Half-a-day interviews series experience for the first time
Earlier I had series of interviews with a company for the first time in my life. First time I heard about this style of meeting person to person was probably when I was reading an article about how Google hires (#1). Original plan was talking to 7 persons including board members, CTO, and CEO but two were out of town, so ended up talking to 5 employees, all of which were director/manager (it was a startup with a few dozens of people but still), 3 engineers/scientists, 2 non-engineering managers but with engineering background.
There was a code challenge that wasn't hard at all but with a nice volume so that I knew in advance I wouldn't finish everything, which I should've mentioned in advance to the interviewer but didn't. Hope it didn't hurt that much.
While the interviews with engineers were filled with technical questions (some of which were not even on my resume), non-engineers asked some specific experiences and how I solved those, a type of question that I'm very happy to answer. I'm afraid though that I took some time before starting to answer for certain questions, which should be ok but could be done better if I did some practice even mentally.
I was told by the recruiter that there might be a discussion about compensation, equity option and other work condition but none happened. Maybe that can happen only when they are already close to making a consensus for "go with this candidate" that they don't always necessarily share with the recruiters.
I was worried that I might have not had enough lunch (I only ate a modest size of bulkogi lunchbox, which isn't filling my extra-large stomach :/) but turned out to be ok with just a backup snack I grabed in the middle.
They did a short tour to what they're making, which was impressive and truly enjoyed.
Overall interview(s) isn't the most pleasant thing to do but talking about my experience and my passion to professionals in the same field is actually energizing. It was a good experience to find that out.
#1 I think that was on AERA magazine in Japan http://publications.asahi.com/ecs/12.shtml back in 2003 or so. By the way, that article was one of my very first time that I got to know about progressive culture in the then-startup companies in California bayarea a.k.a Silicon Valley and that was definitely the point where I started thinking to challenge my career ie. studying grad school level engineering, going abroad for the career etc.
There was a code challenge that wasn't hard at all but with a nice volume so that I knew in advance I wouldn't finish everything, which I should've mentioned in advance to the interviewer but didn't. Hope it didn't hurt that much.
While the interviews with engineers were filled with technical questions (some of which were not even on my resume), non-engineers asked some specific experiences and how I solved those, a type of question that I'm very happy to answer. I'm afraid though that I took some time before starting to answer for certain questions, which should be ok but could be done better if I did some practice even mentally.
I was told by the recruiter that there might be a discussion about compensation, equity option and other work condition but none happened. Maybe that can happen only when they are already close to making a consensus for "go with this candidate" that they don't always necessarily share with the recruiters.
I was worried that I might have not had enough lunch (I only ate a modest size of bulkogi lunchbox, which isn't filling my extra-large stomach :/) but turned out to be ok with just a backup snack I grabed in the middle.
They did a short tour to what they're making, which was impressive and truly enjoyed.
Overall interview(s) isn't the most pleasant thing to do but talking about my experience and my passion to professionals in the same field is actually energizing. It was a good experience to find that out.
#1 I think that was on AERA magazine in Japan http://publications.asahi.com/ecs/12.shtml back in 2003 or so. By the way, that article was one of my very first time that I got to know about progressive culture in the then-startup companies in California bayarea a.k.a Silicon Valley and that was definitely the point where I started thinking to challenge my career ie. studying grad school level engineering, going abroad for the career etc.
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