't all butterflies and sugarplums! Well, sod you. I was good at my job and I achieved real success and it didn't matter in the end because some suit-wearing turds decided that a few more percentage points of profit could be made by closing our offices and transferring all the work to somewhere where the cost of engineering slaves is lower, even though there's no experience in the kind of work that we do... did. The point is, I'm sick of always having to eat it when the suited classes start dishing it out. I'm sick of the fact that no matter how well I do, I'm still at the mercy of someone whose response to problems they themselves created is to fire all the people who do the actual work when in a just world, they'd be beheaded at the shareholder's AGM and their pitch-coated head would be stuck on a spike in reception as a warning to others.

Anyway, as the result of a promise to my useless-but-tries-hard employment advisor, I have been trying to see how my skills might be repurposed for other avenues of employment. One of the ways I did this was to do the online Skills assessment at Direct.gov's Skills Accounts website

After an hour or so of answering various on-line questionnaires and whatnot, I got some suggested jobs that someone with my skillset might be interested in. Top of the list?

Computer Programmer.

So very helpful.