Oh dear, a job hunt in the tech industry.

I see things like this in job advertisements:

“Candidates with development skills in AngularJS or NodeJS will be considered in lieu of ReactJS experience”

Excellent! That’s what I like to hear!

It’s good to know that some job posters don’t have restrictive and stringent requirements.

Nonetheless, I’m, thankfully, aware that my growing engineering skills (e.g., my budding machine learning capabilities) make up for some of the things employers request for.

Some of the things I say and write on my website and on social media may be off-putting to some potential employers, but such employers may be looking for perfect candidates anyway. Or candidates that are not like me.

I’m an independent maker anyway, so…

I’m aware that I don’t have much leverage due to my relative inexperience. I’m pretty much at the mercy of others at this point. That’s bad.

But, there’s good things too. Like how this is still a more appealing alternative to working an unskilled minimum wage labor job, like how I’ve done in the past.

Even if my chances of securing employment are zero, it’s still not impossible for me to obtain a tech job. So I’ll keep searching. I’ve even gained the courage to apply for senior level positions even though I may only be partially senior level. Because, honestly, let’s not think in absolutes here.

My compatibility with others

When employers talk of passion in their job ads, they shall be sorely disappointed with me as my passion born from another world is not the same as theirs. Passionate about coding? No. Just no.

I’m passionate about getting what I want.

This creates a divide, indeed, as we are quite different from each other.

For instance:

Employers say:

“You’ll need a solid technical prowess with incredible coding ability across a diverse set of languages and technologies. You will thrive on the ability to work under pressure.”

And my response is:

Sweet, my history involves having had to use various technologies and leverage new ones such as machine learning in order to enter new markets as a budding independent digital product maker. Which reminds me that I still need to develop my automated news service product, but only after I’ve established a source of income for myself.

“Bachelors/Masters degree in Computer Science or a related field.”

I may not have formal credentials, but my knowledge is essentially the same, especially as I’m gaining experience in the new territory of artificial intelligence. I’m beginning to adopt new technology. On my own, no less, as I have to be resourceful and innovative. So I think that that’s a good indication of advanced capabilities.

“3+ years of software development experience”

Yes, I do possess more than three years of software development experience. It may not include working for someone else as an employee, but that’s okay. It’s still experience. And that experience has tremendously helped me to become an independent digital product maker, which I shall now dub as a D.P.M.

“Experience building single page web applications.”

Yep! Kawaii Predicts and Baka Youtube Downloader are single page applications that I’ve made as a digital product maker–and I keep saying digital product maker a lot.

“Experience using a variety of modern web technologies, including React, Electron, Immutable, Babel, NodeJS, and npm.”

Yes, I leverage modern web technologies in order to create my own technologies for servicing markets. To be specific, I use Angular, Node.js, Express.js, and have a preference for deploying on Heroku.

“Excellent communication skills to both technical and non-technical audiences.”

I shall admit that this is one of my biggest weaknesses, if you will, as my differences are so extremely great that a chasm has been created resulting in communication challenges. Still it’s not entirely bad, so I’ll have a bias toward more pleasant things.

“We expect that this person would be strict when applying good OOP/TDD practices and value high quality clean code.”

My background as an independent maker has caused me to develop a bias toward small scale and rapidly developed pragmatic software results, out of necessity. Possessing a growth mindset, I can change my ways when collaborating with others. But on my own, of course, I’ll switch back to my ultra super lean startup ways.

Entrepreneurial contingencies

I give myself one year to find a tech industry job. If I don’t find such a thing, I’ll have no choice but to pursue employment for a regular job, like an unskilled labor minimum wage job. And that would just be bad. Honestly.

And I’ll make sure that that doesn’t happen.

It’s not impossible for me to find a tech job, even if the probability were to be zero. And I sincerely believe that it’s not impossible.