Last week I went for an interview with a company based in London. It was a very rushed interview, I arrived Wednesday evening at 10:30pm local time and had to leave Thursday 5pm local time (And in London, this is GMT). Nevertheless I did pretty well, everyone was very impressed with me. Even though I always feel like I just did an OK job. But the feedback I got was that everyone was impressed, from the technical side to the cultural side. Basically I had zero technical issues whatsoever, and the only nitpicking criticism was that they didn't know how I would deal with customers, but that was it.
I stayed in a hotel called "Point a Hotels" located near King's Cross. The hotel was very very small. Incredibly small. And when I arrived the room wasn't even made! Bad, very bad. They of course put me in a clean room after that, but it had no windows! I ironed my clothes and then tried to sleep after that but I couldn't, or rather I kept waking up from 4am, 5am, 6am and finally 7am I got up because I didn't want to wait for the alarm anymore.
The interview went from 10am to about 1pm. Their offices are in a building called Saffron House, what a name. Saffron. It's even more expensive than gold!
I met Niall and Olivier at 10am and we had a chat about my project on github. Nothing that I would consider too technical really. My thought process, how I made decisions. Then they asked me how I would make this production ready. Talked about traffic load, where users would be located geographically, and then we finished talking about how they would migrate from an existing old system using Java RPC (Haha...) to the new system. Straightforward question, just implement an adapter pattern. Talked about the ideal pipe, I said everything will go straight to production and have user validation on features. Then I asked a few questions like how the company has grown from 100 to 800 from 2009 until today. Crazy fast! Shortly after 11am I met Bruzer (? Not sure about spelling) but he was from Tanzania and moved to Scotland then moved to England end of last year for the job, but he was previously from HP. That section was the hardest I for me I think. But anyway, after that I had a short meet-up with Jon who is the hiring manager. He also joined maybe 6 months ago, and so did Ben (the recruiter), who is from Melbourne and Australian. We talked a little about a recent conference he had, and how his two year old son learns. Interesting to know. I think he was impressed I remembered he had a two year old son. Then had a chat with Ben who asked me about salary and I told him, yeah my salary requirements have gone up. 😄 But I said we'll continue with that after he gets all the feedback.
After that I left, went and had some lunch at an Asian place just behind their offices. I just rested, and eventually caught the rail from Farringdon to Gatwick Airport. I had Nando's and then just caught the plane back to Stockholm where I arrived back shortly after 10pm. All in all it was good but very rushed.
I think of all the interviews I've ever had, my Cisco Tandberg interview was the best, followed by Amazon and then booking.com. Not too bad, I've gotten all these free trips around the world just interviewing!
So it's Friday today and yesterday I spoke to the recruiter about my requirements and all. He informed me that he thinks the company might not go as high as what I asked for, but he said he'll get back to me. The highest that they would go is still a good offer. I would definitely consider it, but let's see what happens. I feel positive about all of it plus this would look immense on my resume even though I feel my resume is already pretty good but let's see.
Will England come calling? I guess time will tell... very soon!
I stayed in a hotel called "Point a Hotels" located near King's Cross. The hotel was very very small. Incredibly small. And when I arrived the room wasn't even made! Bad, very bad. They of course put me in a clean room after that, but it had no windows! I ironed my clothes and then tried to sleep after that but I couldn't, or rather I kept waking up from 4am, 5am, 6am and finally 7am I got up because I didn't want to wait for the alarm anymore.
The interview went from 10am to about 1pm. Their offices are in a building called Saffron House, what a name. Saffron. It's even more expensive than gold!
I met Niall and Olivier at 10am and we had a chat about my project on github. Nothing that I would consider too technical really. My thought process, how I made decisions. Then they asked me how I would make this production ready. Talked about traffic load, where users would be located geographically, and then we finished talking about how they would migrate from an existing old system using Java RPC (Haha...) to the new system. Straightforward question, just implement an adapter pattern. Talked about the ideal pipe, I said everything will go straight to production and have user validation on features. Then I asked a few questions like how the company has grown from 100 to 800 from 2009 until today. Crazy fast! Shortly after 11am I met Bruzer (? Not sure about spelling) but he was from Tanzania and moved to Scotland then moved to England end of last year for the job, but he was previously from HP. That section was the hardest I for me I think. But anyway, after that I had a short meet-up with Jon who is the hiring manager. He also joined maybe 6 months ago, and so did Ben (the recruiter), who is from Melbourne and Australian. We talked a little about a recent conference he had, and how his two year old son learns. Interesting to know. I think he was impressed I remembered he had a two year old son. Then had a chat with Ben who asked me about salary and I told him, yeah my salary requirements have gone up. 😄 But I said we'll continue with that after he gets all the feedback.
After that I left, went and had some lunch at an Asian place just behind their offices. I just rested, and eventually caught the rail from Farringdon to Gatwick Airport. I had Nando's and then just caught the plane back to Stockholm where I arrived back shortly after 10pm. All in all it was good but very rushed.
I think of all the interviews I've ever had, my Cisco Tandberg interview was the best, followed by Amazon and then booking.com. Not too bad, I've gotten all these free trips around the world just interviewing!
So it's Friday today and yesterday I spoke to the recruiter about my requirements and all. He informed me that he thinks the company might not go as high as what I asked for, but he said he'll get back to me. The highest that they would go is still a good offer. I would definitely consider it, but let's see what happens. I feel positive about all of it plus this would look immense on my resume even though I feel my resume is already pretty good but let's see.
Will England come calling? I guess time will tell... very soon!
Home new home?
To be continued...
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