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first interview in five years
Monday, August 28 2023
location: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, NY
This afternoon at 4:00pm would be my first interview of the ongoing job hunt, my first actual job interview in five years. From the job title of the person interviewing me, I thought initially that this would be a cultural-fit kind of interview. But then later in the day, my first contact at the company sent me a message saying the interview would be a technical one and I would probably be expected to write a Node.JS API. I haven't written such an API since early in my work on the Taxinator, circa 2019, so I definitely needed to do some cramming. So I found a tutorial to help me write some basic API calls to do file system operations, read from the query string, and insert data into a MySQL database (I had to install WAMP on main computer Woodchuck for that; somehow it had lacked that since it entered its current incarnation. Figuring I might have to write code in TypeScript, it seemed prudent to also go through a tutorial on writing Node.JS APIs in TypeScript. But that ended up being a bog I couldn't extract myself from.
I was so nervous that couldn't make myself do anything else through the afternoon. It didn't seem to help that I'd taken a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine, though when the actual interview began, it helped give me confidence that largely translated into an assertive, but not dickish, persona. The interviewer was a middle aged white guy with some sort of hard-to-place accent. It was a heavy enough accent that I had to make him repeat several acronyms he quizzed me about. Overall, I knew answers to most of the questions he asked, and when I didn't, I immediately said so. The interviewer had a cold, humorless affect, so it was hard to work any of my sort of charm on him. He also didn't give me enough room for saying the things I wanted to say, especially the things that highlight my ingenuity (such as, early in my career, using a web server's file system to bypass the red tape associated with getting things into the database, which I wasn't yet allowed to work with). By the end there, I didn't think I'd bombed the interview. But the interviewer ended the videochat with an affect that, in the past, has meant that I hadn't landed the job.
Later though, after a bath and after Gretchen returned from dining with one of her friends named Kaycee, I told her the interview hadn't been too bad despite being the technical kind that I often flub (since, being an autodidact, I don't have a perfect sense of the terms used to describe the things I know). I told her that the interviewer had seemed cold and humorless, though (fortunately) if I did end up getting the job, he wouldn't be the one I would be reporting to. Gretchen has her doubts about this particular job, saying it seems "awfully corporate." She compares my ho-hum attitude about it negatively to how my eyes lit up as I was described to her a software developer job at a nearby Hudson Valley company that maintains a sustainability database.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?230828 feedback
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