What I learned from a phone interview

gtwade — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 19:54:43 +0000

Last week I had a phone interview with a local company. They’re looking for a programming intern and posted a job opening through MATC where I’m going to school. Well, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity: part-time and programming all at the same time. I’m only 1st semester but I can only get rejected or ignored, right?

They emailed last Monday and set up a phone interview! I was shocked. And scared. Thursday rolled around and they called. Until that time I filled my waking hours thinking about what kind of questions they would ask. One of my friends suggested I google some interview questions based on the languages they were looking for.

However, their questions were less about technical points of ASP and C# (neither languages I know yet) and more about motivations. They asked why I’m going for a degree in programming when I already have one in chemistry. And they asked if I have already completed any programming projects. I could answer these questions, but even so I wanted to give them more satisfying answers. It’s the last one that bugs me the most: do I have any actual working code to show them? Not really. I played with TADS once upon a time, but didn’t complete anything major. It didn’t fit it with day-to-day stuff at the time.

What I would have really impressed them with is work with an open source project. Something on Sourceforge, something I’m interested in. They could see I like programming and it’s my hobby as well as a vocation. So the moral of the story is: I gotta get me a project. It would provide practice AND a portfolio I could show a potential employer.

I haven’t heard back from them yet. I’m cautiously optimistic. I’m sure I could give them good intern work. Hire me, okay?

Hello world!

gtwade — Sun, 26 Sep 2010 02:44:15 +0000

Welcome to Better Geeking! I don’t expect there to be a lot of readers to this little corner of the Interwebs, but if you stumble upon it, welcome!

My whole purpose of setting up this site is to talk about what’s going on in my career change. I was laid off on May 12th from a pretty good job as a chemist. And now I’m switching careers to computer programming. I might be talking about why later on. Suffice it to say there is a lot going on in life now. In addition to dealing with being unemployed, my beautiful wife and I are bringing up a very awesome little boy.

So, there’s a lot to talk about: life, employment, kids, marriage, school, programming, geekery…something else. Oh, yes. LIFE. Did I mention that already?

Thanks to all those coming over from Cranking Plot. If there are any of these. I assure you, that blog is not dead, it’s just resting a bit, since my brain can only process a limited set of instructions at a time. Writing is taking a back burner to what I’m doing now…except for writing this blog, of course.

Feel free to post any comments, any observations, anything. TTFN!