Rantings of a Black Polemicist

The Interview

Saturday, May 20th, 2006 | Work | No Comments

My last gig ended early, so I’ve been at home with my finger on the pulse of the job market for the last three weeks. There are all kinds of jobs out there for software developers, don’t believe the hype from traditional news outlets. I made the decision to be a little bit more picky this time around, holding out for the really good assignments.

One position really jumped out at me. It’s a Pre-Sales Consultant role at a very cool start-up company. I’ll call the company Cool Startup. I’d be flying up and down the East Coast helping make sales pitches to publishing companies and federal agencies. It sounded really cool, so I sent my resume.

Cool Startup looked at 200 resumes for 4 positions. Of those 200, they spoke on the phone with 40 candidates to see what they were made of. Of those 40, they choose only 9 to be interviewed in Washington, DC.

My interview was Tuesday afternoon.

After making the three hour drive to Washington, I took an elevator to the 10th floor of the hotel and walked to room 1046. There was a sheet of paper on the door that read “Melvin Jones, 1:30pm”. Once inside, I took a seat at the suite’s dining room table and laid out my interview toolkit: a pen, my portfolio, an unopened can of Red Bull and an enormous bottle of Evian.

Bring it on.

This wasn’t just any interview, but an intense 5 hour long tag-team marathon interview designed to break the weak candidates and leave them huddled in the fetal position, sobbing uncontrollably and begging for their favorite stuffed animal. I talked with six different people, two for thirty minutes and the remaining four for a solid hour each. Most of the interviews were variations of the same theme: an intense technical grilling.

“I see your degree is in Mathematics. Remember the Fibonacci series? Implement that algorithm using Java.”

“Explain aspect-oriented programming.”

“Explain the difference between the bubble sort and quick sort algorithms.”

This was all a piece of cake compared to the most important interview that day. Mr. Director of Important Stuff wanted to see if I had what it took to get up in front of clients and help make technical sales pitches. He had a surprise up his sleeve for me.

“So how comfortable are you with talking in front of a client?”

“Very comfortable.”

“Great. Here’s a piece of paper and a pen. Take five minutes and think of a complex technical concept you’d like to talk about and create a visual aid. I’ll be back in five minutes to hear your presentation.”

I whipped up a solid presentation on the Bittorrent specification and an idea I’d come up with in my spare time to improve on existing peer-to-peer networking communities. My delivery was flawless.
As I made the drive back home, I couldn’t help but reflect on the interview.

I’d felt like a completely different person in that hotel room. For that five hours, I’d somehow become the person that I saw myself as. I’d been so busy answering questions that I’d forgotten to be nervous. It’s like someone had flicked on a switch and I’d been transformed into some kind of high-performance machine.

I didn’t expect to hear back from Cool Startup until the next Monday, but got a call on Thursday. Apparently, the powers that be were more impressed with my interview than any of the other candidates. There’s still one step remaining in the interview process. I have to write some code to solve a problem that Cool Startup hasn’t yet defined for me. I haven’t seen the test problem yet, but I can write code in my sleep. I don’t think this part is going to be nearly as difficult for me as the interviews were.

Well? Is this it? Am I going to throw in the towel and get a W-2 job like everyone else? No more consulting? No more billing hourly? No more tax loopholes to exploit?

I guess I’ve got a lot to think about.