Opinion: Chase Ultimate Rewards (Part 2 - Latest Chase Travel Information email)

"""
...

As always, we follow the policies of our partners, which means a credit, refund or change is at the discretion of the airline, hotel, cruise line or other travel provider.

...

We understand your feeling of urgency, but we can serve you better when you wait to call us if:

• You are not starting your trip within three days

• You trip isn’t covered by a specific flexible change policy offered through the partner

To change or cancel a hotel reservation, please go online to MyTrips https://travel.chase.com/trips?eapid=0509-70501 and click on your itinerary.

We are also working with our travel partner Expedia to launch other self-service cancellation options soon. We are addressing individual cases and will work with customers who can’t reach us right now.

...

"""

Just read this email today from Chase. As I mentioned in the previous post, Chase did not honor this policy as I provided the email from Alaska Airlines. The Alaska Airlines email was sent 4 days prior to my call. I was not starting my trip within three days, and I was not changing the ticket. Email clearly says cancel fee waived. There were a few additional criteria. My ticket met all the criteria with Alaska Airlines eventually honoring the ticket themselves by giving me a credit.

I had even called into Chase support, yet all I get is the email for generic user. What about those who already called? I suppose it is too much to ask for an apology.

Opinion: Chase Ultimate Rewards Refused to Refund Alaska Airlines Ticket where Alaska Airlines Honored Refund

In short, I have a lower view of Chase rewards which happens to coincide with me wanting to cancel my Chase Reserve Card; and a better view with Alaska Airlines which happens to coincide with me wanting to move away from United.

My situation is that I am flying cross-country. Due to family circumstances, I did not want to put them at risk with the Corona virus even if it is a rather small chance so I decided to cancel my trip with Alaska Airlines.

Alaska Airlines had launched their Peace of Mind policy which waived change and cancel fees. Because I booked through Chase Ultimate Rewards, I called them. When I reached some guy with a moderate Indian accent. After I explained my situation, he goes to "research" his options then puts me on hold several times. Eventually, he says that my ticket is a 'savers' ticket so cannot be considered for fee waivers. I explained to him that Alaska Airlines has the policy which he responds that I need to go through the airline even though the Alaska Airline site specifically says to go through the agency that I purchased the ticket from. He then repeats that my ticket will be charged a cancellation fee.

A bit off-topic, I can barely hear the guy and he barely hears me. When he speaks, there are random background noise. I am not sure why there is such a low quality with support this time. I usually have rather high quality sound and service from Chase or their credit card services. To add, why did he need to research on how to cancel my ticket? And also on one of the final holds, I just got this annoying beeping sound as if I was disconnected instead of the hold music I had before. I was unwilling to hang up at this point, and he did eventually return to give me nothing useful.

So then I called Alaska Airlines which I had to wait a long while. Eventually, I got through and spoke with Becka. Becka was wonderful, professional, and explained that I should go through Chase. I then explained that Chase refused and that I speak with Alaska Airlines. She understood and went to ask what she could help me with. I was on hold for a few minutes. She came back and told me that she explained my situation and confirmed there was "difficulties" with Chase so she needed to reach out to see if she could assist with exception for me. She came back on and said that she could help by giving me credit with Alaska Airlines which I was perfectly fine with (although, I would have preferred refund as the policy stated). Since I was most likely going to fly with Alaska in the future, this was not a major problem.

So, I do not understand why Chase cannot honor the policy the airline was willing to waive. From what Alaska said, they could have reached out to Alaska for a waiver code. I tried to call back to Chase but I was told that the wait was 3-5 minutes and eventually waited 20 minutes before giving up.

Interview: What Project Were You Most Proud Of? (Software Engineering role) (Failed)

I have had several interviews in the last couple months. This was probably one of the most popular questions for me (January - February 2020), "Describe to me about one of your proudest projects that you worked on?"

Because I was a release manager applying for a software engineering role, this question was quite tricky because I did not work on projects. I had other projects that I would like to share but they were not really programming projects or projects where I produced something. In most cases, I managed and delegated so I gave those samples.

Thinking back on those interviews, I do not feel that I gave good responses to the question. I also tried to provide a side project that I worked on as a release manager. The proof-of-concept did not get enough traction to be approved for actual use, although everyone liked the idea. Environment and management of an application was not something management wanted to handle, as they rather just purchase a third-party system or none at all.

Perhaps, I should have used a project that I worked on back when I was a programmer. I am not sure what a good response would be even after seeing what our developers do. Especially in an agile environment, the developers no longer work on projects in the same sense as a waterfall project. They are constantly just writing code per user-stories, test, and refactor. Most of them do not know the full project scope. Maybe they should, but from a procedural point-of-view, this method has been rather effective for the company.

Perhaps more effective for the company in that the developers will have trouble finding new jobs because they may also struggle with the same question. Without the experience, they will not know how to position themselves in such a way where they can also gain something that they can market.

Given that I was not able to even get a second interview with any company that asked this particular question makes me really think that I am definitely failing this question at some level. There have also been other weak parts of my interview that may have also contributed like not being the local vicinity (even though I recently moved to the area) and no in a current programming role which a couple HR managers have told me directly.

Coding: Difficulties of Learning New Programming Languages (Python/Django for example)

I always assumed that it would always be easy for me to pick up a new language since I have already had experience with Java, VB, C#, and several scripting languages. This was kind of the case in the past, but not so much in the modern era.

Knowing a programming language definitely helped me learn Python. What makes learning today is not the language itself anymore but all the frameworks, configurations, all the options, and all the new standards.

At first I spend so much time in just figuring out all the environments that Python can be used in. Maybe this step could be skipped if you already stuck on a certain platform like Windows, Linux, or MacOS.

Then I spend a lot of time just how to build out the infrastructure, like Apache, Django, PostGRESql, MariaDb, etc. Yet, I still kind of regret not going simply with mySQL. I imagine this would be longer for first time programmers as I already had some experience with IIS and MS SQL.

Finally the most time-consuming part of a new language is learning its new framework, process flow, terminology, plug-ins, and standards. For example in Django, I spent the last few days figuring how the engine picks the templates that you designate in the views.py after I built a second application. By default, Django looks through each templates folder start with the order the apps were listed in the settings.py.

At this point, I started to understand the importance of community support. I just could not find the proper wording to find the solution to my problem. My problem was that I attempted to make my template folders have the same structure. Because I did not learn the folder standards yet, I had some files in the template root folder like the index.html. So when I try to access my app2/template/index.html, my page showed my home page (app0/template/index.html). This did not make sense to me because I assumed that the views.py in app2 will use the index.html in app2. I kind of guessed this was the case so I tried to find a way to force the rendering to pick app2's index.html which led me down a lot of rabbit holes.

Each time I meet a new challenge, I find not only do I spend time to research the problem but in some cases, I have to also redesign my application to fit the community's standards. One example is learning about PyLint in its standard on documentation. I had to go through each file to provide documentation which is a triple quote description after the component declaration. I have been using the same method as MS Visual Studio which uses comments prior to the component declaration. It also checks naming schemes, tab spaces, proper empty lines, lines with spaces, etc. Although great for consistency, this took up a lot of time to learn and implement. I do not feel any of my past experience made this process any simpler or faster to learn.

In summary, I am starting to understand the demand for specific language requirements in current job descriptions. I think I would definitely learn much faster with an experienced language programmer to guide me through the differences. I feel that I will still learning faster than a new programmer but will still take time to learn the framework and learn how to troubleshoot compared to an experienced programmer of that language. I feel that it would take me about a month to be somewhat familiar with the new language, tools, and standards; probably a couple weeks if I had a resource dedicated to point me in the right directions. I probably spend 80% reading solutions to different problems similar but not exactly.