An Experiment in Scotch

I had my first true, honest-to-god, tech­ni­cal inter­view yet in this entire “find a new job you like” process. I’d already been through an HR screen and a design/analysis phone tech with this com­pany and man­aged to do well enough on those to get invited in for an in-person grilling. I’d been to one of these back in Sep­tem­ber and came away unim­pressed with how that par­tic­u­lar com­pany screened can­di­dates. I’m a big fan of Joel’s “Smart and Gets Things Done” approach and today was at least sim­i­lar to that, at least in part.

The ini­tial part of the inter­view, prob­a­bly 45 min­utes, dealt with the CLR and .Net in gen­eral, mainly aimed towards the archi­tec­ture of the frame­work, garbage col­lec­tion and what­not. Over­all, with the excep­tion of one stu­pid glar­ing brain fart regard­ing box­ing and unbox­ing, I think I han­dled it pretty well. I knew enough ASP.Net to at least not sound like a bum­bling idiot even though I’ve got pre­cious lit­tle expe­ri­ence in it. Once this part was done, we moved to the whiteboard.

The first task was to code up a sort method for an array which I pro­ceeded to screw up rea­son­ably roy­ally. In the end it was close, but it cer­tainly wasn’t com­plete and given such an easy task, I was a lit­tle bummed about that. Once that was done, we moved on to design of a hypo­thet­i­cal sce­nario and I got that done but it was ugly on first cut. We dis­cussed how it could be bet­ter and of course, you never think of that when you’re stand­ing at a white­board with not only your inter­viewer but also three other ran­dom guys from the com­pany in the room behind you. One thing I didn’t like about the white­board part of the inter­view was the empha­sis on syn­tax over seman­tics but over­all, it was a decent expe­ri­ence (EDIT 12-19-2007: I’ve given this some more thought and while I think it def­i­nitely is more impor­tant to focus on the seman­tics in a white­board cod­ing expe­ri­ence, the truth of the mat­ter is that I got some­thing fairly fun­da­men­tal wrong so bring­ing that up prob­a­bly is the right thing to do, just in case I have no freak­ing clue what I’m doing.)

Once that was done, we dis­cussed the job, what it would be like, I expressed reser­va­tions over being a con­sul­tant which I’m still work­ing through and that was it. I think this would be a cool com­pany to work for. They are sup­posed to be in touch next week and we’ll see where we stand at that point.

Mon­day is an ini­tial dis­cus­sion with a startup which I’m pretty excited about. Of course, I know next to noth­ing about it other than what I’ve read on their web site but I think a startup fits my style a lot bet­ter. This is all just an adven­ture anyway.