Title: I&#x27;m a contractor, things were strange during COVID. I worked on project rewrites that got abandoned, and made the mistake of doing test consulting for companies that had never tested before. I will never do that again.<p>It used to take two-weeks max to find a new position. It&#x27;s now been two months, and I have no leads. I will call out the exact situation I&#x27;ve run into.<p>I have received nearly 20 calls from a dozen different recruiting firms all for the same two back-fill jobs at Charter in St. Louis. I interviewed with them once, and it&#x27;s not a match. .NET, Knockout, and TSQL... They weren&#x27;t interested in me either. I&#x27;m not exactly offended by that.<p>I get two calls a day about Charter at this point. I&#x27;ve been told, &quot;they just finished a round of interviews, and didn&#x27;t find anyone.&quot; At this point, I have to ask straight away to anyone that calls me about a position, &quot;Is this for Charter?&quot; It&#x27;s always yes, and I always say, I&#x27;ve already interviewed and I&#x27;m not interested.<p>One of these firms told me they don&#x27;t want to work with Charter anymore because they&#x27;ve basically gone through everyone, and still haven&#x27;t hired for these two back-fill positions they&#x27;ve been interviewing for. And they seem to be the only company in the city that&#x27;s hiring. Or pretending to hire, because they&#x27;ve been giving everyone the runaround for months. I asked to add a note for me in their system that I don&#x27;t want anymore calls for Charter. They added it and told me they have a shared system with a few other organizations.<p>That same firm told me they are focusing more on remote positions instead of St. Louis. Which is the least safe city in the country, which includes financial security.<p>I&#x27;ve always struggled with St. Louis overall. Enterprise is ancient here. When I&#x27;m told, &quot;But we have Boeing, Centene, and Bayer!&quot; I have to groan a bit. I&#x27;m not talking about tech stack, it&#x27;s all old as far as I&#x27;m concerned, I&#x27;m talking about mentality. Nobody tests, CI automation is unheard of. And everyone rolls their eyes at the web. These companies want to build web applications, but they don&#x27;t want to use the tools of the trade, they want to use desktop tools and pretend browsers don&#x27;t exist. It&#x27;s like building a skyscraper with nothing but wood planks and screw driver. I won&#x27;t get into that at the risk of a much longer rant.<p>This place feels like a barren wasteland. But I know people in other areas are struggling to find work too. I&#x27;m open to move at this point, but I haven&#x27;t decided which market to focus on. Is there anywhere that&#x27;s actually growing right now?
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