The never-ending job interview.

I like it when places give you one job interview and then hire you. It's happened once or twice.

(It happened at ipackets. They hired me after meeting me for 20 minutes, but 6 months later they were out of business.)

Unfortunately, that's just not the trend anymore. Now the trend is toward multiple interviews.

On Friday I have my third interview with a big company. This one is a panel interview with all the managers.

I also had to do a grammar test and two writing tests. I also had to show them my writing samples.

The bad news is that it takes forever to go through their hiring process. The good news is that maybe lots of applicants will drop out somewhere along the line and I'll get an offer.

80% of jobs aren't advertised.

I'm thinking more and more about my upcoming job-hunt in June. I'm a bit worried about finding a job in this economy. It took me almost a year to find my current crappy job. I don't have a year to spare this time around.

Anyway, I've read a lot of books about how to find a job and they all say this in one form or another. 80% of jobs aren't advertised. I find this, literally speaking, to be very false. In every place I've worked, every position has been posted - either internally, externally or both.

The trend nowadays where I live is to no longer promote someone within. The human resources trend is to post the job internally and externally and have the public and the employees apply for it.

(Another trend is, instead of internally promoting your employees, you hire someone from outside your organization to fill the roll. That's why it's often better to leave a company and come back, rather than stay in the same old job hoping for a promotion.)

Many not-for-profits and union contracts have it in their bylaws that they have to post a job. Also, any company big enough to have a human resources department almost always posts their jobs because that's standard industry practice.

I will say this, however:

1) Even though a position is posted, many managers and companies already know who they're going to hire. By posting it, they're just going through the motions.

And it's for this reason that "networking" is important. And that's why all the books say "80% of the jobs aren't posted." Because they want you to network and it's easier to say this then to explain it the way I did right here.

I can actually feel myself getting dumber.

I've noticed lately that I can feel myself becoming less mentally sharp. I would love to blame this on lack of sleep, but the truth is I'm sleeping fine.

Maybe it's age? I'm not that old. But I do have the sense that I was much more mentally agile 10 years ago. I'm beginning to tell people the same stories over and over again. (I never used to do this. Now I no longer remember if I'd already told someone a particular story.)

I'm beginning to lose track of conversations. I don't recall this happening before. Just the other day we were having a technical conversation in our office, and I soon realized that much of the information went over my head.

I seem to be reaching my level of incompetence - as I basically have the same job as a did 10 years ago, and I realize that I'm very likely to have a similar job 10 years from now.

I'm beginning to notice there are younger people who have more success, smarts, money and talent than me. This certainly wasn't the case 10 years ago. (And to be honest, at this stage it's mostly older people who have more success, smarts, money, and talent. But the tide is slowly shifting.)

What does all this mean? It means that I've probably peaked, and it's going to be a slow decline from this day forward. Oh well. I had a good run.