I originally came to Japan as a software engineer five years ago but, bad luck, my company went bankrupt three months in. Later I found an automation engineering job (mainly python) in cybersecurity. Everything was going okay until many things happened and was moved into a non-coding cysec job. The job is not hard and I’m barely doing anything with lots of free time everyday. Which was great for short term financial stability during corona, but bad for long term career vision.
After all this time, I got to a point where I gotta do something about my career. Because if I want to change jobs or my company suddenly fires me, then I got no skills to escape this cage I’ve trapped myself into. No career security whatsoever. So only way to solve this is by going back to where I started.
I’m using this free time I have to finally study foundational knowledge I never got to learn properly such as data structure and algorithms which is filling lots of gaps.
But I’m lost as to what comes after that. What should I do to help improve as much as possible? Are there any coding meetups or boot camps that might help me? What languages/technologies should I know for a job in the Japanese market?
I’m 28, based in Kanagawa and speak Japanese pretty well.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated
1 comment
My general advice would be:
* (Re)learn the fundamentals like you’re doing
* Practice coding interviews, including coding on a whiteboard
* Pick a specialization and get really good there
* Go to conferences and meetups. There’s a pycon in Tokyo for example.
As for the specialization, it could be whatever you did before, or security. It will probably be hard to switch to a new field on your own, but not impossible.
As for what languages to learn, it depends on your specialization. If you can give some more info I might be able to give more advice.
(Edit for formatting)