Noon
I missed an interview today for a completely preventable reason. The scheduler sent me all my interview times in MST. I’m in PST. For people not familiar with US time zones, PST is an hour behind MST. Since everything else had been in my time zone, I didn’t notice that one letter was off.
Compounding this, the two largest companies I’m interviewing with have not sent me calendar items to accept. They’ve just sent lists of dates and times for me to manually transfer. So, not noticing the MST/PST error, I put all the interviews into my calendar an hour later than they should have been. Luckily the rest are for Monday, so I was able to correct those.
Speaking of Monday
One of the companies I’m interviewing with has a few interviewers in Europe, so I made myself available earlier in the morning if they need it. They took advantage of that flexibility and I’ll be interviewing from 6-8 a.m. on Monday.
But another company set an appointment for my demo presentation at 3:30 p.m. So, although there will be a couple of long breaks between interview blocks. I’ll finish my interviews on Monday 10 hours after I start them and I’ll be giving a crucial presentation 9.5 hours after I start my first interview of the day.
Rest of today
It’s all interview prep from now through the weekend. That means expanding and refining my lists of answers for behavioral questions, doing a little more practicing for technical questions, and adding/refining answers for professional questions like “which company has the best developer site and why?” For that, I need to go beyond the obvious candidates like Stripe and Twilio and dig down to remember/find some sites that are killing it and pick out 2-3 talking points about why I believe that.
Of course, I don’t feel anywhere near prepared or like I’ll change that with the next 2.5 days of prep. But I don’t know if that’s a fair assessment or just my anxiety and impostor syndrome. I like to believe that I’m a seasoned, experienced professional who does good work, yet there’s still a nagging doubt in the back of my mind telling me I’m somehow just good at spinning my past accomplishments and nothing I’ve ever done is good enough.
Luckily, I’m not the type who lets that doubt stop me from going for it. The doubt and its associated nagging voice just sometimes require chemical earmuffs at bedtime.
Reflecting on 4 weeks
It’s odd. There have been a few roles I thought I was PERFECT for and heard nothing or got a rejection email. Meanwhile, there have been companies that called out of the blue, I told them I didn’t think I was perfect for the role, and they said “let’s talk anyway.” The fact that I locked down 2 start-up interviews, 3 big corp interviews, and turned down multiple start-ups and big corps says a lot, especially given my grey beard and the youth bias in tech.
Do I believe that one or two of the companies that rejected me were doing so because of my age? Yes. Can I prove it? No. Does it matter? It’ll matter to them if I end up at one of their competitors, killing it, and costing them business. I will not favor one of their competitors out of spite, but if proving them wrong is one of the intangible benefits in the role I end up taking, I’m not going to be unhappy about that.