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Job interview

2021-03-12

So, yesterday was my first proper job interview for my first proper job. It was an interesting experience and didn't really match my expectations, I was expecting to be asked a bunch of very formal questions about what I know about the company and how committed I am to the company's future or something and then a bunch of job interview coding tasks on top of that.

But it turns out that wasn't at all how it went. Instead I got this pretty chill dude that just first gave me a short introduction to what the context of the position I was applying for (trainee software developer) was in the company's bigger structure. Then he interviewed me on my personality, which was a slightly weird experience but it was done in a friendly way and I'm pretty bad at acting, so I just tried to be genuine in my answers.

After that there was a short, and I mean short, coding part. It was easy stuff, like constructing a list of 10 random numbers from 0-100, calculating the euclidean distance between two 2D coordinates, counting the sum of the lengths of the sides of a triangle based on three coordinates and writing a couple of unit tests. When I mentioned that I expected the coding part to be harder, they said they'd scrap the entire thing if they could expect people to be honest about their GitHub/Gitlab code, so all they really wanted to see was that my coding looked like that in the projects I mentioned on my CV.

The toughest part of the interview where the logic puzzles. The first one was a lock puzzle where you had to figure out a combination based on a number of clues. This was easy enough and the interviewer commented that I completed that puzzle very quickly. The rest of the puzzles didn't go that well though. I had to come up with an algorithm to filter out certain polygons and I couldn't come up with a good enough rule to do it.

The final puzzle I struggled with immensely. It was basically an puzzle that looked like a physics exercise about a boat in an oil tanker where you had to determine what happens to the surface level of the oil if an anchor in the boat is thrown into the oil. Ultimately I had managed to reach all three answers by reasoning in different (wrong) ways: surface level stays the same, surface level goes down and surface level goes up. Then I was told only 1% of people get the right answer. That made me suspect trickery, but I couldn't figure it out. The correct answer would have been that there isn't enough information given to solve the problem, because it had mentioned nothing about what the anchor was made of.

That lead to the final evaluation. Based on the oil tanker puzzle the interviewer concluded that I have a tendency to make assumptions about the world so I can mold the world into one I can logically reason about. But he said that my logic, when applied in a well-defined scenario, works well and that he liked both my coding and my personality. He didn't like how concise my CV was though, which is fair enough since I'm bad at summarizing my life on a small piece of paper and thus I mainly focused on my skills rather than what I am like as a person.

Then after a bit of going back and forth and giving feedback, the interviewer asked me if I wanted to know what the result of the interview was then or the next Monday. I figured that either way it wouldn't make too much of a difference, so I asked him to let me know there. I felt like I had kinda bombed some parts of the puzzles, so I was mentally preparing to be turned down. But nope, he said I was hired. He did tell me that the job would require removing the blinders, but that if I could do that I would find a good place on the team.

So, that's the story about how I got my first job at my first job interview. Job starts in May and apparently involves getting to learn about all sorts of newly maturing technologies without having to worry about any legacy baggage. Right now I'm thinking that I'll naturally work there the summer and by November I should have a pretty decent idea about how fun the work is. If the job suits me well, I'll probably work one or two days a week while in uni. They also said they have plenty of interesting graduate thesis topics to offer, so I could also combine work and study that way. Then, depending on how I'm feeling at the time, I might even apply for a regular position in the company after graduating.

For now though, I have rewarded myself with a new Ryzen R7 3700X CPU and a faster kit of RAM. It was a bit of a hasty upgrade and I probably could have made do with the R7 1700, but with how temperamental it's occasionally been, I felt the upgrade was justified.

Anyway, that is all.