An occupation for you
So, this has been a busy week of interviews. On Monday, a 30-minute phone interview at a company a friend works for. That felt like it went well, and by the end of the day they were asking about setting up that longer interview and tech skills demonstration and all.
I set that for Friday, because another company --- on that had solicited me based on my listing at a job site --- wanted an interview Thursday. That started out as a video chat interview. I'd felt like that was going as well as the phone call had. Most of this was describing what I had been doing and what I was hoping to do in a new position. The big interview question I'll remember maybe forever was asking about projects I wished I had done differently and I could offer a pretty good story for that: on my main project I took the database structure as it existed, instead of pushing to get the whole thing converted to an SQL server, even though the SQL server would have made my programming easier and the whole site faster. Besides being true I thought it also demonstrated a willingness to go with project parameters as they exist balanced by a consideration of the project's long-term needs.
So, on Friday, they e-mailed to reject me.
Also on Friday, thought, that first company gave me what I guess was my second-round interview. This with a programming person. Some of it went over similar topics of what Monday and Thursday-with-other-company did. It ended with a programming demonstration project, and I had thought it had to be more complicated than just an HTML and CSS demonstration. I was expecting it to be something tied to a particular work-like project and instead it was ... using HTML and CSS alone, replicate the United States flag. It's practically one of the traditional goofy tech demonstration projects.
And so the rejection news has got me cross-examining every little bit of that. Like, at one point, the guy interviewing me said that the image of the flag we were using for reference wasn't really needed; we could hide it. In setting out the field of stars, he said that there wasn't the need to draw actual five-pointed stars. It was enough to use a string of * * * * * * symbols instead. I didn't do that, though, trusting that it would be quick enough to do that later. Was that me failing to take gentle direction? The interviewer had started out the session by saying he had a hard deadline of 2 pm (my time). I saw the time roll just a bit past 2 pm and we weren't quite finished with the flag (in fact, I'd just realized things that I would need to patch), when I mentioned my awareness of his time. He seemed surprised by that; is it because he wanted to see how he was going on and I cut him off, or ... did I show good situational awareness? No answer can reassure me (and I appreciate you want to reassure me) since they're the only ones who can say how they received it. And I keep thinking over ways that I could have done it better, more thoughtfully, more precisely ...
I guess I'm glad it's the weekend so that I don't have to dread rejection coming through in e-mail for another day. And, I don't know there is rejection coming but I am feeling burned, too.
How about looking in on the Crossroads Village and Huckleberry Model Railroad? That's fun, right?
Another view of the main layout in the center of the building. I so wanted to see the switching in back be used but we never did.
Train racing through the miniature town.
And here's a miniature gorge with the train over it; if you look close, you can see Tiny Pauline tied to the tracks. (I'm joking, of course: silent movie melodramas did not tie the heroine to tracks. If you see a still of one, it's from a comedy spoofing this tradition, or a post-silent movie riffing on what they imagine happened but did not.)
Trivia: Chamonix, France, had a population of about three thousand people, with space for about two thousand visitors, ahead of what would become the first Winter Olympic Games in 1924. By placing beds in corridors, ballrooms, and billiar parlors of hotels, and enlisting private citizens, they could find space for another thousand of the expected twenty to thirty thousand visitors.
Source: Encyclopedia of the Modern Olympic Movement, Editors John E Findling, Kimberly D Pelle.
Currently Reading: Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World, Simon Winchester.