Thursday, August 5, 2010

On Interviewing for a Contact in Tōrōnto

As never before I went for an interview with a startup located in downtown Tōrōnto. Tho it's located 12km (7.5m) from my house it took me an hour to get there because of the unbelievably bad traffic.

As a rule I require that the 1st interview be conducted on the phone as a quick means of weeding the job offers. This time I let the recruiter sweet-talk me into hauling myself to their premises. Never a good idea.

An oddity about the Qu*kPlay job description was its purposeful vagueness - the recruiter says that they keep it like that "to attract talent". Not a good sign. Another odd thing was that they wanted to hire "yesterday" and that the customary two-week notice wasn't good enough.

So I went to the 1st interview; it was with some technical guys: apparently they use BREW from the CDMA company and this piece of work is quite buggy. They needed some low-level debugging. All good. They hinted of other projects as well.

A week has elapsed and they scheduled another interview at 3pm against my morning preference (3pm+ is hard rush hour in Toronto). So I went. This time I saw the Architect [think Matrix] who's asked me lots of SW design questions, behavioural questions [a bit odd to do that for hired help] and hinted of a third interview.

Having sunk six hours already in coming to their place and showing my face I said that the next interview must be conducted over the phone as they had seen plenty of me. This didn't quite go well so I did not get the job.

The last two oddities were that the Architect had no idea that he had an interview scheduled so he was laate and that in both interviews they were insisting that I come join their company as a f/t perm employee and asking me for justifications for my dislike of perm positions.

I think this startup is growing rapidly and they cannot make their minds as to who does what. And that they want to enlarge the staff by adding low-ish paid perm staffers (it's much cheaper to have perms in Canada than the US as the health insurance is taken care of by the taxes we pay and the government-run insurance scheme).

-ulianov