Inspired by boon’s anti-resume. This one isn’t really meant to be a pitch or anything, though. Just a collection of my thoughts and experiences.

Pre-University

I played a lot of ROBLOX. It was quickly obvious that knowing how to code was equivalent to wielding magic.

I liked the idea of having my own JARVIS from Iron Man so I could just sit back and chill if I wanted to. I wanted to automate things and be lazy. Turns out, I’m not the only person that loved to spend hours automating problems that can be solved in minutes. I wanted to craft my own games and let my friends and everyone else be immersed in a world with my storytelling after reading all kinds of Manhua and Manhwas. I could build worlds and improve lives with just with my keyboard. I wanted to do computer science.

Apparently, you have to be good at math to do computer science. In 7th grade, my maths teacher described me as an “able mathematician”. He was putting it very nicely: I barely scraped by. I was “too dumb” to be in advanced math and “too smart” to be in standard math. Teachers maximized students total grades as an KPI and strongly discouraged anyone to take advanced math.

My teacher had people taking advanced math tell the whole class that they were doing it. The department emphasized multiple times that it was not uncommon to get a failing grade, which you wouldn’t want for university. The school actively discouraged people from applying to reach universities on their applications. I was scared off from taking on the challenge.

I ended up getting a pretty good score in the end. The teachers were pretty good at their KPIs at least, I guess. I was out-of-luck for most top schools in Asia and the UK for not doing advanced math for computer science, but still ended up getting into a decent school in Canada where I had to compete by GPA to get into the computer science in second year.

University

Year 1: I wanted to prove them wrong. I wanted to prove that I could do it. I studied, a lot. Turns out, when you’re only studying topics that you’re interested in, you perform a lot better. I did well and got in. Math is so cool when it makes sense. Participated in a hackathon, made a ROBLOX game, and did a SWE internship at a real-estate company over the summer whilst taking summer courses. I was on the grind.

Year 2: I was fortunate to meet many smart people in my classes and was persuaded by one to take honours math with them, sneaking into the group of honours math students as computer science major imposters. I went to every office hour on 1-hour commute each way, met tons of smart people and challenged myself. I proved to myself that I could do it and broke most of the imposter syndrome I had with math. I landed my second internship at a mid-sized tech company that summer and overcame my allergy to web development. Tried TAing. Really liked it.

Year 2.5 ~ 3: I also applied to go on exchange to Japan and got in. I wanted to take courses in Japanese, so I signed up for N1 in December of that year. Spent 8 months grinding Anki decks with 100 new words a day for vocab, reviewed 300 to 500 cards daily, flipped through some past exams & grammar textbooks 1 month before the exam and went in. I passed, but only ended up with just 1 course in Japanese due to the lack of available courses. I spent 4 months in my home university, and the rest of the year essentially in Japan. The term that I was transferring to was from April to July, so I traded a summer internship for this experience. Also TA’d when I had the chance to in my home uni.

Year 3: The courses in Japan were significantly less rigorous, but I was able to dive into fields like Software Verification, Image Information and Information Retrieval which I really wanted to learn more about, but my home university had no courses for. I also travelled a lot. Snowboarding in Feburary, cherry blossoms in April, fireworks & festivals in July and August. Picked up maimai after wanting to for a very long time and getting to 14.5/15k. I don’t think I would have had the time to do all of this had it not been for this.

Year 4: I got my first internship at a job working with low-level systems, something that I yearned for. It turned out to be basically embedded software development. I worked with a large open-source project in an unfamiliar field with unfamiliar hardware and tried my best. Most commits went through fine, but still got flamed by someone on open-source for “poorly written code”. I tried.

I tried getting another internship afterwards and landed 2 offers, but couldn’t manage to land anything Big Tech™. Decided that I should just get some full time experience and decide later, so enroled in courses to graduate. TA’d again in my last term and got to write some exam questions in operating systems. Successfully TA’d the whole systems course offering for undergrad across my own undergrad!

Took really cool courses in distributed systems, algorithms and entreprenurship. Went through 0 to MVP in 3 months with a team of 4 and pitched to a panel of investors. Unsuprisingly no funding, but it was really fun. I wanted to do more. Also kinda sad that I didin’t get to take more courses. Wanted to learn so much more and still do.

Getting A Job In A Recession

Job Hunting: Wanted to do something new, so started hunting for new grad roles. Companies in the US just weren’t interested: couldn’t get any calls for internship, didin’t expect it for New Grad either. I just don’t have luck. If I can’t land any Genshin 50/50s, I’m not going to land anything here.

No companies were hiring. Radio silence. Turns out, job hunting in a recession is one of the least fun things you can do. A-famous-IBank-Firm I interviewed with from November gave me a verbal offer in December and kept me in the pipeline until May, where they told me they couldn’t produce the offer due to HC. I was bummed, but saw it coming.

Ended up expanding my choices and started interviewing for companies in Japan and Australia. Interviewed whilst preparing for graduation and travelling in Europe on my grad trip. This was one straightfire easy way to make a month-long grad trip significantly less enjoyable.

Ended up landing an opportunity with a startup in Japan that is well funded, in the perfect timing in growth (imo), plentiful learning opportunities as the first new grad hire of the team with an English development team. I have to wait 2~3 months for the visa, so kept applying to other companies for fun.

Late new grad roles (~July, August) from Big Tech™ et. al and new grad roles for graduates in the next year started popping up. I started getting a handful of interviews on cold apply. Turns out, it was the market and not my resume. Eventually came to the conclusion that I should just stick with the offer I had, as after adjusting my mindset and thinking it through, I wasn’t certain if I really wanted to work in a real Big Tech™ firm anyways.

Now: Didin’t expect to start my career in Japan, but here I am, I guess. Certainly not a great financial decision at 1USD:140JPY (previously 150!). Peers in my cohort will be making 2x~4x my salary. In fact, I could’ve doubled my own salary just by taking the return offer. I wanted to move to Japan eventually, but not this soon.

As long as work in the startup isn’t too far off from my expectations, I think I’ll be happy. All the learning & coaching that I’ll get, in a team of people whom are basically all from MANGA anyways, as one of the few juniors and the first new grad hire of the company. I’ll be my own bottleneck in an environment that (hopefully) can help expedite my growth as a engineer. Is this massive copium, or did I actually luck out? I’ll find out soon.

— hal