Am I Not Geeky Enough?

Since it took up so much of my past couple of months, I really should have written about the whole graduate application experience sooner. I guess the most prominent memory I have of the whole thing is meeting all the Super Smiley Cheery!!!! applicants at the assessment centres. Upon walking in, you are immediately greeted by five different people, and everyone is talking and laughing at jokes that really only stoners and people high on nitrous oxide would find funny. With the exception of the Ericsson one, I walked out of them thinking, "Am I the only person in here with half a brain?!" (Thank God for Suzy at the ANZ one.) Then again, I was also playing the Super Smiley Cheery!!!! persona, so perhaps everyone else thought the same about me.

To be honest, I had trouble telling if it was genuine - it's entirely possible that everyone in the room was truly Super Smiley Cheery!!!!. One of the things I love about working at Crown, is that 99% of the people you work with are friendly, and of that 1% that aren't, they're just having a bad day. It's probably due to both the hiring process and the fact that being on the floor for even a short period of time will weed out people who can't cope pretty quickly. I can't think of any advantage to faking friendliness would bring, as with 2000+ staff in table games alone, you could piss off half the dealers in the company, and you wouldn't have trouble avoiding them if you really wanted to. Plus, they've all had to put up with loud drunken idiots and rude players with a never-ending supply of $100 notes (I had this brainstorm that the casino could combine with a cinema, and for $100 a ticket, play a movie on the big screen for 10 minutes consisting of a slot machine randomly spinning, and every now and again, lights would flash. All the fun of a slot machine with the comfort of a cinema chair. Plus, you can get popcorn).

The next thing that stuck in my head the most was everyone's dislike of programming. Everytime I brought it up, I would get some comment about how they're glad they passed first year because they never have to do it again or how they found it one of the hardest and most boring subjects in their course. If so many of the people applying for this job found programming undesirable, then either they were willing to put up with it to get the job, or the job didn't really involve much programming at all. I figured the latter was more likely, which made me wonder why they listed a computer science-like degree as a requirement. The again, most of the people who were at the assessment centres had business IS degrees.

To be perfectly honest, my interest in computers waxes and wanes. I remember going over to Yi-Ying's (now known as Sally) house in grade 5 and she showed me a program she wrote in VB where you entered a number and it would print "Yi-Ying is the best" that many times. I know now that something like that is pretty basic to write, but at the time, I was spellbound. Of course, not having a computer at the time didn't make learning to program very easy (I was just reminded of our first computer which we bought from Toys 'R' Us! It boasted a huge sticker saying it was Y2K compliant).

A few years later, my friend Becca mentioned she wrote a program in C++, and so I begged her to let me have a copy of Borland C++. After copying all the files across, I hit a hurdle. I didn't know C++. I didn't even know C, or VB. I thought programming would be straightforward, like it seems to be in movies where you type phrases for the computer to execute in weird "computer-English". I couldn't find any books on C++ in the library, so once again, my programming hobby was cast aside.

I took programming as one of my Year 9 electives, but the subject was terrible in terms of actually teaching programming. The teacher didn't care at all (well, he only cared that we didn't play UT during class), and the subject basically consisted of him giving us a program written in a textbook, and us typing out the code and executing it (we used VB T_T). A couple of weeks in, someone realised we could just use the scanner so the class was basically an hour of free web-browsing. Ben and I tried to get a game going, but all we got was a picture of a cactuar from the Final Fantasy series, and a few boxes for actions (like Attack, Magic, etc.).

It was only after going to uni that I learnt to code properly (although how proper my code actually is is a bit subjective). Still, after a 6 year stint at uni, I still feel like I'm too noob to call myself a programmer (although sometimes I do just to simplify what my course entailed). I know it's bad, but sometimes, when MrMan5.5 or some of the ex-440 people start to talk tech, I find my eyes glazing over and my mind wandering to some mystical valley with flowers, unicorns, and in which whatever they're saying makes perfect sense to me. Still, I am a sponge, and it's a good learning experience!

After 340 and 440, I found that I enjoy testing and debugging a lot more than actual coding, but I'm afraid that if I got a job in that area, the previously mentioned noobishness would make me fail. I know that I look good on paper (my resume is filled with all kinds of extra-curricular stuff, plus the fact that I've been employed for the past 6 years without a gap), but I am terrified of walking into an interview, being shown some obscure piece of code, and then breaking down and crying because I have no idea what's going on. I guess that's why I had my heart set on a graduate position since it sounded like a good blend between tech stuff and non-tech stuff and they weren't looking for some hardcore geek to add to their lab that hasn't seen sunlight in the past 10 years.

I know that I'm not in the realm of the complete noob (I at least know how to double-click), but at the same time I feel like I am lying when I try to pass myself off as a software engineer - even though I have a large piece of paper that declares otherwise. I thought that maybe for the rest of this year, I could do some tech support work and maybe learn enough to feel confident enough to finish a job application for a software engineering placement. After searching on seek, it seems even that requires some sort of qualification/knowledge and so now I feel too noob to even apply for a tech support job. T_T

I've been trying to work out what it is I want. Do I want a super tech job, as I know it would be interesting, and maybe someday, I can understand what MrMan5.5 and the ex-440 people are talking about? Or do I want a job that is more middle-ground, maybe something that involves more client interaction (years at a supermarket/casino must have given me some people handling skills!)? Or do I want to competely give up on software engineering and utilise my arts degree? Or do I want to wait for a distant relative to die and leave me their farm that I have to tend, while trying to court one of the local village women in the hopes of getting married? Decisions, decisions.