My Interview Experience

So I had this phone technical interview that required screen share, and I was trying to launch Skype, which I should have done before the call. Skype was struggling to come up. I think it was gathering information from everyone's profile synchronously, or maybe it was querying its entire global database of a billion users. It locked my machine for a good 10 minutes OMG I hate you Skype! Awkward and tired of waiting, the interviewer suggested that we use Join Me. But then Skype was still hogging my machine. Half way up, it let up a little bit. As soon as my mouse responded I went to Join.me site, waited for the response, downloaded the software, waited for the download, installed it, and waited for the installation. By then I had the remaining Skype trying to launch and Join me installation going at the same time. While all this was going on, I had several copies of Visual Studios with my solutions, and SQL Management opens as well. At about minute 23 things started to settle. After patiently waiting (I hope he was, sorry Mister!), he then gave me the problem through email. And my email client was so slow to fetch new emails, I kept clicking the inbox button but my mail did not come yet, instead, another email from a recruiter came, great! this is all under screen share so he could see how many emails came from recruiters, live. Tired of waiting, he then had to resend the problem to my Gmail account. Gmail got it right away, Go Gmail!

The problem consisted of two parts, back end, and front end programming. Since I had a couple of my solutions open, I was going to do the code in the existing solution to save time. But yea, no, this would not be a good test, and the interviewer preferred that I started from scratch. So ok, I had to open a new Visual Studio instance on this slow machine, and create a brand new solution. As I did in a hurry, I forgot to select No Authentication in the MVC option because this is not readily shown on the template dialog. And I can't say I hate you Microsoft because that's my bread and butter. The Visual Studio then went to town adding this bunch of OWIN bullshit in my interview project. With Skype and Join me running on my 10-year old first-gen CoreDuo with 7200 RPM hard drive and SATA1 connection, this whole process of creating an MVC Application with Code-First Authentication database took a good 5 to 10 more minutes, and I was like, damn, why didn't I get a new PC. I had about 30 minutes left, half the time allotted to code the solution. Luckily I was able to complete the backend, with some simple OOP design, barely on time, and the interviewer was pleased with the way that I handle things, code things up, and spice things up, he trusted that I could do the front end part with no problem. So that's good.

That was extremely stressful though. I'm glad I'm not a teenager, or else I would have died or at least, the machine would have. All in all, I love this interview process, and I wish all companies would do the same. Despite my slow machine, which I will definitely do something about, very soon (machine: you and I are going to have a talk, as soon as I got my interviews out of the way), I love having the opportunity to demonstrate how I do things, first-hand because this is something that I have been doing many many years and I love to share. Also, I could think and code way better and faster than I could talk. While it is important that companies should ensure that candidates have abilities to convey ideas, they really should not rely on statements or test result. If observing skillset can be facilitated, why not go this route?