Day in life as a Japanese Bilingual Engineer — Part 1

Not a instruction or guideline ! No fancy or big words ! This blog post will be very simple and straightforward. This is a day in life of me as a Japanese Bilingual Engineer in Goalist Vietnam.

So, you might wonder what exactly is a Japanese Bilingual Engineer? What does this guy do?

As the name suggests, my daily task would be divided into 2 big parts “The bilingual” and “The Engineer” (or more specifically “ The software engineer”).

“The bilingual” part is when you are the connection between two or few nation teams. Common tasks would be meeting interpretation, document translation, requirements transfering, requirements confirmation, etc. These tasks are very important or should I say the most important of my job.

I always think of myself as an API. Get the information from one application and transfer that data to the other application . Most of the time, the API works smoothly but sometimes it just doesn’t work. Reasons can be:

1. The data is not transfered correctly. Sometimes, the requirements are too complicated, the techniques are too advanced, interpretation doesn’t go well, can’t convey the messsage correctly. Most of these problems corresponds with language ability (Japanese, English and even my native language Vietnamese).
2. The API’s version is outdated. As you work in this IT industry, everything evolves at unbelievable speed. Last month, your tech stack might be fine but ony a few months later, it’s probably already outdated. As a bilingual engineer, it’s important to catch up and level up your skills consistently. Because if you couldn’t understand what your teammate is talking about then how can you convey that message correctly to others.
3. SERVER DOWN! This rarely happens, but it happens. On bad days, when my brain just doesn’t work, the API is laggy, not working effectively…

People are more familiar with this term BrSE (Bridge software engineer)

“The Engineer” part is just simply coding. I do Front-end mostly. I personally feel like the “Engineer” part is more fun and challenging, also less pressure. I do enjoy coding, it’s like solving a math problem.
Yet, it’s difficult. Sometimes you encounter the technologies that you haven’t acknowledged of, you have to learn and research a lot to make up for that.

And BUGS. It’s horrible, if you don’t understand what is the cause of problem, it might take hours, even days to fix such a seemed small bug.

There are other minor tasks that I have to involve in as a bilingual engineer such as backlog management, quality checking, document creation, etc. Even though ,theses are not daily thing but it’s worth to mention that odd job, micro tasks are always there. It takes time and intefere other big tasks if you don’t manage your daily task effectively.

Stay tune for part 2, where I’m going to talk about what I like and don’t like about my job. And what kind of skills I think I have and I’m going to need to improve to become a better Bilingual Engineer