Yeow. As planned, I went in for a second interview at eSoft today, where I met and talked to several more of the people who I would be working with, should I get the position.

I say, doing a job interview is far more insane than any tests you take in school. Compared to this, finals are a breeze. What I'm saying here is probably like, "Well, Duh!" for veterans (or even non-veterans) of this, but it's a fairly new experience for me. All my previous jobs haven't really involved a formal interview process. "We know you. You're cool. Want to work here?" has been the extent of it up until now, so bear with.

Well, barring that little 4-day stint with Little Caeser's back in 96, but we won't count that. ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H (x about 4. But let's not waste valuable bandwidth.)

No study guides. No, "Next week, you're going to be asked how to implement such-and-such algorithm." No idea what languages you're going to be asked to do things in.

(Well, the things you said you know in your résumé is a good bet. (Daring you to make a liar out of yourself. "You know html, right? So what's the syntax on such-and-such obscure tag, and is it html 3.2 or html 4 compliant?" (Ok, maybe not quite that bad, but in the general neighborhood.)) Sometimes, though, questions about other crap you've never even looked at might get thrown in just for fun.)

I don't think there's any way one could really prepare. Certainly not by cramming the night before, as was a common practice employed by myself and many others I knew at ucollege.edu. Only by years of actually using computers, playing with Linux, and programming, could one have even a chance at getting some of that random stuff right. Either that, or have an encyplopedia of programming calls and all the man pages embedded on a chip in one's brain.

Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit for effect. I do that occasionally. (Or perhaps, having been humbled by my own ignorance, I am just making excuses.)

Ok, but here's the cool thing: Having talked to three people today plus the other two I spoke with last week, in every case -- and I may be way off base here -- I kind of got the feeling they knew that stuff they were throwing at me would be a challenge. Things to which, in their entirity there's no way any ordinary mortal would immediately be able to come up with a correct answer to. But they asked anyway, just to see how I would react, and how well I could spit out something which almost resembled an answer.

The other thing I liked: In all cases, it was like the interrogators were rooting for me. That helps a lot. No malicious intent did I sense. In fact, at certain times I found myself just naturally starting to launch into the types of discusions about programming philosophies, web design techniques, and other things normally held on casual occasions with geek friends. These are the kind of people I want to be working with.

Whether I get the job or not, I believe this has been a positive experience, both in terms of learning how to cope with job seeking, and in meeting and talking to some generally cool people.