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...

Montserrat

I am moving back to Ireland in a couple of days, so I've been trying to think of things that I should really see or do in Barcelona before I leave. High up on this list was a trip to Montserrat. For those of you too lazy to follow that link, it is a mountain in Catalunya with a series of oddly shaped rocks. It is famous as a centre for Christian pilgrimage as there is a monastery there with a statue of the Virgin Mary which is famous for its black skin (which leads one to wonder how a black woman could have given birth to Jesus, who, as we all know, was a fair-haired Aryan sort of character who, no doubt, looked very out of place when he lived in Galilee). It was also apparently a centre of resistance to fascist rule in Spain. In any case, it's quite a nice looking sort of place and I very much recommend it to anybody who happens to be in the area.

I took some photos while there. Here is one of the Black Virgin:

Here are some random photos of the mountains:


It's reasonably high up. We took the "funicular" up to the mountains and then there are a series of paths that lead to different parts of the mountain. We wandered off the beaten track and climbed up through the undergrowth to one of the peaks. It took a while, but it was very rewarding. The girl in the photo above (Anna) was wearing beach sandals which added a new dimension of excitement to mountain climbing. It was particularly hilarious when we met a couple of serious mountain climbers in hard hats and with ropes and miscellaneous climbing gear. I think they were a bit put out that a girl in sandals had made it that far...
Here is a particularly great photo:


I'm considering bringing that hoodie with me to other religious sites and making an album of sacrilege across Europe. Watch this space...

Malignant design

I was reading an old article about the American government and its attitude to science. In particular, it mentioned the increasingly prevalent notion that "intelligent design" is an acceptable alternative to the theory of evolution. The Bush government claims that all alternatives should be taught in school so that people can be informed about the issue. Chomsky, being the clever boy that he is, then proposes the concept of "malignant design" for which there is more (empirical) evidence than intelligent design and possibly even evolution. This is obviously facetious, but I like the idea of going to some redneck town in the US and A and teaching the book of Genesis one day, then Darwin's evolutionary theory on the second day and coming in on the third and telling the kids that they were all created by our Dark Lord Satan to spread evil around the world.

I wish somebody would do that.