{"id":67,"date":"2016-06-26T07:01:11","date_gmt":"2016-06-26T11:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lennycheng.com\/blog\/?p=67"},"modified":"2019-04-23T23:20:36","modified_gmt":"2019-04-24T03:20:36","slug":"interview-highlights-for-third-coop","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lennycheng.com\/blog\/2016\/06\/26\/interview-highlights-for-third-coop\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview Highlights for Third Coop"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"transparent\">I was applying and interviewing for 4-month coop positions starting in September for the past several weeks and after a dozen interviews, I came to \u201cdiscover\u201d a curious phenomenon: the interview process often reversed my view of the company. If I wanted to join a company before the interview, then I would no longer be as interested in joining the company after the interview, and vice versa. There were outliers but I think this phenomenon accounted for 70% of my interviews.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">I\u2019m not sure why an interview would change my perspective about a company but there are some theories:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">I didn\u2019t do well on some interviews and as a result, I subconsciously knew the employer wouldn\u2019t provide me an offer, which affected my answers to subsequent questions. In turn, the interviewer might behave differently too. To test this theory, we also need to compare my post-interview mood with whether it\u2019s associated with an offer or no offer<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">Marketing creates an outer picture different from a company\u2019s internal state<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">Some interviewers view students as cogs in a machine and hire them without the intention of mentoring or training them because it is cheaper to pay students than full-time employees. As a result, they consider the student being interviewed more as a tool than a person. When that student is me, I no longer want to be part of the company<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">The main lesson I learned from this round of interviews is: <strong>always be open-minded about a company and let go of any biases.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">\u00a0Here are the highlights from this round of interviews:<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"font_8\">The Good<\/h2>\n<p class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\"><strong>Interviewer:<\/strong> Have you been to Calgary before?<br \/>\n<strong>Me:<\/strong> I once flew over it to get to Vancouver.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">[I forgot the exact dialogue but it was similar to this]\n<strong>Interviewer:<\/strong> The third party might raise the prices in the future but for now, they claim they won\u2019t.<br \/>\n<strong>Me:<\/strong> [with a side look] They claim\u2026<br \/>\n<strong>Interviewer:<\/strong> That\u2019s what they say. They might in the future. Some want to, some don\u2019t. People see it in different ways<br \/>\n<strong>Me:<\/strong> That\u2019s like politics!<br \/>\n<strong>Interviewer:<\/strong> Exactly!<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\"><strong>\u00a0Interviewer:<\/strong> Our salary is $XX.X and we also offer &#8211;<br \/>\n<strong>Me:<\/strong> [surprised and excited] $XX.X!!! Oh sorry, I was really surprised because my previous salaries were $YY.Y<br \/>\n<strong>Interviewer:<\/strong> [smiling] Yes, and we also offer other compensations<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\"><strong>\u00a0Me:<\/strong> Do you know how much the salary is?<br \/>\n<strong>Interviewer:<\/strong> Oh, we didn\u2019t tell you that already? Let me check, then. [turns on phone to check]\n<strong>Me:<\/strong> [while interviewer is checking] I\u2019ll be happy with $40 an hour<br \/>\n<strong>Interviewer:<\/strong> $40?!<br \/>\n<strong>Me:<\/strong> Okay, I\u2019ll settle with $35 then<br \/>\n&#8212;&#8211; NOTE: the salary was less than $35<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\"><strong>\u00a0Interviewer:<\/strong> Do you speak French?<br \/>\n<strong>Me:<\/strong> Oui, je peux parler un petit peu de francais (yes, I can speak a bit of French)<br \/>\n<strong>Interviewer:<\/strong> Great, then let\u2019s do the rest of the interview in French<br \/>\n[1 question later]\n<strong>Interviewer:<\/strong> [in French] This will be our last question in French. We can speak in English afterwards.<br \/>\n&#8212;&#8211; NOTE: I didn\u2019t get the offer<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">\u00a0An interviewer forgot to call me! We rescheduled for another time and right before the rescheduled interview, my phone shut down and I missed the call! Luckily, I called back and was provided an offer. The overall experience was kind of funny!<\/span><\/p>\n<h2 class=\"font_8\">The Bad<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">An interviewer paged the next student while I was still in the room.<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">One interviewer sighed several times as I was trying to solve a technical problem. At the end of the interview, he said the recruiter will email me shortly. I waited for a week and didn\u2019t receive an email from the recruiter.<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">I had an interview scheduled at 1:45 and I waited to be paged until 1:55. I asked the coop desk if the interviewers were running late or if the paging system broke again (it had been intermittently breaking throughout the past several weeks). The coop desk told me that the pagers were working fine, the interviewers were running late, and that I wait. After I met the interviewers, they told me they had paged me at 1:45 but realized the pager must have broken because they received no response!<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">After I asked the interviewers about the salary, one of them appeared to search or shuffle his papers and told me he didn\u2019t have an answer but they would tell me if I emailed them later. Later that day, I learned I was rejected from their company.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>The Ugly<\/h2>\n<p class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">This was the most disrespectful interview I ever had. The interviewer didn\u2019t bother making eye contact or even greeting me as I shook his hand and greeted him. Without explanation, he didn\u2019t have my resume with him, winced every time I mentioned .NET or C#, scribbled illegible and half-faded code on a whiteboard that didn\u2019t have an eraser nor any room for me to write the code he asked me to write. Even after I explicitly told him a couple times I didn\u2019t know how to solve a question, he continued to ask me the same question and its variations.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">\u00a0He played on his phone during the interview, criticized me for writing code he had told me to write, cut me off in the middle of my sentences by asking me questions whose answers I was saying before he cut me off. In one scenario, immediately after I told the interviewer that I would optimize my code after finishing writing a brute-force algorithm, he criticized my code for not being optimized! Afterwards, he said my code was incorrect because it didn\u2019t satisfy a requirement which he didn\u2019t tell me about, which means that my code was wrong because it didn\u2019t do something it wasn\u2019t supposed to do! I think he tested me with an impossible question of writing a copy constructor in C with parameters and syntax that didn\u2019t match a copy constructor\u2019s. Near the end of the interview, he told me he had wanted to test me on polymorphism and design questions, implying I didn\u2019t know about them but what\u2019s interesting is that most of his questions were about concurrency, which most programmers would agree is a notch more challenging than polymorphism.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">\u00a0When it was finally my turn to ask questions, he gave passive aggressive answers. I then asked him what coops would learn at his company. He said coop would learn how to program. Then he said \u201cI\u2019m not looking for programmers or even developers, but for engineers,\u201d from which I deduced the following : <\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">The interviewer isn\u2019t looking for programmers but claim that a coop would learn programming.<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">He\u2019s not looking for developers even though the position was called \u201cSoftware Developer\u201d.<\/span><\/li>\n<li class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">He\u2019s looking for engineers but didn\u2019t ask me questions related to engineering or architecture.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p class=\"font_8\"><span class=\"transparent\">\u00a0Finally, I shook his hand and thanked him for interviewing me. He just looked at me and said nothing. Overall, I rate this interview -1\/10 and won\u2019t be applying to this company in the future. Maybe the interviewer was having a bad day but I don\u2019t think this was an excuse for his extremely disrespectful behaviour. This experience reiterated my belief that those with more power ought to continue treating others with dignity and respect. In the future, if I undergo a similar experience, I would thank the interviewer for his\/her time and terminate the interview. I don\u2019t want to work with disrespectful people.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was applying and interviewing for 4-month coop positions starting in September for the past several weeks and after a dozen interviews, I came to \u201cdiscover\u201d a curious phenomenon: the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":68,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[19],"tags":[22],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lennycheng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lennycheng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lennycheng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lennycheng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lennycheng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/lennycheng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69,"href":"http:\/\/lennycheng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67\/revisions\/69"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lennycheng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lennycheng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lennycheng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lennycheng.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}