Update on The Happenings

This article will be published on Satuday December 1st at about noon because I wanted the opportunity to share some news with Elizabeth before I blabbed it all over the Internet.

My ‘personal trip’ this week, and the much-hyped ‘anxious’ news that I had carefully kept secret here, has an outcome.

A few weeks ago I was approached by Yahoo, yes that Yahoo, asking if I’d be interested in flying up to the San Jose area for an interview. The person who Emailed me said that she’d looked over my resume, and had been to iandouglas.com and looked through some of my open-source software there, and thought I’d be a good fit for her team. She was vague on details as to which of the countless teams at Yahoo she worked for, but I figured hey, it’s Yahoo.

In the course of waiting for her to coordinate my travel itinerary, a second Yahoo group had found my resume and called, did a phone interview, and Emailed me an assignment to write a piece of code for, which I think I performed remarkably on. While waiting for this second group to contact me, the first group contacted me with travel plans, so I asked this second group if they too wanted to meet with me since I’d be in the area. Kill two birds with one stone, as it were.

So Monday night I went to bed about 11pm after doing some last-minute laundry and packing, and woke up Tuesday morning at 3:30am to shower, shave, and get out the door by 4:10am for the 45-minute-ish drive to LAX for a flight at 6am. My interview wasn’t until 12:30, so why they gave me 5 hours between landing at 7:30 and my interview I’ll probably never know. I’m guessing it was a much cheaper flight at 6am.

Anyhow, my interview on Tuesday was with the second team with whom I did the phone interview and code test. I thought that the interview went reasonably well, there were a few gotchas, especially regarding OOP for which I am solely self-taught, but I thought the rapport was good and being able to clearly express my train of thought was presented well enough. They said I’d know the outcome of the interview some time around Dec 3rd or 4th because their manager was out of the country. We wrapped it up, I met an old coworker from PriceGrabber for happy hour, and went back to my hotel to miss my wife and do my yoga stretches before falling asleep.

Wednesday morning I woke up, had a filling breakfast, and drove to a second Yahoo campus where I met the first team that contacted me for what was to be a marathon interview: 10:30am to 4:15pm. By 2pm, it was apparent that one of the interviewers was stuck somewhere and couldn’t make it back in time, so two other interviewers took extra time to quiz me, ask logic-related questions, and ask about my previous work. At 3:15, the axe fell. The young lady who started it all with an Email about having seen my resume and checked out my open-source software came back into the room, and apologetically announced the collective interview team didn’t think I had the skills they needed, so there was no point in waiting for the last interviewer to show up.

She admitted that she’s only flagged about 100 resumes worth considering within the 6 months that this position has been open, and of those 100, I was only the 4th person they’d ever invited up for an interview. So that’s at least some small comfort, knowing that of what must be tens of thousands of resumes in Yahoo’s database, mine stood out enough to get flown up there without so much as a phone interview beforehand. She wished me luck with the other team I interviewed with and she worried about ‘awkward silence’ as she walked me back down to the lobby to say goodbye. I drove back to the airport, returned my rental car, and caught an early flight home.

Well, tonight, the interviewing team from Tuesday Emailed me back, and this was the outcome:

We’ve decided to continue our search and want to thank you for taking the time to meeting with us. Best wishes in your endeavors and happy holidays!

So that was that. Two days of anxious interviewing, over two weeks of nail biting and agonizing over what sorts of things to study up on, and neither group wants to hire me. For a guy with almost 12 years of industry experience, this was a hard pill to swallow. I mean, I tutored a guy in PHP for two years who had zero prior programming experience and *he* got a job at Yahoo… I’m not going to cry foul though, I’m not going to whine about how lack of sleep probably impacted my ability to think coherantly, but in reality, I’ve got almost a dozen years of experience, I should have been able to answer their questions regardless of how little sleep I’d had.

There are lots of other opportunities out there, but at least now the cat is out of the bag. While I haven’t told my “day job” (my full-time contract client) that I was interviewing, I suspect that they at least speculated about what I was doing up in Silicon Valley, and though none of them say so, I’m certain they read my blog, so I’m sure it will come out eventually.

And it’s not that I’m unhappy with this contract and running my own business — who WOULDN’T like to run their own business, work their own schedule, work on projects they actually care about, and for whom they want, and make a pile of money doing so?? Still, the security of a full-time job is something that beckons to me, and I miss the social atmosphere of a casual workplace like I had at PriceGrabber. And my current full-time contract client has already stated in no uncertain terms that my position will be a ‘contractor’ position for a number of years before it would turn into something full-time.

In the meantime, Elizabeth and I have debated moving closer to Santa Monica, and see what job opportunities present themselves at that point. One idea is to go back to PriceGrabber, another is to give the recruiters at eBay a call who tried in vain for 2 years to get me to work at rent.com, or TicketMaster who tried for almost as long to get me to work at their Hollywood office. So I have options, and while I’m disappointed in myself, I’m not throwing a pity party about it.