I think I’ve applied to 5 jobs that show up as “remote” now only to get halfway through a screening call and find out “oh, we’re looking for people in Albuquerque”.

Are my expectations out of whack? If you’re looking for someone in your city, you’re not looking for someone remote. You’re looking for a local worker who just has an office that’s not on your balance sheet.

Is it semantics?

Am *I* the bastard?

Are you content with your job or always searching for greener pastures?

I'm split inbetween. Current pay is very decent and working conditions are flexible. However, the work itself is not always that great. I find it to be comedically true how "hard workers" don't get promoted or bonuses, they get more work. There has recently been a heavy influx of what I'd like to classify as "shit tickets" since a guy who was the main "shit ticket doer" left the company after being burnt out.

I work with a small-ish digital agency as a BE dev, so I'm mostly dealing with small to medium scale projects built with WordPress/WooCommerce, with often custom API/ERP integrations on top. I'm not a big fan of the stack as a developer but as a contractor I can understand the business reasons why it is used. Part of me wants to find something else, part of me thinks I'm looking for a perfect company that doesn't exist and I should lower my expectations -- I might find better work for sure, but with the same pay and conditions? It seems unlikely at the moment. The company was recently acquired, so I'm hopeful for the future.