Interviewing

When we first enroll in college, we do so with the mindset of becoming employed at the end of the four years.  While some people may wish to stay in school and receive multiple degrees, I wish for my schooling to be complete.  As such, I spent this fall looking for possible jobs.  I went to the fall career fair at Notre Dame and talked to several companies, handed out my resume, applied on goIrish, and followed up with recruiters.  Some reached out to me, others did not.  The few interviews I had were not as successful as I had hoped.

One company, however, invited me for a Skype interview with its founder and owner.  Although I knew that it was a small company, I thought it was uncommon to have a personal interview with the owner.  Being a Notre Dame graduate, he wanted to know all about my experiences at the University, as well as my experiences in the marching band.  I could tell that he really wanted to get to know me on a personal level.  As such, he invited me down for an on-site interview about a week later.

I’ve never thought of myself as good at interviews, namely technical interviews with a focus on programming.  Although I am a Computer Science major, I am by no means a computer master; I still have much to learn, and forget trivial concepts easily.  Needless to say, I was extremely nervous for this interview.  However, I was greeted happily by everybody there.

I had 4 separate 45 minute interviews, each with two members of the company.  Three of these were mostly behavioral, asking questions about leadership, work experience, etc.  The one other interview was with two programmers at the company, and was the quietest interview.  It mostly consisted of asking questions about experience, languages, and programs.  I feared the worst about doing whiteboard examples on data structures and algorithms which I had forgotten.  However, I was only required to do one example: write pseudocode to find all the prime numbers from 0 to 100.  Often interviewers will ask insanely tough questions that not many can solve, which gets the brain working but fails to achieve a final goal.  What I would want to give is simple questions, to see how the interviewee approaches them and comes up with his or her solution.  That way, you are assessing their problem solving skills while not being overbearing.  They are nervous; giving them an impossible problem will only shut their brain down.

After the interviews, I was invited to go out to dinner and a bar with my main recruiter.  The owner of the company likes to have his employees take interviewees out and get to know them better, most likely to see if they can be sociable.  I received an offer about a week later and accepted it soon after. I liked everything the company had to offer, being of the smaller type.  I’m afraid of bigger companies, since there are so many people in them that an employee becomes a faceless number in a small cubicle, at the very bottom of the never-ending tree of superiors and managers.  I was glad to see everybody being so friendly and welcoming towards me.  I’ve heard horror stories, especially from the fifth reading where a bad first impression will hinder the entire interview.  In my case, nobody judged me, and I felt that I wasn’t being scrutinized on everything.  Luckily I was able to meet so many people within the company (which was done on purpose).

The interview process was very ethical, in my opinion.  Instead of having a board room of multiple people listening to what you have to say, you get to talk to multiple sets of people, all with a clean slate in their minds.  Moreover, the behavioral nature of the interviews assessed how well you would work as a team.  It was clear to me that they didn’t just want good programmers, but also well-rounded people who can contribute properly to a common goal.