I remember every little thing as if it happened only yesterday. Only it didn’t happen yesterday, but on December 21, 2009. After a week of vacation I got back to work, and before lunch I was back home again and soon to be out of job. Sure, that sucked, but as I was already looking for another job—which was a bit of a public secret, since I was dropping hints like nobody’s business—it just meant that I lost the luxury position of still having a job while looking for a new one. Now, I had to find a job in two months time or face unemployment benefit hell.
Since I find fear of bureaucracy a pretty good motivator, I set my Monsterboard profile to “I need a job, stat!” Almost instantly headhunters started to call. January was a bit slow with a few meetings with headhunters and an interview with TomTom. Mid-February, things started to roll. All of a sudden I had three job interviews in four days, and another one the next week. According to my notes, the one with Web Architects was the best job interview I ever did, but in the end we both were looking for something else. At Booking.com the first round went okay, and in the second they suddenly were looking for a web designer when they should have know that that’s not me. My interview at Bright Alley wasn’t bad, although their idea of javascript usage (Isn’t that just copy/paste from the internet?
) should have set more warning signs than it did. And then there was the one I thought I completely blew. Here I am, six months later, warning you that if you ever need advice on job interviews you really should not listen to me. Apparently, I don’t have a clue.
I’m glad to say that it’s been six quite interesting and fun months. Compared to my old situation, a lot has changed: I am no longer the only employee of a tiny web agency, who had to invoke arcane and mysterious XSLT magicks to transform cold and unforgiving XML in beautiful semantic HTML for several small to midsized websites. Now, as part of fresh webdev-team all I have to do is make the front-end code of one bigass website submit to my will: I do not care whether thy navigator.appName == 'Microsoft Internet Explorer', thou shalt do as I command thee. Unless thy navigator.appVersion doth equal six. Then thou shall not pass, and instead be cast into a fiery pit and burn in an everlasting fire, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth.*
So far, I’m having a blast. And it looks like there is room for improvement yet.
* The content and opinions expressed on this website do not necessarily reflect the views of, nor are they endorsed by, my employers. I’m just sayin’, you know. ↩