I just interviewed with arch nemesis corporation. I spent the afternoon in a conference room, and spoke with four different team members. Along the way, I realized that there's still stuff I don't know.
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My third interviewer asked me to implement a Hash Table in C, from scratch. I stared for a moment, and started guessing how one would work, but faltered throughout the implementation. It went poorly. Having looked it up on Wikipedia, I was actually sort of on track, but still should've known. *sigh*
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During my final interview, I mentioned in passing my current super-secret project, and the interviewer perked up and zeroed in on that for the rest of the interview. I did my best to pull punches so I didn't divulge confidential stuff, but they're working on the exact same thing!
On our way out, he tried to stop by two different managers' offices to introduce me, and happened to bump into one of them in the elevator. Remember a few posts ago where I said, "always have a list of demands?" I literally gave an elevator pitch and ended up doing a short interview in the lobby. We talked pay -- and I think I might've under-sold myself a bit, asking for about a 15% raise over my current job. I threw out a "total compensation" number, not thinking about what that actually includes. Oh well. I guess we'll get to see what happens, given the fact that I whiffed on the hashtable question.
Also, this is the first time I interviewed anywhere with GLBT clearly-written on my resume. :-) It was kind of fun.
Now, we wait. I'll hear from them by Monday. I don't know what I'll do if I get what I asked for, and then some. I'll go from "team lead" to "team member," and start over again in a new company. On the plus side, they're doing better financially than we are, and I may get a pretty nice pay raise. Everything's hypothetical for the moment, anyway.
Excuse the verbal diarrhea. Time for me to go find dinner.
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Getting ready for the Jubilee weekend
23 minutes ago
Exciting! I hope you get it! Would this mean moving out of Austin?
ReplyDeleteDid you follow up the "implement a hashtable in C" with "would you prefer linear probing or chaining?" or even better: "what are the constraints of the execution environment with regards to memory and what are the expected workloads?" then you could demonstrate your adaptiveness and trade-off analysis of the engineering problem -- i.e. lots of reads and want good cache locality = linear probing but lots of writes and less stringent memory = chaining, etc. talk about the trade-offs of each. It's actually a good question if they would've phrased it that way....in fact this might be a good one to put in my pocket for the interviews i'll be conducting in the next few months. Don't worry I won't try to judge you too much for fumbling this ;-) Did they actually ask you to talk about characteristics of different hashing schemes? That's a thick topic :S
An interview question that I like that's kind of "evil" under pressure is: design software to parse post-fix notation and design the data structure that you want to use to evaluate the expression. I like it because (a) it taps a little into their comprehensiveness (i.e. do they remember postfix notation), (b) it is a good opportunity for them to show off recursion and data structures, and (c) its of sufficient complexity that hopefully they'll sweat a little bit and you can see how they handle the stress.
Well good luck and much congrats if you get it! Would this mean moving out of austin?
And seriously that's cool about the GLBT-- but where on the resume did that come up?
Steve
Whether interview style and questions are easy or away with the fairies there is a certain feeling of freedom (and honesty!) about you knowing that they know you're gay.
ReplyDeleteI sometimes worry that it's hard to make that extra confidence sound sexy enough to persuade more gay people to 'come out' at work. If enough of us do it then it becomes another agent for social change.
You'll let us know what the say?
@PlanetX: Nah, I'd stay here. I would have a pretty good incentive to move downtown, though. And what I realized is that my education in data structures is terribly lacking. I'm what I make fun of: a developer that uses a feature or function with zero understanding about the underlying constructs. :-/ Reading wikipedia, I made a reasonably-rough approximation, but it was... rough.
ReplyDeleteI have a few "tell-tale" clues in there intentionally to express my "diversity" status by stating that I was active in various organizations in school. I added one saying that I was a member of the GLBT network group at work. :-)
@Micky: Of course. :-) And I have a book actually on being out at work. I'll write something about it.