Wow.
2007-12-11 03:03 -
No, not in the addicting computer game sense (capitalization matters), although the meme of Funny Farm has been spreading through both the Alcove and through Caltech…
I got back to campus after a very crazy day of interviews in the Bay Area. Suffice it to say, my brain was very systematically and thoroughly picked apart, and the limits of my knowledge were pushed. Five (yes, 5) technical interviews, thankfully punctuated by lunch, will do that to you. I won’t discuss any of the specifics of what I was asked because I believe in keeping my NDA’s, but I thought that in general that I did substantially better on networking, design, and high-level explanations compared to low-level UNIX semantics and syscalls. Thankfully, I was advised (reassured?) that my thought process mattered a lot more than my ability to immediately come up with the right answer, but I still definitely felt very nervous throughout the whole process. It’s over and done with though, and now I just need to wait to see what happens next…
This contrasted a good deal with the company I interviewed with last week where I was asked primarily algorithms questions and very little on systems administration, scripting, etc. even though I was interviewing for a similar role blending sysadmin and coding work. Interesting sides of the coin.
Overall, having interviewed with two aggressively-growing companies in Silicon Valley, I have to say that I like the way that we hire for technical roles at Three Rings a lot better – initial phone screen discussing previous projects, drilling down into details of those projects, paid code challenge to write mini-games using our toolkit, then final onsite interviews that seemed to me to be more about compatibility with the team rather than about grilling about ability to recall/figure out information on the fly. However, I recognize that Three Rings is a much smaller company, and growing much more slowly, so it can take the time to ask people to write sample code over the course of a week and to review the code, rather than trying for immediate answers.
We’ll see whether anything comes of the interviews. Depending upon how skittish the companies are regarding their NDA’s, I may at some point ask permission to think ‘out loud’ here about what factors are pulling me one way or another, as well as to actually identify the companies in question. Right now, were I to get an offer, and assuming the compensation were equal, I really don’t know what I’d choose – I see wonderful cultures at both companies and a great opportunity to learn as well as accomplishing something. I have a gut instinct, but I need to carefully think through everything as well as know what concrete things are on the table.
Changing topics to things that won’t draw the ire of legal departments, I had a rather alarming set of misadventures on my way back to Caltech. I got to the airport at 3:20, just after the 3:15 departure for LAX. My original flight was 7pm, so I tried to standby for the 4:05PM flight to LAX, only to be told that it was canceled and that I had the choice of switching to the 5:10 flight to LAX or the 5:40 flight to BUR. Except things went south from there – the 5:10 flight was facing increasing delays (first 10 minutes, then 20, then it became clear that it was already 5:35 and the flight before the LAX flight at that gate hadn’t even started boarding). After consulting Amtrak’s schedule from BUR to Union Station, I decided to cut my losses and switch to the flight to BUR. This was in retrospect a good decision, as we got into BUR at 6:35, the Amtrak train from BUR to Union Station departed at 7:05 (same cost as Flyaway and much more reliable, plus 1/5 of a free oneway intra-CA ticket on Amtrak), and I was at Caltech by 8:30.
There was just one wrinkle: while I was riding the Gold Line, a woman in her 40’s boarded the train and proceeded to yell obscenities at other passengers, demand from strangers to know where her parents and husband were, and demand that people light her cigarettes on the train. At one point, she shouted “she’s going to kill us all”, started demanding that the train stop this very instant so she could get off, and started kicking in the doors of the car and the door to the vacant operator area in the back of the train. At that point, I ended up calling the sheriff’s hotline because I had become concerned for my safety and her safety as well. Eventually, the train did come to a stop at a station where the doors opened on the side she was trying to ‘get out’, but it was a little bit hair-raising. I really wish that there would be better care for individuals who are having mental issues and are incapable of guarding their own safety…
DIlation’s been going a little bit better – 2-3 hours each day over the past few days. I think that if I try to be a little bit more regular about dilation, things should finally get down closer to 2 hours from now on.
I need to focus on physics from now until Friday. And making sure I have cellphone reception.
<- 6 months postop Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes... ->
