Despite today’s beautiful weather, I am here, regrettably, to take the Information Technology Examination. And this is despite it being almost certain that I will not pass.I have been far too busy with work to study at all (that is an excuse; advancing age has already robbed me of both the perseverance and ability to study :-D. The last time I took an exam was 10 years ago….) So why am I taking it? Because my company keeps pestering me to do so.
In fact, until reaching this age, I had steadfastly refused to take the Information Technology Examination. The reason is that I am not an SE. I am an economist. Before joining the company and studying abroad at its expense, I worked on topics such as “The Impact of the First Gulf War on the Tokyo Stock Market.” My studies abroad were also in economics.
This sort of analysis uses computers quite extensively. The research above was linear because it used input-output tables, but analysis is often nonlinear, and that increasingly required databases and statistical software to be organically integrated for computation. Necessity therefore drove me to build a TCP/IP network connecting them. The system used Sun SS2 machines, 30 units plus a 450 or something similar, running Sybase, with S plus on the clients (or C or Fortran for more intensive computation), while generated EPS files and the like were incorporated into LaTeX to produce reports. Systems work accounted for 8 tenths of the company, but I belonged to the remaining 2 tenths and received almost no cooperation from the systems side, so I had to do it myself. Researchers communicated primarily through SMTP/NNTP/Talk. The same environment was instantly generated no matter which of the 30 terminals one logged in from. That was the kind of system it was. This was in the year 90. Hostnames such as ukihashi were taken from chapter titles in The Tale of Genji. There were, however, 4 exceptions: machines used for Gulf War analysis named “Saddam,” “Bush,” “Gorby,” and “Kaifu.” (Ironically, Saddam was the last one left in the real world.)
This is what would now be called an intranet. Then, when the Internet and intranets exploded in the year 94, my work shifted in that direction.
But I repeat: I am not an SE. The professional SEs I respect are on a different level from me. They are people liable to begin speaking machine language without warning. (The limit for my peers in everyday conversation is Perl at best.) There is no point in an amateur competing against someone with genuine academic training. This applies to other fields as well, and should be acknowledged honestly. To preserve my identity as someone who is not an SE, I had decided not to take the Information Technology Examination.
But age has caught up with me. I no longer have the energy to resist. So I decided to take it, but since I have no time to study, there is no way I can pass, is there?
Even so, why does it last so long? The morning session has ended, and although the allotted time was 90 minutes, I finished in less than 40 minutes…. Most questions simply come down to whether you know the answer, so each of the 1 questions does not take 1 minute. They could let us leave after 30 minutes. Better yet, if they let us continue with the afternoon section, I could finish everything in the morning and go have fun in the afternoon…. Am I the only unserious examinee who thinks this way?
While all this was happening, I ran into someone from my company. He is a year or two older than I am. He too grumbled, “At this age….” Surely there are more important things to do, he said.
When I left the afternoon examination at the earliest permitted time, he emerged at the same moment. For the afternoon II examination, we had to choose one of 2 questions. Looking at the answer sheet, Question 2 seemed to require less writing, so I chose Question 2. He said he chose Question 2 for exactly the same reason. 😀
On the way home, I stopped at Bic Camera in Tachikawa and bought a collection of stock materials and other items. Tachikawa was incredibly crowded. I wonder what was going on….
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