The one time I /needed/ a job, there was a Brass Ring job fair happening in San Jose; one of those affairs where you can (and I'm not kidding) smell the desperation and fear as too-well-dressed people tender their fancy (but essentially vacuous) resumes to harried booth staffers who ("please, dear Lord") just want to end their lives. If you've ever been on the booth side of one of these, you know what I mean.
I went to a booth belonging to a start-up I'd never heard of, presented my resume and mentioned that I had about 20 years experience doing C.
"Really?!" I've never actually seen someone's eyes light up with real light, but the guy I was talking to came really close. The interview the next day was a breeze and I was sitting in a cubical in a Mountain View start-up incubator (The Landings, natch, third time there) within a week. Nice to have a paycheck again.
But.
I won't bore you with the details, but this is where I learned the phrase "Train Wreck," from a guy who left two weeks after I came on board. Let's just make a list: Patterns, Cargo-Cult Programming, a product with 200K SLOC that could have been replaced by 1,000 lines of Perl, and some of the worst code I'd ever seen. Add to this a VC fight (the banks interviewed us worker-bees to try to figure out what was going wrong) and the execs bringing in a psychiatrist to interview the employees, ditto. When I quit, six months later, the prez broke down in tears, begging me to stay.
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Oh yes. A thousand times yes.
The one time I /needed/ a job, there was a Brass Ring job fair happening in San Jose; one of those affairs where you can (and I'm not kidding) smell the desperation and fear as too-well-dressed people tender their fancy (but essentially vacuous) resumes to harried booth staffers who ("please, dear Lord") just want to end their lives. If you've ever been on the booth side of one of these, you know what I mean.
I went to a booth belonging to a start-up I'd never heard of, presented my resume and mentioned that I had about 20 years experience doing C.
"Really?!" I've never actually seen someone's eyes light up with real light, but the guy I was talking to came really close. The interview the next day was a breeze and I was sitting in a cubical in a Mountain View start-up incubator (The Landings, natch, third time there) within a week. Nice to have a paycheck again.
But.
I won't bore you with the details, but this is where I learned the phrase "Train Wreck," from a guy who left two weeks after I came on board. Let's just make a list: Patterns, Cargo-Cult Programming, a product with 200K SLOC that could have been replaced by 1,000 lines of Perl, and some of the worst code I'd ever seen. Add to this a VC fight (the banks interviewed us worker-bees to try to figure out what was going wrong) and the execs bringing in a psychiatrist to interview the employees, ditto. When I quit, six months later, the prez broke down in tears, begging me to stay.
The interview goes both ways. Oh, yes.