Really excited that I have voice acting as a side job... that now goes with the IOS game I'm (slowly) trying to make, my anime figure store, my websites and these blogs that are a part of my rather varied "side income" With how silly the job market is for web, social media & IOS devs can get sometimes (I mean, really... there are places with 1/10th my FB following looking for people to update their social media with freaken Masters in Journalism and/or business as a prerequisite)...it's really smart for anyone in my position to just make that side income, the full income. Freelance, telecommute, run your own ship... anything but the rat race at this point.
Crazy cheap unchanged pay I get at my day job aside... there's other silliness in the IT job market. Even basic web dev is about 3x my current work's pay but I know (and prefer) IOS game development...and that pay is considerably higher than that. Problem is, be it to appease shareholders and/or simply having HR departments that do stupid crap to keep their fragile jobs... some of the prerequisites for even entry jobs in IT are downright silly. Yes, as I said earlier... social media manager jobs (ie: just tweeting and facebooking for a company) have insanely stupid prerequisites. I shit you not... I've applied to even those jobs since..hell even they pay more/equal to $15/hr. These companies have no more than 500-1000 followers and here's me with my 6200+ followers on Facebook, a long running website and webstore mentioned on Business Week, over 2000 twitter followers. Surely that would be enough to get those positions and then some. Nope... again, I shit you not, I've been told I "don't qualify", needed an MBA and even once was told I got the job...to only be told after hunting down the suddenly hard to find owner of the company that I didn't because of my personal facebook profile post. The post in question... a post thanking the person and company and hoping for a positive future with the company. My personal profile has 500+ friends...I have more friends than that company has followers! Web dev jobs and IOS dev jobs..ok, I can understand needing people who know PHP & SQL like the back of their hand. I get that... but a job that is ONLY tweeting and facebooking asking for post grad prerequisites for a skill a 5 year old with a smart phone can do... is just enough to make anyone flip a table.
The job market stupidity doesn't stop there. Understandably IOS game dev jobs, since the job pays more and requires much more knowledge beyond web/graphic design, will require a bit more. You'll have to jump through more hoops and improve that slave price tag on your ear known as your resume to get through to the now unseen in-person interview. I understand that. What I don't understand is that some junior positions ask for you to have multiple successful games in the market. Forget junior IOS dev positions, if you have even one successful game in the market you can run your own damn game studio. It's like trying to hire Richard Branson as a flight attendant for American Airlines and requiring his ownership of Virgin as a prerequisite in order to get the position. In other words, if you achieved the prerequisite for the job...you wouldn't even need the job!
Anyways, pardon my rant here, but I've been thankfully involved with a few good, forward thinking IT companies...two thus far that I've done commercials for with my relatively new foray into voice acting. They thankfully have awesome apps and that startup mentality that me and others have in this market. It's a matter of time before something breaks and either one or all of these side incomes surpass my main income or I work more with these awesome IT companies in both voice acting or even helping dev their apps.
So, expect to hear me in app commercials soon and... know that I could also be the guy behind the code too.
Despite this rant and all of the silliness going on in the IT market here in New York / Long Island area...there are good IT companies out there and in due time I will "be so happy"
