Day 52 Matchmaking

24 Mar 2020

Due to matchmaking, we had no class today.

Matchmaking is usually a series of in person interviews held at Tech Elevator. This time, we used Zoom to do interviews remotely. Because everyone is working from home and schools are closed (Re: Coronavirus) things have been shifted. A few companies dropped out of matchmaking, a few companies joined matchmaking. One company I was going to meet with today rescheduled.

That means I met with two companies today: Big Lots and ODW Logistics! I don’t want to comment too much on the specifics of the interviews, but I will say that the virtual matchmaking was way less intimidating than I imagined it in my head. The pathway directors worked hard to ensure a seamless experience and I can’t imagine it would have been any better in person! It was great to get exposure to interviewing and connecting with recruiters remotely.

Spent my time in between interviews working on a basic javascript chess game to develop my event handling skills and DOM Manipulation skills. For now, it loads the board and you can move pieces around, but there are no rules. Check it out here!

Okay, a Postscript

I try to keep this blog mostly about technology, a record of my journey to becoming a software developer, but today I want to address the elephant in the room.

Though virtual matchmaking was a success and Tech Elevator has generally been incredibly accomodating in the transtion from in person classes to entirely online, things are not normal! We learned on a day’s notice that we were going to be going all remote and since then, we haven’t skipped a beat. There’s a global pandemic and we haven’t deviated from the syllabus one bit!

Now obviously, there’s some benefit here: We will still graduate on time and (presumably) still get jobs on time. And Tech Elevator isn’t the only organization refusing to slow down. Many tech companies are still hiring and prepared to onboard new employees entirely remotely.

I’m grateful to be in an industry minimally affected by the rest of the economy grinding to a halt, but I am not unaffected. What plagues me are philosophical concerns about what it means to have an economy too stubborn to slow down and reorganize to meet the emergency needs of the public. Graduation from a Tech Bootcamp can wait, can’t it?

But, it won’t. And I won’t. I’ll move forward with my eye on employment. I’ll remain as upbeat as possible and continue to focus on my career trajectory. But I won’t do so unaffected.