Well, job interviews with two companies (called Company A and Company B) happened since my last update. I took two days off of work, lying to my co-workers that I was "sticking close to home" when I was traveling to another city to interview for other work. I don't like lying, but am I supposed to say "umm yeah... I'm trying to find other work... so I'm going somewhere to interview?" I don't think so.
Company A. is a small startup. They're doing something very much like the research project paid my bills through much of grad school. The interview involved about three hours of meetings with three senior people at Company A: the CTO, the Head of Development/Chief Architect, and the Head of Operations. All the questions were about general "development philosophy" and some of my previous work experiences. I thought it all went fairly well, but I'm not sure about what Company A. wants to do with me. They like me... and that I have some previous experience that could be very useful to them... but they don't seem have a clear idea what they would hire me to do, much less try to pay to relocate me and Mrs. Geek.
Company B. is BIG. You've probably heard of Company B. They had a much more formal interview process. It was LONG -- almost 7 hours. The day started with an hour with the HR rep handling recruiting for the position in which I was interested. This was followed by three scheduled interviews that involved a lot of standing up in front of white boards discussing programming brainteasers like the following:
Given an array of 1001 integers, taken from the set of integers from 1 to 1000, describe a program to find the single integer that was repeated.
(We discussed four separate solutions to this problem.) A decision point followed the third interview (based on results from the first three), where I was either finished for the day or I continued with two more interviews. I got the two extra interviews. The last was with relatively senior manager who was the hiring manager for the position. I spent about 1.75 hours (45 minutes more than scheduled) in this last interview, answering a lot of personality questions designed to determine what kind of an employee I would be. I figure that Company B. must be interested on some level for a senior manager to spend extra time with me... but will it be enough to generate a job offer? I hope so.
I haven't heard a thing from either Company A. or Company B. since the interviews. It's grating on me. I wrote formal "thank you" e-mails to the folks at both companies this morning. No reply. I find myself gradually freaking out. I wonder "did I ask for too much money?", "was my answer to question X good enough?", and "who else are they talking to?" I woke up at 4am this morning from a dream where I did not get a job offer because my initial salary request was too high.
I am of two minds about what is happening. On the one hand, I keep thinking "well, I must have done pretty well because they haven't rejected me out of hand". On the other, I worry that they just haven't found time to say no yet. I want two offers to chose from, hoping that the answer to both applications will be a meaningful "yes". I also don't want the period of not knowing to end... because no answer is not a "no"... fearing that the answer will definitely be negative.
Can you tell I'm going crazy yet?
said drgeek
on 2007-03-21 at 10:17 p.m.
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