Employment

Those of you who have been paying close attention to this blog will have noticed that I am doing the coolest of cool - living in a small town outside Dublin with my parents and claiming the dole every week.

I have made a handful of applications to a handful of companies. I'm looking for a role as a software engineer. The position has to be genuinely interesting, challenging and well-paying. There seems to be a shortage of this sort of position for recent graduates...

Last week I interviewed with a certain well-known business consulting company, for their technical solutions subsidiary. The interviewing process consisted of three separate interviews: a technical interview; a HR interview and an interview with the senior executive in charge of the department.

The technical interview was, quite frankly, a waste of everybody's time. It consisted of standard java interview questions which are freely available on the intertubes (what's the difference between an interface and an abstract class?), questions about unix (CHMOD and PWD) and questions about my college projects which the interviewers didn't really understand.

The HR interview was the usual bullshit questions that everybody gets asked. The senior exec interview was the most interesting. He was an hour late, presumably because senior execs are startlingly inefficient.

It quickly emerged that the man in charge of the software engineering department knew only a little COBOL. When I tried to talk about anything even slightly technical it went over his head. He was a very pleasant person to talk to and quite intelligent, but he was a businessman and should not have been heading a technical department. We talked about the technology they use and why they should diversify in order to actually be innovative, rather than just saying they are.

At this stage, he told me he had the impression that I had doubts about working in a corporate environment. I told him that I did and that I had read the horror stories about the engineers writing poorly designed, inefficient programs because that's what middle management wanted. I explained that I wanted to write interesting software in the most efficient manner I could. I told him I didn't want to be a "drone in the corporate machine". I explained that if he was looking for somebody with basic Java skills who would translate his notes into bytecode without ever tuning in and thinking about the problem, he needn't bother offering me a position. He then asked me if I had sat a Java test and I told him I hadn't. He called up the hiring manager about that, spoke to her briefly and then announced that they didn't think one would be necessary.

Two days later, the hiring manager called me to say that they felt I should look for a job somewhere which wouldn't be as structured and restrictive as their company. While they felt I had the technical skills for the position, they thought I would be unhappy for the first two years as the work would be routine and boring.

It seems I'm not enough of a hacker to work for Google but too much of a hacker to work for a regular company. Thankfully, I have three more aces up my sleeve. Stay tuned...