Yusuke: Two Hundred Applications, a Quiet Pipeline, and Semios Agritech

Yusuke entered Canada as a career changer with no prior professional engineering experience. CICCC’s mobile track taught Swift, but COVID forced remote study from Japan and the web schedule was overnight Japan time, so he wanted web yet stayed on mobile. Semios’s mobile stack is Android, so school iOS skills were not a direct fit; he self-taught frontend for the role.

Search started early March aiming for May Coop; offer mid-June; start July 1. About two hundred Indeed applications, four interviews, one offer. Process: HR phone screen, then a take-home JavaScript and React exercise covering algorithms, API request and response, and components—then silence. Proactive follow-up shifted him from a customer track to an internal track, then references: instructor, Canadian part-time employer, and a Japan employer. Canadian part-time had included web-service site renewal; portfolio featured a skateboard hobby app. Authorization stacked Coop plus WHV covering about two years.

Semios is agritech and IoT agriculture in Vancouver—sensors into fields and orchards. On the internal web and mobile team of about ten people he splits roughly eighty percent frontend and twenty percent backend including API work, using Docker when needed though it was not listed in the posting. Work is mostly remote after two office visits tied to hardware. At interview he had been in role about seven months with light overtime—roughly ten overtime days. Another Frog alum, Taishi, also CICCC, was already on the customer-facing side.

He advises asking when pipelines go quiet and practicing interview stories—even school projects—framed clearly. Months-to-offer is not stated in attributes. The hard path’s punchline is the reset: silence is not always rejection if you knock again.