New Job!

Got a new job. It's a 6-month contract but so what, it's better than nothing.

My job search was short, but admittedly very frustrating, with many interviews but no offers prior to this company (who are clearly desperate for someone). The main problem was simply how Singaporeans think. "Never come between a Singaporean and a rule," the saying goes. Well, a lot of job postings in Singapore have experience requirements; and while in other countries they might take these as a guideline ("approximately 1 year" for example), in Singapore I found many companies took this as a rule. So I could have 11 months of work experience (I have 10) and they would categorize me as having no experience rather than 1 year. Kind of stupid but that's how it works.

 

Anyhow, the lesson is that knowing the work is temporary, I've got to keep looking and improving myself. Maybe it's the economy, but it's clear that my qualifications aren't holding well in the current job market.

Wish I knew where to go with this, though…my personal feeling is that hiring managers struggle to see me as an effective HR professional if I lack experience in local HR regulation, since my degree is foreign. So I've been looking into taking a postgraduate diploma from a local institution. Problem is there's two HR certification institutions in Singapore, and I have no bloody idea which one I should choose. I've looked into both websites and both ways to certify look like heavy time, effort, and money commitments. So I've got second thoughts, especially with this new job coming up.

July 17th (highly belated)

Okay, it's been a good while since I last wrote for my public blog.

In short, I had an alright departure from my previous company. My senior highlighted that it was a change of management direction that created budget changes for the department, causing me to not get my expected contract extension, so none of the blame is on me. They must know it felt like shit.

 

In the month since, I've mostly been chilling out and working on my project while applying to jobs. I've had interviews with about 6-8 companies (lost track a while back), so that's good. But nothing has really been converted into an offer yet. I'll keep working on it, I guess.

 

Ironically the games are doing the poorest - everything just feels boring and eh. Even though the summer sale just ended and I went on a shopping spree, I found most of the games I bought lackluster, and I have limited motivation to play my old/existing games. Am I outgrowing video games? I don't really think so. I just have this vision of a game I want to play and I'm trying to look for games that are similar to my vision, but I've played through just about every possibility I can find, and nothing gets close enough to what I want. There are good games out there but they aren't relevant to my goals, and I suspect I feel bad for playing them out of enjoyment, knowing I have a project to work on.

 

I've also been kind of feeling…directionless? Let me put it this way. I started my game project with the full acceptance that my "failure rate" is above 95%. My goal, you see, is to make something fun that people will want to play - and why would anyone play my game? It's not like music or visual art; games comprise an oversaturated market of half-decade-long projects built by teams of highly experienced professionals with a variety of different specialized skillsets. A single talented person can hope to make quality music or art, but they cannot hope to best the might of a full organization. At least that's what I think.

 

I also thought, perhaps overly idealistically, that video games might be used as a medium for change. Literature and art have been used as catalysts for positive societal change for millennia; why not, then, a digital medium consumed by millions of youth that serves as a platform for literature, art, and music? But at least in the current day, I question if there is really a place for video games with social statements. The nature of video game development lends itself to corporate production, and the core audience of many video games, I think, lacks interest in such things.