The Story Of How There Is A Gap In My Career

"Can you explain why there is a gap in your employment?"

This question wasn't something I thought I would hear in my entire life. But I did.

I've been, essentially, a web developer since 2014. Ever since I graduated from a university, I've never been unemployed before. That was until earlier this year, back in February 2023.

The Job

I've worked in the tech industry for a long time. I never had a gap of unemployment before. I have gone through 3 companies so far at this point. Up until earlier this year (2023), I never had any issues with my job.

Well, "things" kind of happened.

The Beginning

I worked with Vue.js for years, and I mean "years". Like, at least 5 years. I was in charge of building and maintaining a Vue.js admin dashboard for a company I worked for which pretty much handled roughly 90% of the operations needed to make the "LINEMAN" food delivery app work, with operations such as managing user orders, detecting fraud, managing discount coupons, managing promotional banners, contacting drivers, tracking their locations, handling complains, etc.

Basically, almost everything.

The company "LINE Corp Thailand", at the time, was the owner of the aforementioned mobile application. And I was an employee there.

The team that was responsible for operating this app (including me) split off from the company into a new company called "LINEMAN", which later merged with another company called Wongnai.

How It Went

Here's the thing. The developers at Wongnai all favor React.js over Vue.js.

I continued to work on the admin dashboard for a while before my manager decided to assign me to the team that worked with React.

So I had to learn and use React for like a year or so. I didn't like React very much, but put up with it anyway because it was my job. I was also working on another Vue.js app (and the dashboard) in parallel.

There was a discussion about migrating everything from Vue to React. They planned everything, and it happened. They started working on the migration. I was also one of the people who worked on the migration.

My Family

At around the same time, my dad also got really, really sick. Coupled with how I didn't like working on React projects, I decided to leave my job and go to my parent's home at the end of February 2023.

Unfortunately, my dad didn't make it. He passed away about a month later in early April. It was a shock for me. I sat there watching as his pulse slowly went down to 0...

We had a funeral, and after that, my mom and I decided that we wouldn't keep my dad's company running anymore. We decided to clear out the company's inventory and return the office space we rented.

For context, my dad was a landscape and garden designer so we had a bunch of different trees and flowers. It took us all the way until September 2023, but we managed to move some of the plants to a relative's house, sold some of them, and sold the equipment to other people we knew.

What Became Of Me

I spent the past months helping my mom move things around and deal with existing contracts like garden maintenance and stuff like that. During that time, I decided not to look for a job and I had not done any programming at all.

My mom was my dad's company's secretary, but now that he's gone, she doesn't have a stable income anymore. My younger sister is working all the way in Korea.

In short, it's hardly sustainable. We practically have next to no income.

But now that things have settled down, I've decided to look for a job in tech again and hopefully help my family in some way.

So yeah, that's my story.