I’ve interviewed for a number of jobs. Retail and dishwashing always got me to ‘yes,’ because I can be charming enough to overcome any burden of inexperience for those positions, and high turnover reduces the expectations for new hires anyway. Technical interviews are harder and apt to make for more interesting reports, so they make up the stories I’ll tell.

The first real tech interview I had was during college. They wanted a technical analyst, someone who wouldn’t have to be strictly responsible for writing software but would necessarily have to understand something about the business domain and would be able to understand the code that was being written at least well enough to report progress back to program managers. In retrospect, I can see that this position would merit more technical competency and a greater burden both of time and of experience than I had when I applied for it as a college sophomore, but because I was a college sophomore at a time, I didn’t know any better than to try.

Edulog is a company in Missoula, MT. They specialize in schoolbus routing software, designed originally by a PhD Mathematician. I imagine that it’s mostly a nearest-neighbor optimization on a grand scale, but the scale  implies interesting problems and the necessity of fulfilling business needs probably means that the entire use case is more difficult than just the core algorithm. Anyway, they advertised for an opening that would allow applications for CS students, which I was.

I didn’t get the job, and here’s why.

1. My resume was weak. I don’t mean that I lacked relevant experience; it was an entry-level position which would’ve been squarely within the realm of my expertise if I had a semester of database courses under my belt. I was flippant and arrogant in my description of cashiering and dishwashing, and took the interiewer’s ‘yes’ as a matter of course, because my charisma had always worked for me in the past.
2. I was grossly unqualified for the actual position, despite the sole listed requirement of being a student of Computer Science at the University of Montana. The employer didn’t know how to properly discriminate among the applicant pool, or they just needed to interview some poor saps in order to justify their eventual internal hire; either way, my lack of professional experience and skills with MySQL should have excluded me from the interview.
3. I made a bad impression, joking about the movie ‘Office Space’ and making light of the position’s relevance.

In this case, I think the interview process actually worked really well, for all that it would’ve been nice to have the extra money during college. My performance wouldn’t have been up to par, I wouldn’t have been happy with the job, and driving to and from the office daily would’ve eaten up time that could’ve been better spent drinking whiskey and doing bench presses at the rec center. Despite that, I wanted them to hire me – so here’s what I should have done differently.

1. I should have developed a basic understanding of what’s expected of entry-level tech people. I sure had a handle on 101-level Java, and I knew that there was such a thing as a database, but taking a few hours to arrange a half-hour lunch with anyone who had industry experience would’ve shown me the enormous gaps in my skill set.
2. I should have found someone (anyone) to review my resume. It was very clearly written by a 19-year-old who thought he was better than the interviewer, better than anyone, really. I’d never been turned down for a job and I’d never been rejected before and it showed.
3. I should’ve asked more questions and spoken less during the interview itself. Every word that comes out of a candidate’s mouth is a potential reason to disqualify him from consideration, and i had nothing but shortcomings at the time.

Again, it’s ultimately for the best that I never worked at Edulog. My technical skills still needed serious development, and the internal hire their rejection letter indicated they went with was better suited, regardless of my strengths. Today I’d hire a call center worker from the company over my adolescent self, despite the fact that the former wouldn’t ever eventually be able to fill the “software engineer” role: they needed a business person with domain knowledge, not a can-do introductory tech worker.

I don’t fault myself for having applied, and I don’t really fault the company for having advertised the way they did. I hope they didn’t open a similar position with the same advertisement later, having learned from the candidate pool during my hiring round that you can’t take Java 102 and perform as an analyst.