Losing a job three times in a row

Oh boy, I still remember when I blogged about my experience of losing my job first time and I grew anxious because it took me 7 months to find a new job. And then, I lost my job again as my company downsizing, this time it took me 2.5 months to find a new job. Not as bad as before!

For the better or worse, I have always prepared myself for the worst to come. And then covid struck, the entire global economy collapsed. Indonesia’s economy also contracted.

In the last 5 months, my company slashed like 30 people from the workforce, and I am about to lose mine, by the end of month. To be honest though, I have always wanted to move in 2020, but not like this.

My circumstance was better, I was informed about losing my job in the late May, so I had a time to prepare. My coworker lost his job around mid-July. My bosses and other coworkers did not receive any severance pay as they only worked for two years, on contract basis.

I was anxious at first, but thanks to my career transition from half-assed market researcher to data analyst, the experience is actually not that bad compared my previous experience. While I am yet to receive a formal offer, there were times when I was so busy with interviews, SQL tests to the point they stressed me a bit. Data science job market is fortunately, still thriving, and I am so glad that those endless nights of studying programming were fruitful at last.

To my surprise, the experience is even better because for the first time ever, my job applications to european companies were being processed. Apparently the EU companies are still recruiting non-EU people for data science jobs.

Although I am yet to receive any offer from any EU companies, the experience has given me a boost of confidence. There is a chance for me to work overseas! In a country with a better covid management! With a better human rights situation! (Germany has not always been my top place to migrate until I realized its data science job market is quite big).

It’s almost midnight here. I will have a second round interview with a Japanese research consulting company tomorrow, and maybe another company on friday, and I have two tests to finish.

A reflection of a non-STEM graduate who learned to code

Happy new year 2020! This is my first article post in 2020, as I completed my career transition as an excel analyst to R data analyst, I have met a lot of people who have a similar background who asked me “how did you become a data analyst?”, “can I become a data analyst too even though I am not a computer science graduate?”, “how should I begin?”, etc etc etc.

If you take a look at my LinkedIn profile, you will notice I have a weird background and oddly out of place for a data analyst. I graduated from political science and development studies, working in public relations firm, but somehow managed to pick up some working knowledge of a data analyst.

According to Stack Overflow 2019 developer polling, only 1.8% people with social science background ended up working for STEM jobs. I personally think data analyst jobs are the non-STEM-friendly jobs for a non-STEM graduate to enter the data professional market, the entry barrier is probably much lower compared to software developers because sometimes you do not need to learn how to code at all because of the popularity of Microsoft Excel.

Excel: a weird love story

Actually it’s neither as magical nor hard as it sounds. During the early days of my career, I actually had a short internship at an investment institution. Even though I didn’t continue my career as a financial analyst, I was taught by my coworker how to use vlookup and excel for financial analysis, which I kept using to manage my own investment portfolio. When I studied for my graduate degree, I also used Excel to do my data analysis which was conducted in mixed methodology method: qualitative coding and online survey. During my tenure at Edelman, I also did a lot of manual coding for sentiment analysis, data aggregation with pivot tables, and thematic coding for our clients during communication crisis.

However, I never explored the full extent of automation until I moved to my current office.

The experience was not the most pleasant, as the previous data analyst basically committed the excel users’ regular sins: copy pasting tables from various excel files into a single excel file which is referenced as a “database”. Moreover, the previous analyst did not use vlookup and spent a lot of time connecting one table with another using search button on pivot tables where the delimiter of the key has been separated. I am actually impressed that the previous data analyst could stay sane and worked with such method for 5 years, since it took me 3 months before I almost lost my sanity due to the amount of the manual labor. I had a very hard time meeting my coworker’s expectations to finish my reports on time (btw the previous data analyst is a graduate of computer science school, I am still amazed she didn’t code).

That’s when I finally googled the keyword in google: “Automation in Excel”, and I learned that you could actually automate your data cleaning in Excel using this add-on called Power Query.

After watching various tutorials here and there, I decided to implement Power Query in my work, replacing the manual labor with Excel. So whenever my manual labor has finished, I will go home and tried to reproduce what I did at the office, and it took me about 1-2 months before I was finally able to automate everything with power query. Finally I could breathe a sigh of relief, I finally had more time to create insight instead of racing with time to copy paste tables.

After using Power Query, I decided to up my game and learned Power BI as well, because it is very similar with Power Query, I had no trouble to switch to Power BI and learning to visualize my data and created a shared dashboard with my team as a part of transparency and accountability.

Now, at this level, I have entered a comfort zone as I only needed to press a button to do my data transformation, but because my office laptop is not that powerful (lenovo V310 with 8 GB ram), it often crashed, and I ended up hard resetting my laptop. Whenever I googled “data transformation”, the result was always “learn how to code!”. That was the moment when I wondered to myself “Me? Learn how to code? impossible, I probably wouldn’t be able to do it”.

However, after I read so many news here and there about big data and how excel analysts should pick up one or two languages to ensure they keep themselves updated with the market’s trend, I couldn’t help but to feel FOMO: If I don’t learn it, I may risk myself being irrelevant a few years from now on.

R or Python?

It was not an easy decision when I decided which first language I should learn. I was aware about Python popularity among tech companies as if it’s the magical language that runs in everything and that R is a very specific, niche language more catered to the academics and statisticians. I decided to learn R because I feel THIS is the language that should have been taught during my academic study, in my mind, I was 14 years late of learning R.

I took several R courses in Udemy taught by Kiril Eremenko from SuperDataScience, and was impressed by the course contents as the teacher made it as if learning a programming language “fun” and “easy”. It took me 3-6 months finishing basic and advanced R courses from super data science.

When did I find time to learn you ask? After office hours of course. There were days when I sacrificed my free time, learning how to code by watching the R courses till 11 PM during weekdays and weekends.

After finishing the course, I picked up Jonathan Ng’s Tidyverse course on Udemy and learned about the existence of tidyverse. That’s when things began to change. I found coding in R became so intuitive with tidyverse.

After learning enough basic R and Tidyverse I was finally confident enough to reproduce my work in Power Query with R. And yes, as usual, I used my after office hours and my weekend to code. It took a lot of trials and errors but I finally managed to automate my task with R. I still use excel to maintain a spreadsheet, as not everything can be automated and there are some manual labor to do such as data entry, but it’s quite manage-able.

Perhaps, my greatest regret is, I didn’t learn to code sooner.

Most of my “default” network aka my friends from university are political science graduates. We often joked that we studied political science so we didn’t need to learn maths or complicated stuffs such as coding. I graduated from international relations department. Only one teacher in the faculty had a quantitative economics background, and I only got one introduction to statistics class where we were taught to calculate stuffs using… papers (this was 2005).

Similarly during my time studying at Massey University, my lecturers were more proficient in qualitative and participatory research approach, and their paradigm is like “let’s not oversimplify development in numbers”. Well that’s quite a valid point, but after I graduated, I found qualitative research skills are valued less than quantitative research skills. My sister got her doctoral degree in psychology from the University of Queensland, but she didn’t learn to code either, so no one ever told me how useful it was.

However, after learning to code with R and Pandas, I think coding is not that incredibly difficult if you know what you want to do and know how to achieve them using the verbs. Just like learning a natural language, there is a learning curve. When I studied English for first time, I struggled to create a sentence because I couldn’t find the right verbs and nouns to form my sentence and express my opinion. It’s similar with formal language such as R or python: you need to know the right verbs and noun to create a sentence and create something out of them. In 2020, I decided to write more in python as I am confident with my proficiency in R, and it’s time for me to move out from another comfort zone.

I am not sure whether my lack of experience in coding is universal or not, because I noticed that there are some people in my network who actually graduated from political science and picking up R during their graduate study, but never used the skill on their career.

My biggest criticism is probably directed to my previous schools and all current schools who don’t teach students how to code: you are not equipping your graduates with the basic skills in the big data era. Ok, not everyone need to learn how to code, but I think it’s good to have a non-compulsory option to learn it so they can decide whether they want to join the market or not.

tldr:

1. Can a non-stem graduate learn how to code? Absolutely. Look at me, someone who has been avoiding programming like a plague for almost his entire life.
2. Should I learn R and/or python immediately? Depends! I would recommend you to learn Excel first, and familiarize yourself with pivot tables, vlookup, power query, and power BI.
3. Why should I learn Excel first if you say R/Python superior for data analysis? Because I personally think excel is still useful to visualize what you can do with R/Python. If you know how to do data transformation in power query, you could visualize what you are doing in R/Python with the user-friendly GUI. If you are feeling confident, no one forbids you to go ahead and learn R/Python.
4. Should I learn VBA? Maybe not if you are not working in finance where VBA seems pretty popular. Microsoft didn’t seem to develop VBA anymore, and I personally think it’s a legacy language. I didn’t learn VBA because Power Query is enough to do everything.
5. Which one should I pick? R or Python? I recommend to learn both and pick your “favorite”. I learned R first and then picked up tidyverse, and ended up liking R more. Python is more widely used and will open you for more job market. I coded in R exclusively in the past one year and now trying to polish my python coding skill, maybe it would have been better had I learned python first. Whatever language you choose, you must polish one language before learning another. I chose to code in python in 2020 because I gained enough confidence that I will not forget what I learn in R.
6. Which courses / resources should I use? There are plenty of resources out there, choose the ones that suit your time and pocket. I prefer to buy from udemy as the courses seem more practical. Believe me you will spend a lot of time reading discussion in stack overflow when you are stuck.
7. Is data analyst a fun job? Depends on your personality. I found data analysis and coding as “fun” as it creates a value from something untidy, just like cooking and building IKEA furniture. For some people it’s a pure torture. I know some people who learn R during their undergrad or grad school but didn’t use it since they are not interested with data analyst jobs, and they don’t feel pressure to become a data analyst at all.

So tell me, as a non-STEM graduate, are you still interested to walk in the uncharted territory?

Happy (re)learning!

crossposted from my linkedin article

 

my thought after learning python

In the past few weeks (feel like a century)  I have been taking an introductory course of Python in udemy. It took me quite a time to take this course because I have been using R for a while for my daily data transformation task and I really enjoy it. These days, I don’t use excel other than data entry stuffs or some crazy people ask me to build and ad-hoc report less than 24 hour (I want to slap those kind of people).

Anyway, I have been engaging with #Rstats professionals in twitter, and they are really helpful to ask an emergency help whenever I cannot find a solution. However, if I have been uneasy ever since I read R has dropped in popularity as mentioned by these kind of  headlines and then there is also Tiobe Index, which shows R is now on the 20th place of top programming language in August 2019

 

That definitely made me uneasy because I invested a lot of time to learn R (which has a quite steep learning curve) only to find the usage in mainstream market is declining. I am quite upset that a language that I thought as a good investment actually considered as a niche language. R is still the de facto data analysis language for academicians everywhere, but the market is much smaller than the mainstream market where all the data professionals have been building their ecosystem using Python. While I know Python and R are complementing each other, I decided to step out (again) from my comfort zone and embrace python.

Fortunately, the learning curve seems much better than R. Since R is my first language and I have been using it quite extensively in the past few months, when I watched the python introduction course I was like “hey it just looked like R!” or “I probably can do this faster in R using X function” or “what? you need to make a loop for that in python?” and so on and so forth. It seems having a language helps me to understand other programming language faster.

As soon as I finish my python course, I am going to reproduce what I have been doing in excel and R, to ensure I have a solid foundation for the next step, aka learning the data science stuff, machine learning, NLP yada yada.

4 more months the 2019 will be over! my how fast time flies, but I think I used my time wisely this year!

 

2019 has been one studious year for me

It has been a while since I updated this blog. Actually, there is not much to tell about my personal life. Perhaps a quick recap:

1. I decided to shift my career from data analyst to data science as it seems more promising. I have been digesting data-related technical skills that allow me to catch up with the market’s demand. I started with Excel’s Power Query, Power Pivot and Power BI. Ever since I learned power query, my life at my office has become considerably easier. I have figured out how to automate task and all my data is cleaned on a single click! Amazing that the previous analyst copy-pasted multiple source of data into a single flat table which was tedious and prone to error. She didn’t even bother to use vlookup to minimize her ordeal, and she graduated from computer science! As someone who self-learned data analytics and an outsider from computer science, I just cannot understood why people who are supposed to be smarter than me actually work more inefficiently
2. Related to number #1, I started learning R and PostgreSQL in the past few months. R has a very steep learning curve and sometimes I curse myself why I study it even though I could do everything on excel. But after getting through it for a while, I understand why command-line-interface is preferable in data analytics job, you need to make sure your output can be reproduced and audited. With Excel, it’s hard to keep track of everything. PostgreSQL is a query language that used by data analysts to retrieve and manipulate data from SQL server, and apparently it’s a must-have basic skill for data professionals. Fortunately it’s not incredibly hard.
3. I had my 33rd birthday on 3rd March 1986. I made a promise to myself: I will not make a stupid decision that will make me sad this year. I want to make this the best year ever for my personal growth. Therefore, I am focusing myself to study more instead of procrastinating. Dating? I do it sometime, but only on friendly basis since my chaotic period of coming out in 2015-2018 really damaged my mental health. But after my 33rd birthday, I think I matured, and I am starting to remember my old-self. I have always been a relentless learner, and spent most of my time studying something, therefore, I channel my focus on something more productive aka learning data science.
4. I have applied like 5-7 phd programs and and hundred of jobs in the past one year, none of them caught in, but I will keep trying. Maybe learning data science will become a ticket to work overseas. My friend recently interviewed by a German company who is willing to sponsor her. She has a background in management but shifted her career as a data scientist, and fluent in Python and SQL and various data analysis. Looks like those jobs are really on-demand.
5. I had a nice birthday party, invited my main family members, and my childhood friend with her family (20 years of friendship)

   

   My 33rd Birthday – my father, my big sister, and my mother

6. I got a poodle, her name is Athena, and this furball is so adorable (she’s living at my parent’s home)

   

   SO FLUFFY I CAN DIE

7. For the first time ever, I was admitted into a hospital as I had a food poisoning like a month ago. Fortunately my office’s insurance paid everything (cashlessly) but the cost was around US $500  for 2 nights. My American friends on facebook commented my treatment would cost them around US$10,000. And I thought that price was insane! American healthcare system is insane-er

Now, I think I need to sleep. I think I have been studying too much to the point I use my weekends for studying too, and I am feeling guilty when relaxing. It kinda reminded me when I studied in New Zealand in 2013 and 2014. My brain is currently in “study mode” and I am getting rewarded everytime I learn something. I am not sure whether it’s healthy or unhealthy. In my mind, I am having “fun” since it feels like I am cracking mysterious puzzles.

I get adequate sleep too and starting to workout regularly with the power twister I bought from online shopping channel. While I want to hit the gym and workout regularly, I am afraid my severe eczema bars me from doing anything that trigger sweating. I am getting terrible itch on my neck since 2016 everytime I sweat as the result of skin allergy+sunburnt. It’s unpleasant, but I have to cope with this condition for the rest of my life.

 

 

Romance Scams: Yes That Can Happen to Anyone

Finally I have some time off to write the juicy details of the most distracting events that happened to me last month. Romance scams! Not only once, but twice in a month! Oh boy!

First let’s discuss the first one. I met this guy on planet romeo, who claimed he’s an american surgeon who is living in UK, and he’s looking from a serious relationship. Not too long after, we exchanged our phone numbers and started to chat  there. The guy claimed that his father is a native american, who was divorced by his italian mother who now lived in Australia. He claimed to speak italian and a catholic. His “photo” shows a very good looking guy in his 40 although I barely could see a trace of mixed ancestry. The guy in the photo looked like someone of middle east  ancestry, more like jews than an italian actually. His chat of course, was full of affectionate words, he would always start his chat with “I am thinking about you”, “I care about you” etc etc. He also sent me his “photos” working with his patiens. But the photos were weird – a lot of them looked cropped and had smaller resolutions. A simple reverse search shows the sources of those photos. A-ha! I told to myself, an identity theft!

At that point I should have stopped, but I am curious still: how do those scammers would try to get money from their victim? Let’s say he’s really visiting me in Jakarta, wouldn’t he in the end, will show himself, get caught in the public camera before can do anything harmful to me?

I tried to confront him and asked him for a video call or audio call to cross check my findings. The guy’s real profile speaks with a perfect american accent with no italian accent at all, and his father is still alive and not a native american person. I laughed when the guy rejected my request by saying he broke his phone few years ago after a fight with his ex and has been unable to do a video call or voice call ever since (now that’s the dumbest story you can tell). I then asked the guy, “hey, why did you steal Dr. Richard Zoumalan’s identity?”. The guy blocked me and then he’s gone. Good riddance. The guy’s profile is unfortunately, still floating on planet romeo. No matter how many times I reported the profile, planet romeo just won’t take down the profile. I tried to contact dr Richard Zoumalan through facebook, but since he’s a renowned public figure, I am doubtful my message will ever be delivered to him.

Ok that settles the first scam. The second one!

I met this guy on Scruff. He claimed to work as a consultant at a civil engineering company located in new york. Unlike the first one, we didn’t really chat that much, but we did exchanging pictures few times (nothing graphical), and learning from my first encounter, I also grew suspicious with this guy. Finally the time came for him to throw the bait. He told me he was about to visit Jakarta, thus he sent me the details about his flight ticket and his hotel itinerary, which showed his “legal name”. I checked his legal name and found out there was no result on google. Which is impossible of course. You cannot hide your identity that good. I could even find my mom’s name, who is not active in internet like I do. Red flag? Definitely. But since his itinerary contains another number which is different than his whatsapp number, I crosschecked the number again with TrueCall. Turned out the phone numbers originated from Iowa. Another red flag. I concluded that this guy most probably a scammer, but I still wanted to try how it would play out.

During the day he claimed to take a flight to Jakarta, he turned off his phone to ensure he really traveled to Jakarta. He even made a phone call to me (I couldn’t recognize the accent – it didn’t have a strong american accent) to convince me that he arrived.

Now the climax arrived: he texted me shortly he was arrested by the immigration officer because he brought $350,000 in his luggage, and he needed to pay a fee to be bailed out. He claimed that he needed “anti terrorism certificate clearance”. When he said that, I immediately texted him the phone number of American embassy and told him to ask their assistance. I googled about this certificate clearance thing, and reconfirmed my suspicion as there is no thing such as anti terrorism certificate clearance. I am also quite updated with immigration’s policy and I know for sure, foreigners can bring up to $10,000 or more as long as they declare it. Even if they get arrested, they will not be caught at the immigration line because that’s not where the inspection happened.

The guy later texted me he needed my assistance. I then asked, what could I do for help?

An Indonesian woman (!!) called my number and asked me whether I can bail out my “friend” here. The story was: he brought $350,000 in his luggage, he currently has $4000 in his wallet, and he needs $800 more to pay for the certificate. I said bluntly, “I have no money”. Like seriously, who would believe that absurd story? Why not use that “money” to bail out yourself? That’s a very poor plot, and little did he realize my wallet is tougher to crack than my heart.

This two events were an eye-opening events for me though. Previously I have always been deluding myself there might be someone out there for me even the person is a foreigner. Now, use that insecurity, sweet words, and identity theft, I was actually vulnerable for this romance scam. My friends often called me “stingy” because I concern  too much about money (a typical Chinese trait), but at least I knew, if someone you never met you asked you to transfer money, it’s definitely a scam, and I didn’t let my vulnerability ruin my finance.

Later on, I read about this scam, and there have been many victims. For example this guy lost $500K.

I shared my story to my LGBTQ friends later, and they were surprised to hear. Not too long after, a friend from the community also received the similar scam! It’s happening real time and I advised him to do the right thing and saved him from the trouble. It’s great that my experience saved other people.

Since LGBTQ community are more vulnerable, I can tell why it’s happening. We want to believe there is someone out there that can be part of our life, but seriously, when someone asks you to transfer money and there have been so many red flags, you know what to do.

 

Being in a closet in 12 years: did I miss anything?

Lately I have been thinking about my younger days because my dating life is getting dull at the moment. I am still using dating app as usual, but since it’s dating app, you cannot really expect someone to magically appear and stay even as a friend with benefit. It’s amazing how hard to find one decent person that can become your sex partner. I had one sexual encounter this year. The guy is an ambonesse and a graduate from the melbourne university. He’s apparently working as a diplomat and will leave by February 2019 so I try not to be attached with him. But damn, I had a very nice sex (albeit a little awkward) with him. I have been expecting a second round of sex but the guy has been busy. And even after I turn on dating app, I haven’t been able to find another person to have sex with. I think sex/dating is just quite complicated because everyone has their own parameter and refuse to compromise.

This kind of weirdness doesn’t happen to me in straight dating for sure. I remember having a “normal” time with all the lovely girls that I met and having good time together, although most of them turned into nothing, but we treated each other with a respect as human beings. One of the most unique girl that I met on tinder was actually my friend’s friend, after two dates she told me she was close with someone, and I had to listen a brokenheart song to process the emotion. However even after that we maintain a friendly/professional relationship as I referred her my old (close) friend when she was looking for a position at her company (and they have become a bestie ever since). But the fact that I can maintain a “normal” relationship with her just makes me wondering why non-straight dating is so weird? The only guy that treated me like this was a french guy that I met on a scruff 2 years ago. We had hookup when he visited Jakarta, although again, it didn’t turn into anything, we stay in touch, I even visited him in Bangkok, and this time, as real friends (we didn’t have any sex).

So this goes back me thinking, what would have happened had I dated when I was 17? When I started to be curious about my sexuality? After rewinding my memory, and recalling all guys that I met during my study, I just realized that I was only attracted to one guy. His face is quite unique because he seems having an arab ancestry and good scruff. We are not really close, but when he received a scholarship to study in Japan, he sent me a postcard which I still keep. We maintained a casual friendship all throughout the university and since he has always been my second tier friend, we never catch up unless it’s something professional. It was not painful to think he has married since he’s straight anyway, I doubt there would have been any chance for anything to develop. But again, the attraction was probably just physical. I like someone whose body is quite contrasting to me since I am slim and hairless while he has the right amount of body hair.

Back then in 2004-2008, there was no dating app. How did people find their dates I wonder? Even in straight dating pool, my choice was quite limited. I had a crush with a girl and gave her something for her birthday (now I think it was stupid). She is now married with her sweetheart but I still consider her as my “first tier” friends. But other than people I met at the university, I couldn’t think of any way to meet new dates. Tinder was created in 2012, and okcupid was launched in 2014. Even during those years, there were still an ongoing stigma of online dating. Ironically in 2018, online dating is how you meet and dates people these days.

2018 is about to end. Next year I will be 33. Even after I hit 32, many people around me still thought I am younger than my real age, even my facial hair doesn’t really help. My friends said I have a baby face, but I am afraid my behaviour can be erratic at times too and can be contradicting.

Isn’t this a typical face of 32 years old Chinese person?

For example, I am mostly very responsible about time and money management, but during social interaction I can be very insensitive to other people’s feelings. What I thought something normal people would think or say, would be perceived offending by a lot of people. This has gotten me a lot of troubles and social awkwardness. I have always been trying to increase my knowledge by observing people, but even that has a limitation. During sex,  I am more inexperienced and the last guy I had sex with, said I made him feel awkward. I guess the absence of dating made me half-function as an adult? Although people know me publicly as a “nerd” and in general I am very competitive in my own field and expertise, I think I am failure when it comes to social life.

I haven’t properly socialized since July (after losing my job). And weirdly enough, it feels my “old normal”. The times when I didn’t think about dating at all and always spending my time for myself.

Without dating app, I probably going back to my comfort zone and the life I have always been. I rarely meet new people, and prefer to stay in my room and enjoying my video games or writing something. But investing time in finding a relationship is also part of an adult life, and it prompted me to find dates even though it’s outside my comfort zone. I dunno how long I will do this though, maybe at some point I will go back into my cave.

 

Breaking up: it’s not as painful as I thought

A month ago or so, my girlfriend and I decided to call off our so-called “long distant relationship”. We ended it peacefully. We had a video call and discussed what worked and didn’t work. Despite giving me a greenlight for a polyamorous relationship, we agreed that the intimacy was just not there from start. We became a long distant couple naively after three dates. If I think about it now, it felt like a social pressure. Both of us were single, and we just needed someone to validate that we had a value in the dating market. But I anticipated that the relationship would have never worked out and I told my ex-girlfriend that please don’t post anything on social media because I didn’t want our relationship to focus on social media. And boy I was right, the relationship lasted less than a year and it was really a fiction we wanted to believe.

However, my ex-girlfriend and I, we still maintain a friendly relationship. I told her, the intimacy was just not there and we were more suitable to be a friend. Was it hurt? Maybe it was, but it was not because of rejection, but it was hurt because it took so long for both of us to believe the fabricated lies we agreed upon. However, the relationship was not meaningless. It was my first relationship with a girl, and I did learn something.

The craziest part, I am still thinking about my high school crush. The girl who was not interested on me and prompted me to date guys. I keep thinking and thinking, what would have happened if only we could become a couple? Will I stop dating guys and have a happy public heterosexual life?

Then if I think about it, any relationship with her just won’t work. She came from a relatively conservative catholic background. I don’t think she will accept a bisexual boyfriend. To this date, she seems still single. The day she announces her marriage probably the day I finally could move on completely.

Crisis is over: I got a new job

Yes you read it right. I wrote last time that I was laid off by my company, and I had a panic attack because the last time I was fired, it took me 7 months to find a new job (I got 7 months of severance package though). Somehow this became a silver lining indeed. I received a generous severance package that is roughly 8 times of my last monthly income.

I LEARNED A LOT from this process. Here’s what I learned from the past two months if you are laid off:

1. Live frugally. This is absolute. You don’t know how long you will be unemployed, so you must cut down all your entertainment and eat at restaurants during the weekends.
2. Don’t update your linkedin work history just yet. This is critical: one of my biggest mistake was that I thought I should immediately update my status as soon as I got laid off. That’s what happening last time and it made me unemployed 7 months! The thing is, you are less attractive when you are unemployed. Employers will look down upon you and you have less leverage. And naturally, don’t say you are laid off when you are being interviewed. You have no obligation to do that. A company will not inform how much revenue they get to you, and they will not inform whether their company is healthy or not. Use the same logic: you are not obliged to be completely honest to them.
3. Be confident of yourself. If you haven’t had any recollection of what you did or what you achieved in the past few years of your tenure, you are in a deep trouble, because those are the technical details that prospective employers want to see. They will ask you: “what’s your experience with X?” “how did you do Y?” if you generated a list of project and what you accomplished there, you will remember everything you do. You want to rewrite your LinkedIn profile to make sure it reflects your latest skills and expertise and feeding it with the right keywords.
4. Ask your network / friends / co-workers. One of my most fatal mistake I did during my unemployment period was that I realized I had a limited network. I only had like 300 linkedin connections, and after I was unemployed, I added people randomly and got 2000 connections, it did help a bit, but I didn’t know most of them. Now, after I got a job, I slowly build network with people whom I met on linkedin, and yes, it does work. I reached them out and some of them offered their help. Your ex co-workers and your college friends are very valuable here.
5. Perception is a reality. I don’t know about candidate’s background checking in your job market, but here in Indonesia, employers tend to ask your current salary and expected salary on the employee registration form or during the initial interview. I really don’ like this practice, because it’s basically a psych-war. Anyway, in Indonesia, salary information is a secret information, and people don’t disclose their salary. Once the employer knows what your current salary is, they probably will try to give you an increase of 10% at maximum.

I admit that I was overreacting, turned out all I need was a confidence.

I lost my job

As you read it right, today I am officially unemployed. I have a mixed feeling about this. I have been working at this PR firm for two years three months. Prior working at this company, I was fired from a media company because I couldn’t follow their corporate culture (it was the weirdest phase of my career).

However this time it’s different. My firm’s ENFP CEO apparently siphoned fund to his own company in the past one year (or more), he also had an adultery with one of the office worker. The latter is actually not our problem despite he’s breaking the company’s policy, however the former hit the firm really hard.

After he got sacked almost immediately in the January, the company went downhill. I had so many idle days at my office that I virtually could spend all my day doing nothing but browsing facebook (and applying jobs on linkedin). I work at this firm as a researcher, and my role is to provide the right data to support business growths, I thought I was quite important at my firm since hey, I helped the business! Unfortunately, after months after months, I realized that we had so many pitching but no win at all, and we didn’t have any paid projects since January. I immediately thought there was something wrong with the firm, and started applying jobs.

The problem? I overestimated myself and only applied overseas jobs, thinking that I will be “safe” from any layoff. Unfortunately, no prospective employers ever got back to me, since most of them probably didn’t want to sponsor a work visa. However, as my sister had a wedding last week, and house’s rent was due, my parent’s sister offered my parents to move to one of their empty house (hooray!). I thought it’s the time for me to leave this rented house and move to my own place after a year of delay, effective from August 2018. Unfortunately my salary was not enough to support my expense since I have to pay the mortgage, and that’s when I decided to start applying jobs locally.

That’s when the shit hits the fan. Yesterday I peeked my in-box around 11 and noticed the HR invited me with another two co-workers for a meeting that lasted only for 30 minutes. My heart skipped. There cannot be a meeting that lasted only for 30 minutes. I immediately suspected I was going to be fired today, and I was right.

The HR explained that the firm was struggling financially. The firm only had $33,000 cash to cover their operation cost. To prevent further mass layoff, they need to downsize the workforce, and unfortunately, I was axed as well. I got a severance package around 8 times of my monthly salary, which is not incredibly bad. Combined with my equity and saving, I still could pay my mortgage for 31 months, assuming I am living in my parent’s basement. The scenario is brighter if I can find someone to rent the apartment ASAP, so we don’t need to pay the mortgage for few months.

I have a mixed feeling but calmer as I have been laid off before, but it was a traumatizing experience. It took me 7 months before I could find the right job. I got VERY lucky to get my last position at this firm because I only graduated from a master’s degree and I got fired after 5 months. My CV looked so horrible. When I applied at this firm, I applied for consultant position, as I wanted to get back to reputation management again. But my last manager saw my CV and saw me had an experience of crunching a lot of data, which is ironically, an activity that I only did two weeks before I was fired from the media company.

The good thing about this firm, it has a big name in the public relations industry since it’s an American company, and I worked with so many projects that helped me to grow my expertise. After two years, somehow I ended up developing a personal brand as a mixed methodology researcher who is expert in designing research. But at the same time I feel it really restricts my career move since I strictly could only work as a researcher.

My English skill has been improving a lot too. That last op-ed published on the diplomat actually undergone a minimum editing, to my surprise, and even my native Australian friend said the grammar was okay (yay!).

But the most important part is, I met the most helpful co-workers in my life. I have been working at 4 different companies, but this company was the first experience I felt everyone was so helpful and always watched your back, and they will do their best to support you instead of ruin you. The company culture is incredibly good, that’s the reason I haven’t had any thoughts to move to another office despite the irregular situation that happened since the beginning of January.

I am really sad at the moment that my relationship with this firm had to end this way. I had no remorse, and I really proud that I was part of this firm, but unfortunately everything has to end. But at least I know everyone else is affected.

What do I want to do next? Aside from applying jobs in Jakarta, I probably will start applying PhD again.

To be honest I feel more prepared this time as my CV looks more polished, I have enough saving, I have been living frugally in the past two years, I have no debt (excluding the mortgage), and I have no children! Being laid off like this make me feel I shouldn’t procreate any human beings. I am sure my misery will be doubled if I had any child now.

 

My article was just published on The Diplomat

Take a look here!

https://anonym.to/?http://thediplomat.com/2018/06/lgbt-tourism-and-inclusion-in-southeast-asia-a-divided-future/

I haven’t updated my blog for a while since I want to return to writing on the media.