When last we left our
heroprotagonist, back in Barely Breathing, the phone interview had gone well, and the as-yet-unnamed company were interested in a face to face interview.
There’s always a gap between Let’s Talk and Can You Do Thursday?, and in the meantime I discovered that Edinburgh was booked solid because of a rugby game. Not following rugby in any way whatsoever, I completely missed that this was happening, so I booked a couple of nights in an AirBnB in North Berwick, a seaside village/town about a half-hour train ride from Edinburgh, recommended to me by a friend (the other escapee from The Horrible Incident Of The Barf In The Night-Time) from the hostel.
Naturally, the call came in as I was getting off the train in North Berwick, confirming an interview on Thursday.
Well, an interview schedule with a bunch of parts to it, starting with the thing which … damn near paralysed me with terror; Use our cloud-based map platform to make a map demonstrating the benefits of said platform, then give us a twenty-minute presentation on it.
Tell the people who know all about the product, by virtue of the fact that it’s their product, all about it.
No pressure there.
This was not helped by the AirBnB having … sub-ordinary WiFi. On one side of the room.
Wasn’t able to get much of anything done on the presentation, but I did at least change my hostel booking from ‘the next week in an 8-bed’ to ‘three nights in a private room’, book a train to London, and another to Aylesbury.
The rest of the time, I did what I could to prepare, which wasn’t much, and spent the rest of the time relaxing.
Back in Edinburgh, it seemed a good idea to make sure that the job interview outfit worked.
Craig wears: Shirt + Cuff Knots from Charles Tyrwhitt, Trousers from Debenham’s, Tie + Shoes from Primark
And to attempt to do the Donald Sutherland in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers pose.
Getting the phone in the way didn’t help.
I spent a couple of days reading and doing tutorials to get up to speed on something I’d never used before, and getting increasingly anxious about what the hell to build for a presentation.
On a side note; Hostel bars aren’t so great as workplaces. Neither is sitting on a bed in a hostel with the laptop on your lap.
Eventually I decided, after being unable to find other data out there which gave me any ideas at all, to map the location data from my smartphone, on the grounds that I had some idea of what it was and what it meant.
I got some of the work done on the train to London (took a morning train on Wednesday, so that I could go to one last Tai Chi class before leaving Edinburgh), and the rest in a state of blind panic† at the hotel in Aylesbury.
Finished building it maybe 2am.
Unpacking that a bit; The finishing touches happened at 2am. That was the point at which I was happy that I’d caught all of the mistakes I could find, and that the thing looked the way I wanted it to.
The point at which it was ‘done’, in the sense of “I will not be adding to this thing”, came at around midnight.
† A shout-out to Gulo T. here, who was kind enough to chat on the phone for a bit & help me to calm down and focus.
Heading for the interview, I figured I had a shot, and was going to do what I could, but that I’d maybe chased myself up a tree with that data; Too much information, so that I couldn’t do any cluster mapping or hot-spot finding without blowing the allowed budget in the free trial of the platform on processing, and I only figured that out too late to do anything about it.
Still, I met a local cat while I was walking around the area before the interview, who demanded to be petted, and then immediately went into murder mode, scratched my hand, and then attacked it’s own feet.
And then demanded more petting when I left, and deposited some fur on my trousers for luck.
They liked the presentation.
I’m not sure whether they expected me to have brought something on a USB stick because that’s what the recruiter said I’d do, and suggested to me that I’d be doing, but … I couldn’t see a way to put an online platform onto a USB drive, so I didn’t; I just asked to use their laptop, logged in, and ran the thing live.
I’ll have to ask them about that USB stick thing.
I’d assumed, given the nature of what they were asking for a presentation on, that presenting it from the website was the way to go, and that Awesome Recruiter’s mentioning of the USB stick was just because he, by his own admission, didn’t know much about the specific platform.
Maybe that was wrong?
Maybe they expected a powerpoint presentation with pictures of the map I’d built?
Anyway, they liked it.
They liked that it was my own travel data, they liked some of the design choices, and they seemed to like the exploration of points which looked to be errors of location, but actually weren’t.
That set me up in a good mood for the rest of the three-hour interview.
The more standard “tell us about a time when” interview questions were fine, and pretty conversational.
Meeting the team, so that I could ask them questions was a new one on me – The closest I’d had to that was at the interview for the previous job, over a decade ago, when we passed through the workplace and I got to say a quick hello to one of the other team members. The other guy wasn’t there that day.
“What’s it like to work here” and “What’s Aylesbury like as a town”, while pretty generic questions, really paid off.
There were enough people that they bounced the reply around, so I got a flood of information about social activity, benefits, some of the charity support, how the company works with regard to folks who aren’t based in that (or any) office, how long people stay there, and a bit about the UK Conference. Also some information on the changes in whether people live in the town, or commute to work from somewhere else.My thinking on those questions was that a flood of negative responses was a bad sign, and a fairly brief “It’s fine” would suggest that it’s not a company or town that folks were particularly attached to, so didn’t feel the need to ‘sell’ to me.
Like I said; It paid off.
The second thing I’d been dreading (Or more accurately, #2 on the list of things I was dreading) was the Technical Test, but that also turned out to be fine, not at all what I was expecting, and was kind of fun. Not sure whether to discuss the content of the test or not, so I’ll leave it at that.
There was a final wrap-up, and chance to ask questions, and that was it.
9:15 to 12:30, so call it three hours of interview, and it had felt more like the sort of conversation(s) you could have at a Tech conference, or maybe with a somewhat nerdy group at an SF/F convention. Or with hardcore gamers of any type at Gen Con.
Their plan was that they’d interview the other applicant that afternoon, make a decision the next day (Friday), and I’d most likely know by Monday.
This is not what happened.
What did happen is that I got a call from the Awesome Recruiter at 4:47pm, saying that they’d offered me the job and wondering whether I’d like to accept that offer. Which I did.
Contract is signed, and I start on the 20th of March.