Friday, April 06, 2007

The Glass of Success is Half Full

As planned, I applied for J2EE jobs using Finnish annotator (FA) as a merit. FA was implemented with embarrassingly low technologiy: HttpServeltResponse.GetPrintWriter().println() produced most of the web pages. I got to 3 job interviews based on it.

After one interviewer told me that they used JSP and servlets to implement web services in 2001, in no uncertain terms, I realized my J2EE experience was inadequate and that I would rather be an experienced Symbian programmer (despite the shittiness of Symbian, which is worth anoter post) than a J2EE trainee. After that, I applied for Symbian jobs and got one from a mid-sized Symbian subcontractor. I'm not going to tell the name of the company, since I have no idea how it differs from other mid-sized Symbian subcontractors, and because they have their own marketing department to take care of their external image, thank you veeery much for your suggestion of advertising by blogging but no thank you.

The Symbian job I got pays 600e/month more than what I got at Nokia. I started 1.4. I still haven't been assigned to any project, but anyway I'll get more pay than ever before for carrying less responsibility than at the last months of Nokia.

If I had really wanted to get a J2EE job, I could have applied at J2EE Professional Trainee Program at Tapiola. But I thought that it was too easy, since from the 4 technologies they list (JSP, XML, EJB, WSAD) I already know JSP and XML and have read a book about EJB, so that only WSAD (whatever it is) would be totally new. Also, applying to the program would be dishonest, since my interest in J2EE is not about becoming a Tapiola man, but about developing the FA.

By the way, "professional trainee" is an oxymoron. Who wants to be an oxymoron?

My initial plan with Finnish Annotator was to collect a 5000 word Finnish vocabulary by September. This would have required me to write English definitions for about 24 words a day. Now that I actually work, I have noticed that I have no energy to write word definitions after work. So 5000 words is utopistic. I'll have to either overcome procrastination or find out just how many words I have patience to write before contacting a Finnish teacher and sugggesting co-operation.

The glass of success if half full or empty in the sense that I failed to get a J2EE job but succeeded in getting a job that pays more than anything I have done before.

What to do with the money when I've accustomed to a student budget? There are practically only 3 ways to spend it in a way that actually increases my standard of living:

  • Get a mortgage instead of paying rent; this would mean that in the future, if I want, I can loan money and use the apartment as a guarantee.

  • Travel to foreign countries. Among my peers this is a popular hobby which I haven't done much.

  • Buy sex, an option I should try since I'm never going to get any with my current levels of nerdiness and muscularity without paying for it.

No comments: