You are looking at posts that were written in the month of April in the year 2008.
SO! Last week was a busy week. I had interviews at 3 different Personnel placement companies: Vision Consulting, Panache, and Robert Walters. All seem to be decent sources for bilingual IT jobs in Japan (at least they send me more leads than Recruit has).
Monday was with Vision. They sent me some good leads, but when I got to the interview the guy (should I say his name?) was a real prick. He wasn’t paying attention to me. I was upfront about wanting an entry level position because I don’t have any formal experience, but he still belittled me. He asked me the same questions more than once… and he didn’t seem like he really knew about IT.
Wednesday was with Panache. Nice people. My advisor there is an 8 (out of 10 meaning she’s pretty cute… not anything to do with job performance. But on that note she was 100% better than the guy at Vision.). They had contacted me by email and phone and already had a job lined up for me to interview for. I had to skip through a bunch of the normal registration processes and actually moved my interview with them up from Thursday to wednesday to give room to the company I’d be interviewing with … which ended up happening last Friday at 4 (but I’ll come back to that).
Friday at 6pm, I met with a Robert Walters agent. We found out quickly that we have a mutual friend and the interview was relaxed and smooth. One thing I have to say about this company… NICE OFFICE! And the reception girl was pretty hot too… (I should be focusing on jobs… especially since I’m married… but the stress of job hunting seems to make me notice other women more… or maybe its just because I’m out and about seeing women around me other than just the students and teachers at my school…)
So back to the actual real job interview I had on Friday at 4… The company is an international law firm… not sure I should say where, but its a pretty prestegious company. Law offices in 25 countries and they do over a billion $ in business every year. The position is an entry level help desk job. No formal experience required… CCNA MCSE etc are helpful… most important seems to be an interest in IT and the ability to communicate in Japanese, especially in email.
The interview went great. The head of their 2 man IT dept at the Tokyo office (soon to be 3 when they hire someone) is actually taller than me… real nice guy. Seems like he’d be really pleasant to work for and he seems like he cares about his work and his employees. Minimum overtime, maximum educational exposure (its a small team so its easy to involve everyone in all aspects of the IT management I’ sure…), pay would be the same-ish as what I’m making now (and I wouldn’t ask for more, honestly…).
Now, I’ve been asked back for the Japanese version of the interview and an aptitude test…. TODAY at 4pm. So… hopefully I can pull this off. I get nervous just thinking about it… because I do have confidence in my day to day conversational Japanese, and I know I’d be ok if someone sent me an email asking for computer help in Japanese, but I don’t know how well I’ll be able to handle a conversation about IT stuff in Japanese. Sure, a few weeks on the job and I’d get to brush up real good! But, at first? Coming from a ZERO it exposure job where I teach English? I wish I had joined the computer club here at my highschool sooner…
Anywho… I hope I can get this job and finally start being useful! Maybe by the beginning of June I’ll have a new job!
I was searching for a nice animated .gif of Link from the legend of zelda when he’s invincible… (haven’t found it yet… but I know it exsists… I used to have it as my AIM buddy icon). Anywho… I stumbled on this blog a guy is writing trying to review all of the NES games… He and his wife? girlfriend? play each game for 30 minutes, he writes a review, pretty simple. But his reviews are really good and really funny, especially when a game sucks. They are evidently working through all the ones they have (currently over 250 it seems) in alphabetical order to be fair to all the sucky games in between the major ones we all know and love.
Here’s the link: 10-Yard Fight
enjoy … I hope its ok to just randomly plug someone elses blog on mine…
A few weeks ago I finally broke down and signed up with a Recruit Agent. I’ve passed my CCNA certification and I had been signed up with Recruit’s regular job search site through yahoo.
I guess the Recruit Agent people go through the job candidates on Recruit Next once in a while too, because a guy contacted me saying that with my experience (next to none?), drive (got a little…), and career goals that I should sign up with him and have the Recruit Agents help me find a job.
So, I did… had a 3 hour interview with a guy, talked about what I’ve done in the past, what I want to do in the future, how I’m studying to try and get there… (whole interview in Japanese, but evidently I could have done it in English, so he says). He tells me my Japanese is more than good enough to work an IT job and that I should list myself as having 上級 (top level) Japanese on my resume, great…super. Good thing I decided to stop studying for the first level on the JLPT.
He also said that keigo won’t be a problem (something I was really worried about) and that if I can communicate as well as I did during the interview with him, that I would be A-OK during a job interview. He also said that my lack of real experience wouldn’t be a problem as many companies are looking to hire 第二卒 (second graduation?… like the point where you finally realize what job you’re meant to do and go change you career) people and they don’t expect those people to have any experience, just drive and a desire to learn. Plus, the fact that I’ve been proactive and have been studying to get some certifications on my own should impress.
Now I just have to pluck up the courage to actually apply and start leaving my ALT job behind… I really hate being an ALT… and I really want a new job. But, its scary!
After 9 months of not posting anything. I feel compelled to start writing here again… why?
Apple.
I’m getting really annoyed by them shoving Safari down my throat through the Apple Software Update service. If I wanted Safari, I’d go download it. You guys are getting as bad as Microsoft! I’m already forced to use IE for sites that don’t (for some DUMB reason) support Firefox (or times when I want to login to two different email accounts from the same provider… when is someone going to come up with a solution for that on Firefox? Some kind of cookie splitting or something…?)
Theres no option for disabling the Safari download in the Apple Software Update service and next week or maybe even tomorrow, my computer (and all the others I have iTunes installed on) will ask me once again if I want to install software that I’ve said time and again that I don’t want…
… And I was almost about to give in and buy an iPod…
…iTunes pissed me off lately too by somehow deciding to change my music genres from English into Japanese when I play a song… so now half of my music is Rock/Classic Rock etc… and the other half is ロック・クラシックロック 等 and its really pissing me off… Why the change? Did I ask it to fuck with my music? NO! Same with the default folder management that I didn’t know about when I first installed iTunes about two years ago… I still have music that now belongs to no artist and no album all just jumbled up in one folder because iTunes wasn’t smart enough to read the folder names to get Artist and Album titles… Winamp was smart enough… but now that software is bloated and buggy too. (and has a “pro” version. What is this world coming to?