Lions and Tigers and Bears

Out of college with my degree, I had everything going for me except for a job.

I didn't know what kind of job I wanted, but I did know the kind I didn't.

Before I had graduated I'd gone to a career information session at one of the big banks. I listened to about an hour of corporate doubletalk before they trotted out a pretty young white girl who'd been in the previous year's graduate program. She told us about her exciting job maintaining legacy software written in an obsolete languages running on on ancient mainframes. She was bright and perky and enthusiastic and I walked out of there ready to slit my wrists.

I had zero experience, so there wasn't much to look at on my resume besides my education and the time I'd spent stacking boxes in a warehouse. With three majors, two of which were not computer science or engineering related, the most common reaction I got was one of confusion. "Just what do you want to do with all this stuff?" "Uh, the job I applied for is in software development," was never a good enough answer. One place looked at my university career and said "Well, you're obviously not much of a programmer, so we're not even going to let you do the test."

The most rigorous interview I did was for a position as a tech writer. Half a day on site, four interviews, and a writing sample. It was forty degrees, the air conditioner was broken, and I was stuffed into a suit while the rest of the staff wore shorts and t-shirts.

I went to an interview in a building that was still under construction, where I had to push through plastic sheeting and climb up scaffolding, when upon arrival they looked at my resume and said "Oh, so, as a graduate, you don't actually have any experience?"

I was interviewed for a graduate role by a man who put both fists on the table and demanded "What makes you think that you're ready for this job?" He followed this question up with "Do you have a girlfriend?"

I did a couple of interviews with a company that was on its way to becoming one of the country's biggest contracting firms, Lion Consulting. The second of these included an hour of formal testing. The first two sections I was fine with: computing and mathematics. The third section was management-related, and I had no idea what to write. The four section was supposed to assess language skills: in addition to answering the questions,  I corrected spelling and grammar errors I had noticed in the questions themselves.

I applied for a job where they wanted someone with good tech and language skills and required a portfolio showing graphics work. At the interview they asked me chemistry questions. They didn't know exactly what they wanted from the person they were hiring. I lost out to a candidate with a degree in graphic design degree and a portfolio. 

Lion called me and told me that I was on the shortlist, and they'd be doing a third round of interviews in December. I was going to be overseas in December, so I asked if they could schedule the interview for another time. When they told me they would pencil me in for their next graduate intake, the following December, I decided that I didn't want to work at Lion Consulting after all.

I did an interview with a medium-sized tech company, Bear Technologies. I didn't really understand what it was that they did at Bear, but it sounded high tech and interesting. There were three guys in the room: two suits who talked and asked questions, and a bearded guy who sat off to one side listening. The beardy guy would occasionally interrupt, ask me a question, and then nod. I didn't impressed to suits much, but I felt like I had some kind of unspoken rapport with the grumpy old beardy guy.

I wascontacted by a Dragon-sized overseas corporation who had somehow discovered my combination of different majors and were keen to hire me to work in the new Usability lab that they had just built, and which they had no idea what to do with. The interview went well, and they said "We'll call you. Soon."

The Dragon didn't, but the Bear did. They were considering me and one other guy and they will be in touch about a second interview... one day.

I did another interview with a small software company called Tigerland. Three guys interviewed me: a manager and two engineers who introduced themselves as Amos and Meggs. Meggs wore a beard and reminded me a lot of the guy at Bear Technologies. The interview went well, until Meggs produced the test.

The first part of the test was easy. They showed some simple procedural C code to me and I had to work through it, explaining what it was doing. The second showed some object-oriented C++. I worked it through as best I could, but I did not know the answers to Meggs' questions about  inheritance, composition, and the stack. I figured I was out of the running, but perhaps I could learn something from the interview, so I relaxed and settled in. It was nice to be talking about programming instead of how confusing my resume was. "I don't know," I said, when faced with a question I couldn't answer. "How does it work?"

I think that attitude is what got me the offer. Amos called me within a few days and said, "Are you interested in this job? It's a hardcore C++ job; it's not for pussies. If you are interested, it's yours." I told them I would think about it. Amos told me to call him back the next day.

I called up Bear Technologies, who still had me shortlisted. They told me that they couldn't make a decision for another month. There might not be a job going there, after all. I told them I had another offer on the table, and they advised me to take it. So I called Tigerland back and accepted their offer. I would start work in two weeks' time.

The following week, the Dragon called me. Things were moving ahead. They liked me, they wanted me to work there. They would be in touch with me again really soon... but they had no paperwork and no actual offer yet. I'd already signed with Tigerland.

The following Monday was my first day at work. My first day full-time employed, in any capacity.

I was now a real person.

Home is the Hangman

I returned home to Australia permanently right before Christmas of 2006.

I took some time to get reacquainted with my homeland, going on some roadtrips, attempting to surf (it had been so long that I had forgotten how poor a surfer I am) and generally getting my life in order. My final manager from ATB soft, Sherman, approached me about working remotely and after I didn't say no, a contract materialized in my email. I hedged and delayed for about six months until he retracted it: I didn't want to work for him anymore.

Soon I started applying for local jobs, and found it to be miserable: there was less work going than when I had left in 2001. The work there was less interesting than before, and salaries had been falling steadily while I was away. Meanwhile, the cost of living in Australia had been skyrocketing. It was ugly out there.

I did some meetings with various people. A friend of the family who wanted to start up a startup, some guys who worked for a bank. The startup was too nebulous for me to take seriously, and the bank guys basically told me I'd be bored stupid (but well paid) if I wound up working there. They described me as a 'technologist', while they themselves were... well, they didn't way what they were. Paycheque Cashologists, I guess.

I sent out some resumes, with little enthusiasm. The job I'd let go for ATBSoft was much more interesting than anything else I saw, but I couldn't bring myself to work for them again. I got some bites soon enough.

The first interview I did was for a big contracting company. I did well on the initial interview, but I flubbed the subsequent testing round: I hadn't done any kind of written test since leaving college and I was unusually nervous. I'd never been into a written test completely unprepared. I have a distinct memory of  opening the booklet with numb fingers and immediately being assailed by vertigo. I couldn't read a word of it! It took me a couple of minutes to realize that I had the booklet upside down. I think it's the only test I've ever flunked.

I did another interview for a small company, Outerlink,  who did most of their business in specialized hardware. The software that ran on top of it was a fairly vanilla client-server RDBMS system, much like the one I'd worked on at my first job, and the people there seemed like nice, competent guys. I did very well on the test and I suspected I would get an offer when the manager decided to show me around the premises afterwards, with special attention given to the coffee machine.

Outerlink soon called me back and asked me to a second interview, so that the owners of the company could meet me. Again, pleasant and competent guys (one technical, one not). The technical one of them became a bit obsessed by cultural differences between working in the US and Australia.  I actually had to give a formal answer to the question: "Do you eat pizza?" Of course I answered "yes." I do like pizza, although it has never been a staple of my diet. I am a meat-and-potatoes man, and pizza is mostly dairy.

I became dispirited with the process, and winter was coming. A vagabond friend of mine persuaded me to travel up to Byron Bay with him for a week of sun, surfing and girl-chasing. On the second day I badly sprained an ankle, which put paid to the latter activities. I was looking lying on the sand, looking out at the waves, and finally starting to relax a bit when Outerlink called me on my cellphone to offer me a job. With a heavy heart I accepted. They invited me to come in and sign the contracts, and the said that I should have a look at the codebase first to see what I was getting myself into. That gave me some misgivings, but I told them I would be in later in the week when I returned to Melbourne.

The contracting firm called me to tell me that I had almost made it, but not quite, and to wish me luck. I told them I had already accepted an offer. I went out to Outerlink and we took care of the contracts. I refused their offer to check out the codebase first: I needed work, and I knew that if it was truly horrible I would have to refuse.

The same day I received a call from a recruiter who had lined up an interview for me with a video games company. This, finally, was an opportunity that I was excited about. New technology, fun projects. The recruiter warned me about long hours and low pay, but I said I was prepared to accept that. And I was.

I went to the interview on a Friday. I would, years later, discover than one of the guys who tested me there as an infamously brilliant and mental boy-genius fixture of the Australian games dev world, but he seemed like an okay guy in the interview. Not only did I do well in there, but I had fun talking to the guys about the process and particularly about the technology, and I think it showed. When they asked me what kind of salary I was expecting, I told them that I had an offer on the table already, and for how much. I knew it was high for a games developer, but it didn't feel particularly high compared to what I had been making in the US and I figured we could use it as a starting point as they bargained me down.

As soon as I said the number it felt as if the air had been sucked out of the room. They thanked me for my time and I was swiftly ejected from the building.

I had the weekend left and then it was back into the trenches: my first day with Outerlink would be the following Monday. I was already bored.