Day 203 of writing every day.
While I have the time to take things slow, the majority of the day is spent alone with my thoughts or my attempts to block my thoughts. After all, life is filled with decisions that in retrospect seemed poorly thought out.
Having gone through multiple interviews and failing to get the job, and being outright rejected at the application stage, I’m at a point where I’m getting a lot of feedback that I’m not good enough. I’m not letting it get to me because I’m quite confident I have what it takes to succeed at any job I’m applying for, provided they understand how to utilize my strengths and give me what I need in terms of on-the-job training and guidance in order to succeed.
Tech isn’t medicine where entry level positions require medical training. I’ve already learned some programming language basics and already have a pretty big headstart over candidates who have zero experience and can’t type at a reasonably fast pace accurately. But, as I mentioned before, some companies still reject me despite advertising themselves as open with hiring people in their thirties and people without any experience.
The doom and gloom thoughts when I ponder the inability to find a decent entry level job makes me want to go back and redo things. I wanted time to be able to learn, and these recent months have been filled with learning but also distractions. I’d say at best I got about 60% of the study time I had hoped to get in ideally. My initial portfolio looks like a miserable failed attempt if lined up side-by-side next to a professional portfolio of an experienced freelancer.
I’m fine with who I am, but I strive to be better and do better. I’m not beating myself up, but neither can I say that I’m proud of what I achieved so far. I have dreams of success but if you ask me where I see myself a few years down the road, I still can’t give you a clear answer. I wouldn’t want my life to be planned out for a boring career all for the sake of job security. I want to find out what it is I’m meant to do, and the journey feels like it’s far from over and hasn’t even really started.
Anyways, I get sick of the greed driven capitalist economies dominating many societies today. If wealth was more sensibly distributed instead of being hoarded and wasted to the benefit of a select minority, maybe we wouldn’t be juggling being miserable doing things we don’t like just to survive and trying to find time to discover what gives our lives meaning.
I don’t really see the point of living if, for example, you have to labor all day and barely get enough time to recover over a weekend that flies by too fast. The ability to have time for yourself outside work to do what you want to do is so important to me that I quit my last job. The idea of working until I’m drained of my youth and passion for anything seems like hell to me.
I was offered an interview with another company in the same industry when my career advisor thought to help me by sending my resume out to them thinking I’d be open to working a job that’s basically the same as what I just left a few months ago. I apologized that I wished to withdraw from the offer as I did not want to go back to an industry that just treats workers as expendable labor that can be readily replaced.
Game testers are basically like the sweatshops of the game industry, where developers and publishers get all the credit but the hundreds of man hours spent manually checking to make sure the product isn’t a buggy mess and tracking down the causes so that developers can go back to their code and fix things if it doesn’t end up causing bugs elsewhere.
I have no interest trying to establish a career in such an industry where workers have no voice over their working conditions and the primary worker motivation is a desire to play games where as long as they have time to play outside of work, it doesn’t matter if their job holds no real advancement opportunities nor new skills to increase the value of their time and labor.
Perhaps the job posting just opened up some fresh unpleasant memories. Well I hope tomorrow will be filled with more pleasant thoughts.
Thanks for reading!
One Chance Works 