data solutions.”
I’m still wondering if there is a question or if I should be verbally agreeing with his obvious statement. My mind wonders, I wonder what kind of technical questions he’s going to ask. I’ve heard lots of stories about Silicon Valley job interviews. The current rage is to ask technically based mind bending riddles. I’m great at games, but it usually takes me a couple of rounds to get keyed in to what they’re looking for.
Lucky for me, Chéng-gong is going analytical. Being Chinese, I know he’s memorized every definition and programing term he uses and will test me against his knowledge. My parents pushed me to memorize, a skill that my American friends consider a waste of time, but it comes in handy when I’m dealing with other Asians.
After almost forty-five minutes of what feels like a technical game of Jeopardy, his iPhone beeps, he politely tells me his turn is over, slightly bowing, gets up, and leaves. Sitting in the room alone, I wonder if I should pull my Samsung phone out and start reading. Since this is Apple I’m afraid that using it might be construed as sacrilegious.
By my seventh interview of the day I have no idea what products this group is working on, or anything else about engineering since they’re so paranoid. The hiring manager wouldn’t even tell me how many people worked for him. At lunch time someone brought me a salad since I don’t think they let outsiders in their cafeteria. It must be because Steve Jobs stole most of his ideas from other companies, and he didn’t want grad students to do that to him.
I feel wrung out and exhausted as I drive back to campus in the car that I borrowed from Sam, my college roommate’s boyfriend. I’ve already decided that I’m not interested in working at Apple. They have twice the amount of employees as Google, where I worked the last four summers. I think I want to work at someplace smaller.
The next week I interview at a well-funded start-up that’s located in San Francisco. I have a number of friends from school who now live there. Most of them commute down to Silicon Valley. Even though some of the Silicon Valley companies are building offices in San Francisco, typically the choice is to have an apartment in San Francisco and live for the weekend, since you spend so many hours commuting, or find a place near work in Silicon Valley and head up to the city to party on the weekend. If I get a job in San Francisco then I get the best of both worlds, a short commute and hip city living.
From the train I walk to their offices located in a trendy refurbished warehouse. As I wait in their urban cool lobby, a hipster looking guy with a goatee comes out to get me. The interview proceeds similar to the one at Apple. My potential peers ask me to define some technology terms, they give me a problem to solve on the white board, and then ask me some mind bending arithmetic riddles.
All the guys I meet tell me they’re developers, but they dress rather hip and brag about the perks, though besides free food, I wonder how they have time to use any of them. One of the guys comes in carrying his messenger bag. Back at Leland all the engineers used backpacks; it was the business guys who used messenger bags. I’m wondering how solid these guys are, or if they’re just a bunch of brogrammers? Those college frat guys and athlete code monkeys who only know how to develop apps and front end applications? I’m an engineer, I want to use math to solve the hard problems.
When I get in front of one of the senior managers, I ask him how much funding they have. I quickly calculate that with forty employees and a fancy facility they will run out of money by the end of the year. Then the manager tells me they are behind on their deliverables, and now need to hire people who have the skills to handle big data. Now I’m wondering if I’m the only one in this building who sees that they’re in trouble.
At school, the Venture Capitalists (VC)—the guys who finance new companies—have been swirling around the engineering building. It’s always a great way to grab some free food. But I’m not yet interested in starting my own company. I’d like to work for someone