Ericsson Interview III: The Search For Spock

Reehight.

This was the big one, Tuesday: the third and final Ericsson interview. Unable to find overnight lodgings in Basingstoke at short notice - hotels in Basingstoke are actually surprisingly few and far between - I plumped for a hotel in Winchester, the next station but one down the line. Winchester is where archaeologist buddy-of-mine Phil went to university and he seemed to enjoy it. It is rather nice to look at, though it is... well, steep. The Westgate Hotel, which I'd selected based on its proximity to the station turned out to be hotel rooms above a pub. You know how you get houses where it seems like every single room was added individually as an afterthought? Fire doors and stairs and low ceilings and not a single straight corridor anywhere in the maze? If you stayed in Bene't Street while studying at Corpus then you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Anyway, it was like that. Room was uninspiring - miserably dull light bulb, curtains which wouldn't close adequately, a scenic view of some back alleys and bins, useless furniture, no coathangers or coathooks, wonky television bracket with the television itself propped horizontal by a book... it goes on. Pretty miserable, especially for £80 for the night, £20 more than I paid at the Travel Inn last time. I don't intend to stay there again.

Sometimes you just want warm grease in a bun so I went to McDonalds for food. It was cheaper than dining in, if nothing else. Checked my gigantic list of test questions before attempting futilely to get to bed... noises outside my door until past 11pm and a humming in the alley until nearly 1am would have kept me awake but these days I can sleep through that kind of thing (too much time spent dozing on the bus to work, *cough*) so it was really more my weekend sleep schedule (sleep at 1, wake at 11) which scuppered my attempt at an early night, than anything else.

Got up at 6:40, ate an apple for breakfast - wakes you up faster than coffee, better for you, also, I like apples and don't like coffee. It was a gloriously warm and sunny day already. Caught the train to Basingstoke - 20 minutes, significantly shorter than my current 75-minute morning commute on the bus, so I could conceivably live in Winchester if I got the job. Hung around enjoying the sun because I was ahead of schedule, and whom did I spy? Well, a guy I've never mentioned before, actually, guy called Mike, whom I'd met at the previous interview. So we shared a cab.

Gradually people accumulated around our table in the Ericsson canteen that morning. I think it's a good thing to arrive early for an interview because that means you get to start the conversation - other people have to elbow their way into the crowd of strangers. Several people mentioned the flaky recruitment process which they'd experienced, including one girl who'd apparently been told to come on the wrong day and was taken away before any of the actual assessments began! The poor soul. Others had come on the day before or after their final exams. I, for one, had had no such problems. Lucky me.

So there was the usual talk about what the jobs (three posts going, eight applicants, relatively good odds, all things considered) consisted of, Q&A with some of their recent graduate intake, all informative, all of it giving me the best feeling about the job itself since I interviewed for Data Connection.

First assessment was a presentation. Here is a brief about Rick's Cafe Bar. He has to choose between refurbishing his bar and opening a new one - perform a cost analysis and advise him. Sometimes you're just in the right gear for this kind of challenge and that day I think I was. I couldn't tell you how good my presentation technique was, I mean, it was one of the best I've done but I've not done many and the more I think about it the more I think about things I could have done differently/better. Getting less confident even as I write this, in fact. My interviewer asked me a few questions which I fielded as well as I could, in contrast to several people who reported they'd finished extremely early and/or been asked no questions at all. Good sign? Who can say?

There was a group exercise: this was a fun one. You have to build a bridge from these materials, scoring maximum points for time taken to build, weight supported and span, subtracting points for certain purchases. We spent a while mulling stuff over - rather longer than I'd have preferred to spend, really - rolled the flipchart paper diagonally and found it wasn't strong enough and so were forced to fold it in half, reducing our span and scoring only 18 points altogether. I think we could have done better - as a matter of fact, it's a fun challenge so I'd have appreciated another go at it. I was chided for continuing to study the problem afterwards. Bah, I say! Wanting to complete a problem to the best of your ability is a positive character trait.

What was the other thing? Ah yes: finally, after hours and hours and hours of tiring tests and somehow-even-more-tiring sitting around talking with our nominal competitors, was the face-to-face interview. It could have gone better. Several questions, despite my massive list mentioned above, went unanticipated - "Name a time when a company provided you excellent service"? Excellent service tends to be transparent... - so I couldn't say how good an impression I formed, although it's always good to meet an interviewer who has just as much disdain for miserable generic HR-speak as you do. Low tolerance for garbage may be a defining property of geeks.

Despite having huge amounts of free time during the day we nevertheless finished about an hour late. We were given passes for the bus back to the station and I enjoyed a beer on the train home with Nariman, one of my fellow candidates - beer is something I always feel the need for following a long and exhausting interview.

So, my closing impressions? If I'm honest with myself, there were three, possibly four candidates there whom I'm fairly sure I outperformed. As for the rest, it's anybody's game. You're not there for their interviews and they're not there for yours. It's hard to guess.

They said 24-48 hours, so I should know for sure by about this time tomorrow. Right now, while I'm becoming more worried as I analyse the interview, I think my odds are better than for any interview I've had since Goldman Sachs.

I REALLY need this...

Update

Was being scored out of 4 on lots of areas during the day, here is the run-down:

Others were apparently scoring 3s and 4s and were believed to be better suited to fit into the existing software teams they had at Ericsson. Such is life.

This result nearly broke me.

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