Programming job prospects revisited

I talked with my Nagoya friend a bit about her job and my job prospects. Thinking back on our conversation now, I feel like her attitude toward me might have changed a bit (for the worse) during this time or maybe in the restaurant. I probably didn’t come off as very attractive in the areas of competence or confidence when we talked about careers.

Anyway, because of our conversation I thought more about programming. Last night I opened up Eclipse, looked at the project I was working on, and decided that I needed to start over on the controller part of the program because I didn’t really understand it. The data classes (model) are probably fine, though, and I never really got started on the view part. Also, I need to do a better job with setting up the debugging.

Then today I looked at some jobs. There were some good-looking jobs, but I felt almost no interest in them. Why? I have no idea what the job would involve—why can I write it off as something that wouldn’t work for me? I think I’m just lacking too much confidence. How can I gain confidence, then? In the first place, I don’t really understand what the jobs involve. If I can gain confidence in my programming skills, that should be enough. Also, since I’m interested in embedded programming, I should look more into that—what kind of projects would demonstrate a familiarity with field?

Then I can’t help but wonder, do I even want to stay in Japan and do such a job? Because if I don’t have that desire, I probably don’t have the motivation to work toward these possibilities in the first place.