another kind of me

saturday, january 16, 1999, 03:15 so? how was it? well, i guess the best way to answer that is to say that the company itself looks very cool. what do they do? they make big hard drives. to tell more would involve me yelling excitedly about it and using big hand gestures and saying "interesting" and "cool" a lot. more specifically. how did the interview go? well, that's a different story, and one that i really don't know how to approach. stragest thing about the whole experience was that this was an onsite, second-round interview. which is really nothing all to special except to say that i never had a first-round interview, so they really should have had no reason to call me back, because they really shouldn't have been impressed by anything up to this point. but i got there. and, as always, getting there is half the fun. an early waking the gentle rattling of the windows by the freezing rain and the radio annoucing school closings (and oh how i used to lie in bed listening to the radio hoping hoping that they would announce that school was closed or at least had a two hour delay so i could hold off that dreaded time when my mother would walk into the room and wake me up and make me get out from under the warm flannel sheets and out into the cold room) made me realize just how out of practice i am for function on a timeframe comparable to anything else the rest of the world views as "normal business hours" as it were. the car they sent to get me was stuck at a mcdonalds and couldn't get up the hill for the ice on the as of yet unplowed and unsalted roads. after finally creeping up the hill it took us near half an hour just to get out of the city itself and onto the highway, where the going was treacherous at best. a dozen cars over the length of the trip off to the side. a fedex tractor trailer, it's cab twisted around like the broken neck of some large, now incapacitated, land animal. finally made it to the company with just enough time to get my visitor's badge and make my way to the conference room to sit down with a 10 ounce tropicana orange juice and listen to the hr guy talk about the company for a couple of minutes when my name came up as one of the first people to get their interviews started. welcome. the interviews themselves were different than expected, and i don't think i could possibly even rehash them. i was taken into a small loung with whiteboard by carla, who has been with the company for about a year and a half now and we talked for an hour about the most technically challenging projectes that i've had to do and how i solved them, and group projects that i've worked on and how i manage my time and what sort of long term goals i have. and then she told me what great time she's been having at the company and how they constantly feed the employees. that was the first hour. next was a man whose name i can't even recall. a bit older than the typical just-out-of-college mid-twenty-something that seem to be the norm, this guy asked me about my teaching assistant job and the courses that i took and some basic technical questions which i muddled my way through fairly poorly. and we talked about the products which the company produces and a bit about file systems. and then the second hour was up and it was back to the conference room, then to lunch in two stretched limos, a tour of the building (including a room with 1000 terabytes of storage in it and some hdtv technology -- mmm... hdtv) and then a really really boring presentation from some of the suits in sales and then a final talk by the university recruitment person and then it was back into a car for the drive home. now it's almost not fair to call the sales guys the suits since we five interviewees were all decked out in our very best interviewing dark suits and clean shirts and uncomfortable shoes, but still, those guys like wearing suits, you know? so all that remains is to see whether that two hour block of time was enough for them to make any sort of decision about me. while all during the day, everyone there made it seem like they were giving out offers to anyone with a pulse and a degree, i'd be very surpised if they actually decide to extend me an offer. and yet, as i think about it, i'd be awfully disappointed if they didn't, for precisely that reason. if i haven't given them enough basis to hire me, it seems that i barely gave them enough reason not to hire me. but i guess that's really not the way the real world works. damn real world. oh yeah. and i got my grades for the semester. three b's and an a. not exactly stellar performance. bummer. up one | mail | mon | wed | thu | fri