Reading Carefully

Day 199 of writing every day.

I spent the day just going over some job postings I hadn’t come across before yet that were put up either recently or up to a couple weeks earlier. Since I reached the end of the course material for Laravel that I was scheduled to go through, I went ahead and moved on to the GitHub practice materials.

While GitHub is free to use and provides its own tutorials, I do realize the importance of being able to read and understand instructions for it in Japanese. So I spent some time going over how to use GitHub and learning some basic commands on top of what the correct steps are for linking local files to GitHub and the purpose of the commands that help working professionals collaborate.

Needless to say, it took some time learning to use the command terminal and the logic of Git. I was disappointed that I couldn’t seem to get the submission done right for something as basic as uploading a file demonstrating two commits and a text file showing the commands history.

Strangely, I thought I understood the instructions the second time after getting it returned to me telling me to include the command history I overlooked to include that were part of the instructions, though they weren’t marked very clearly.

Anyways I was getting depressed just being in my room all day trying to figure out how to work everything, and even if I did succeed, it’s not something I become proficient with in just one day. The feeling of dread was only being compounded by frustrated feelings of being incompetent over what should have been a simple assignment.

I felt better after the Aikido night class and am going to prepare for the interview with a different approach tomorrow. One company agreed to interview me instead of just rejecting my application despite not advertising as being specifically open to people with no previous industry work experience. Maybe I’ll play the wildcard and ask them to bet on my potential despite my lack of experience and still questionable understanding of PHP and Laravel.

But what’s the point of spending half a year to a whole year studying to become entry level if a few months on the job as an interim hire can determine if you actually have the makings of an engineer? No one knows if someone will actually succeed at a job they haven’t started working. Demonstrating some competency with the programming language and framework can set expectations from the employer’s perspective, but expectations are only put to the test after someone begins working and there’s no guarantee the most successful looking applicant turns out to be actually the most successful recruit in retrospect.

I have my doubts about my chances with either company tomorrow, so why not just have a bit of fun by showing my honest opinion instead of trying to conform to some image of the ideal candidate that I have a hard time identifying as and relating to. Maybe my instructor might be right that they’ll be impressed with my “Americaness” and frontiersman go-getter outlook.

Thanks for reading!