Of interviews, and interviewers
Intro
I recent wrote a series of articles about job hunting and interviews for 'CVu', the magazine of the ACCU. People seemed to like it, so I thought it would be nice to add it to the site. Oh, and yes, I do have a job now (crosses fingers).
Part 1: Down and out in Moscow and London
The recruiter was succinct, and to the point. "I've just got off the phone to the XYZ Sports Games studio," she said, "They really liked the class design you prepared, but in view of the fact that you couldn't name an England football team for the next World Cup, they're not interested in considering you for the software developer job."
This was something of a first. I've never been turned down for a job before because I couldn't name my own choice of an England football team. I couldn't even think of a book I could buy to help me over this massive gap in my technical ability.
As it happened, this was only the first in an increasingly surreal set of job hunting encounters.
The next day I received a phone call from another recruiter who wanted to put my CV in for a high level programming job with an online poker company. As it happens, I do have quite a lot of experience programming online poker, so I said go ahead.
He rang back an hour later and said the company liked my CV, was I available for an interview later in the week. I said yes and gave him a day that I would keep free for the interview. Two days later the recruiter's boss rang and said that he was taking over because the original recruiter had left to become a ski instructor!
The new guy then told me that the boss of the poker company was flying down from Glasgow (to London, where I'm based), and would meet me in a coffee bar in Liverpool Street station. This seemed strange, to put it mildly, but I agreed to the meeting - fortunately I didn't have to carry a copy of yesterday's Times to identify myself, since we now have mobile phones.
I sat in the coffee bar - a sort of narrow corridor squashed into a corner of the station, and my mobile rang. "We've moved to a better coffee bar upstairs," a voice said, and gave directions. I have to confess that I was starting to get more than a little worried, but I followed the instructions and found the boss and his CTO.
In the event it seemed a fairly genuine affair, the software was demoed on everyone's mobile phones and we discussed what needed doing - basically a full audit of the newly developed software to make sure it was fit for purpose. Two days later the recruiter rang and told me they didn't think my poker was good enough for what they wanted...
When the next morning another recruiter rang me and asked if I was interested in a job programming gaming software in Moscow, I decided to gracefully decline the offer.
The next opportunity seemed a little more promising. A Very Big Software Company (aka VBSC) in the city might be interested. They would be sending me a test to take shortly.
The test, when it arrived, turned out to be a URL for one of those BrainBench thingies. I duly answered the questions and it announced that I was an expert in C++, and in the top 10% of people who'd taken the test. This would have been more convincing if I wasn't pretty certain, on the basis of the score it reported, that it got at least one, possibly two of the answers wrong.
Anyway, this gained me an interview (the first of six as it happened). This first one was a phone interview with HR and having passed that I was invited to the VBSC building in the City. At this stage my wife intervened and decreed that I had to wear a suit. I was hauled off to a big department store in Oxford Street and told what I was going to wear. Those of you who know me will appreciate just how traumatic the whole business was.
The first interview was going quite well, although they didn't seem to be asking any high level C++ programming questions.
Then it happened.
One of the guys leaned forward with an intent look on his face and said, "How would you reverse the words in this." 'This' was a piece of paper with a sentence of a dozen or so words in it.
"Oh," I said breezily, "just load the words into an STL container and then take them out in reverse order." I was about to continue that a stack would probably be the most efficient when I realised that the interviewers had all frozen with stunned looks on their faces. There was a silence. It seemed to stretch on and on, but it probably only lasted a few seconds.
The guy who asked the questions recovered first, and shook himself. "Ah," he said, "but supposing you don't have access to the Standard Library?" I have to confess that I nearly blew it then and there. I opened my mouth to laugh and ask what compiler they were using that didn't ship with the standard library, but fortunately managed to restrain myself.
I managed, after a bit of a struggle, to come up with some massively sub-optimal solution which didn't take advantage of any of the useful facilities provided by C++. Doing it the hard way seemed to appeal to them.
Sadly, this set the tone for all the other interviews as well, though it did take a further five sets of interviewers asking questions before they decided that my C++ wasn't bad enough for them!
So, I hung up my suit with a feeling of relief and it was Xmas and the recruiters softly and suddenly vanished away... until the new year.
Part 2
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