Long time no see — my last post here was back in January, and a lot has happened since. Five months. That is how long it took from "I think I am ready for something new" to actually sitting down on day one of a new job. I had no idea it would take that long, and honestly, nobody warned me.
The Job Search Nobody Romanticises
There is a specific kind of tired that comes from interviewing while still employed. You finish a full day of work, open your laptop, and spend the evening preparing take-home assignments, practicing system design on a whiteboard app, or reviewing data structures you have not thought about since university. Rinse, repeat, five months.
My situation had an extra layer: most of my target companies required interviews in both English and Japanese. Explaining distributed systems architecture in a second language while trying to sound calm and competent is, to put it diplomatically, a workout. There were sessions where I blanked on a Japanese technical term mid-sentence and had to make a graceful detour through English — or just invent a sufficiently convincing pause.
I kept a spreadsheet. Forty-something applications, a dozen first-round interviews, several technical assessments, a few final rounds. Each rejection taught me something, even when the feedback was the classic "we went with another candidate who was a slightly better fit" — which, as we all know, is the job-search equivalent of "it is not you, it is me."
Seven Years and Still Feeling Like a Fraud
Here is the part I did not expect: I have seven years of professional experience. I have shipped things. Real things, used by real people. I have mentored juniors, led small teams, and debugged production issues at midnight. And yet, every time I clicked "submit" on an application, there was a quiet voice asking if I was actually qualified.
Imposter syndrome does not care about your years of experience. It is remarkably immune to evidence. I would read a job description, feel confident about 90% of it, and immediately fixate on the 10% I was less certain about — as if that 10% would define the entire outcome. Spoiler: it rarely does. The interviews I felt worst about were often the ones I passed. The ones I felt best about were sometimes the ones that ended with a polite rejection email two weeks later.
What helped, eventually, was reframing the process. I was not trying to prove I was good enough. I was trying to find a place where my particular combination of skills, experience, and working style was genuinely useful. That shift — from supplicant to evaluator — made the whole thing considerably less miserable. Slightly less miserable. Somewhat less miserable.
Why a Startup
When the offer from this startup came through, I ran my usual due diligence: checked the financials, talked to current and former employees, asked uncomfortable questions in the final round about roadmap, team structure, and what "we move fast" actually means in practice. I have been in enough jobs to know that phrases like "flat hierarchy" and "greenfield opportunity" can mean very different things depending on who is saying them.
What convinced me was not the pitch — it was the specifics. A small, focused team. A product with clear problem-solution fit. Engineers who could explain technical decisions and the tradeoffs behind them. And, critically, a level of ownership that a larger company would simply not offer at this stage of my career.
At a startup, the work is not pre-chewed. You build things that do not exist yet, make calls that stick, and live with the consequences either way. That is terrifying in the best possible sense. After years of contributing to established systems and processes, I wanted to feel the weight of real decisions again.
Day One
Today is May 1st — technically a regular Thursday, sandwiched right in the middle of Golden Week. Japan is in that odd pocket where the holidays bookend the week: Showa Day was Monday, and Constitution Day, Greenery Day, and Children's Day are still ahead. Most people have taken the intervening days off to bridge the gap, which means the city is quiet, the trains are spacious, and I am, apparently, starting a new job.
I do not know exactly what the next chapter looks like. Startups are, by definition, a bet on an uncertain future. But I am going in with seven years of scar tissue, a much better interview process than I had five months ago, and enough self-awareness to know that imposter syndrome will probably show up again on day two.
That is fine. It can sit in the corner. There is work to do.