CST Module 5 February 5th - February 11th

Interview

For this week, I interviewed one of my coworker Jhon Aclan who works with me at Keasy.

Jhon Aclan is a recent computer science graduate at SFSU (San Francisco State University). He acquired his bachelor in Computer Science in Spring of 2024 with a minor in Mathematics. A majority of his past work experience is in the IT field providing Tier 1 and Tier 2 technical support for internal users. He recently landed a job at MX2 Technology as a Senior Executive Service Desktop Support while also working remotely at Keasy as a software engineer. I chose Jhon because his career path is something that I believe most software engineers will go through. 

When asked about his career path, in Jhon's personal opinion, it's hard to get an entry level programming job so we have to get our foot into the door either through a similar industry where those career either exists within your work place in hopes that you can eventually move to that position after proving your technical, communication, and ability to work with others. His work in the IT field allowed him to stay within the technology industry and when he graduated he was able to move to a more senior position which allowed him to negotiate/find better opportunities related to his field of study. 

When asked about what kind of technical challenges he faced, he says most technical challenges nowadays can be resolved by reading the documentation of whatever framework you're using and using AI to help speed up the process. The real challenges in this field, if not all field, is the social challenges. Navigating through team members that are difficult to work with, lack of knowledge, communication, or inability to take advice/criticism is the real challenges. His most recent challenge he faced at MX2 Technology was due to a lack of technical knowledge. One of his coworker has been assigned to assist the CEO with all technical issues but hasn't been able to deliver on them. Because of this, that coworker's tasks were reassigned to Jhon as these were urgent tasks that needed to be done. The coworker later received more assignment from the CEO but never responded to any of the CEO's technical request, Jhon's manager stepped in to ask Jhon why weren't they being completed even though those tasks weren't assigned nor visible to Jhon.

My reflection based on the interview is that Jhon displayed the right approach in regards to wanting to work within a specific industry. I say this because I've mostly worked in the manufacturing/warehousing sector which has limited my ability to approach future employers regarding my technical skills. In these past jobs I've held in manufacturing/warehousing, I've applied my programming knowledge to achieve results that helped the quality of the entire organization and have gain recognition through them. But to future employers, this means nothing as my job title was not related to the tasks I can perform. Showing my projects and the steps I've taken to show my technical knowledge was one of the biggest step I've never got to do because I've never even got to the interview phase where I can demonstrate my skills and technical skills. Hearing Jhon talk about his challenges at his work place is all too real. Hearing how poorly his management performed, misplaced accountability, failure to address the coworkers underperformance, and lack of clear task delegation is something I've gone through myself and I know I'll continue to face those challenges. How Jhon handled it, professionally, is something we'll all eventually have to learn and adapt to in order to get things done and have longevity in the industry.

Through this interview, I've gained a lot of knowledge that I will apply to my academic and professional journey. The main one being how I socialize and communicate with coworkers in order to achieve my goals. Moving forward, I will also be trying to get into more technical jobs and avoid different sectors as well.

Learning Journal

Part One: 
https://khaaicsjournal.blogspot.com/2025/02/week-4.html?showComment=1739385977337#c6234805923708428434

https://vladscsjourney.blogspot.com/2025/01/week-4.html?showComment=1739386160185#c704428189554993283

Part Two:
Some of the capstone project ideas I think would be fun or would help me as a part of a display of technical skills would be to create games in the art style of those old arcade games as I think that's something more I can realistically achieve and do. The other project I would like to do from the ground up is probably a health application to develop the skills necessary to create a dashboard, implement the typical functionality an application would have and then integrate AI to it to provide suggestions, the goal of this app would probably be something along the line of keeping a healthy BMI level by inputting in the food you eat and AI would help output what kind of calories you would need to eat or decrease on in order to achieve your goal while also recommending which food to eat, something along that line. The last capstone idea would be something social related, something like life360 because I want to learn how to integrate GPS API's and Maps into an application.

Part Three: 

From this week activity, I've learned how to better use AI to help me draft arguments for my essay, I've also contacted some friends to see if there's potential internship available for next year and will likely try to get those internship. As for graduate program, as of right now i'm extremely interested in pursuing my masters program so it's something i'll continue to research into.