Whoo.

Avid readers of my blog will be aware that on Thursday I took the train down to London, for Barclays Capital's Graduate Technology Assessment Event. This was the last round of interviews before being let onto the Graduate Technology scheme, due to begin in September 2007.

The trip down was uneventful as ever and I spent the time coming up with answers to a list of 109 possible interview questions I had found online. Got off the DLR at Westferry and walked a very short distance down the road from there to the Four Seasons, which is by far the nicest hotel I've ever stayed at. While checking in I was asked what credit card I was intending to use for any additional charges that would be incurred; I informed them hesitantly that I had no credit card. Naturally the guy I was speaking to took the whole thing in stride but I was left wondering frantically what counted as an additional expense and what didn't.

The room door was operated by the same card system I found myself spending two entire days trying to master while I was doing International Mathematics Olympiad training at Trinity College in Cambridge - which meant I actually knew how to use it, luckily. This, I think, saved me some awkwardness. Nice fingerprint design on the back. As for the room itself - lots of hard wood, lots of interesting useful little things in corners to hunt around for, not quite as much overhead lighting as I would have preferred, so I ended up turning on most of the smaller lamps, but the effect was good. I didn't get a window overlooking the river, alas, but the view of the Canary Wharf area of London was still pretty nice. I had time to explore the room a little bit before the drinks reception at 6:30.

There were, I believe, 32 of us altogether. Now, on the application, there was an optional section where you could put your ethnicity. As a white male, I paused for a long time over this, thinking: "They're going to want to make sure they get a good ratio of ethnic minorities in here. Bearing this in mind, do I put that I'm a white male, or leave it blank?" I don't remember what I put in the end, but I was surprised to discover, when I got there, that about a third of the candidates were Asian and another third were of Oriental extraction. But this was as nothing compared to my surprise at realising that 100% of the candidates were male. I brought this up with the first couple of guys I got chatting to - we came up with a few theories, but it still felt pretty anomalous.

We swapped a few facts - name, degree, home - most of which I (as I tend to) instantly forgot. I remarked that 6:00pm interviews were infinitely preferable to 8:00am ones (in London, at any rate), which, in retrospect, perhaps I shouldn't have...

Circulating among us were existing Technology employees of Barcap so we got a few questions in. We got better opportunities to ask questions over dinner - small tables, three Barcap employees and about six candidates per table, exquisite food which I didn't eat much of. (I always feel pretty nervy during interviews, and I don't really eat properly.) We were waited on by short women in white jackets and grey skirts. Useful facts came across. Barcap is a relatively new investment bank (only nine years old) and its graduate recruitment processes are relatively newer still - they are playing catch-up, in a way, but this also means a new graduate can potentially have significant positive effects on its development. Most Tech folks work in the "front office", working directly with traders to develop and produce the tools they ask for and solve their problems. For a software development outfit, their processes are, of necessity, extremely fast, with a minimum of specifications, documentation, prototyping and so on - time is money. This, I've been thinking about myself - is it a good long-term business practice? Streamlining the process is one thing, but I believe a lot of such streamlining can come at the expense of a safety net, which would be CRITICAL in a situation where cash is at stake. I found out that, despite Vista being recently released, they were only just now finishing the transfer to Windows XP from 2000, because it was only recently that they had started using hardware components which demanded XP.

I asked about specialised hardware - I was told by one guy that, though they didn't use much of it, they were seriously looking at figuring out ways of using 3D graphics card GPUs for fast calculations. Recalling the recent development of PPUs (physics processing units) for games with heavy real time physics demands, I wondered out loud whether there were possibilities for making specialised financial processing units specifically for investment banks to use. I think the consensus was that the banks themselves didn't have the time to develop such things, but I, for one, believe there could be a market for them, so when Nvidia and ATi start making them, remember you heard it here first.

Working hours, I was told, are relatively good for an investmant banking post, but still, 50 hours a week is "pretty standard" to them - this figure gave me significant pause for thought. Several times I was asked what department of Technology I wanted to work in, which threw me for a curve somewhat, as I know very little about the interior of Barclays and hadn't had any rigidly defined ambitions in place beforehand in any case. I said I was looking forward to going through a few rotations to see what I liked.

Breakfast at 7:30am the following morning, they said. They had a full day planned and said we should prepare to feel exhausted. Sounds familiar to me, all job interviews are like that in my experience.

Spent a little while exploring my room some more. Frighteningly expensive minibar (mixers: £3.70, and so on), card on the pillow with tomorrow's weather forecast, Four Seasons Magazine, shoe horn, laundry bag, and so on, and so on. Set the bedside alarm for 6:30am. Set my phone to wake me at the same time. This proved a wise move as I'd set the bedside alarm incorrectly and it never went off.

Comfiest bed ever. Excellent pillows. Duvet, wasn't so keen on, but still good. Too much on my mind to sleep very well...

Had a bath Friday morning. Bath was too small to accommodate me comfortably. Ah ha, I thought, they're not perfect after all! Dazed and not fully awake (I'm not a morning person) I checked out, then reported back to the meeting suite kinda thing that Barcap had arranged for us. You know that tiny bread that the guy complains about in "This Is Spinal Tap"? There was that. Chocolate pastries and fruit salad and bacon sandwiches. Nothing I would describe as anywhere approaching breakfast. To be honest, I would have killed for a bowl of cereal. And a seat! Sheesh. It was 8:30am by the time the action actually started.

We were divided into three groups but all did the same stuff in the end. I had two half-hour interviews first. The first one was with a guy I'd sat next to the previous evening so we had a rapport going already, which was good. The second guy I didn't know so well - I found myself a little distracted by the frankly awesome view behind him (the interviews were in hotel rooms, specifically the ones facing the river, and on the higher floors at that). He asked me about my website (this website, in fact) and I explained about HTDTE and he actually went off on a little bit of a tangent to ask me how I would actually go about destroying the Earth. Having managed to get an actual conversation going like that was extremely gratifying. Although if I'm honest I couldn't tell you what kind of impression I might have made.

There was a break and then a "Case Study Preparation". We were given a one-page case study and given one hour to come up with a 15-minute presentation. "Hexagone Investments does this, this and this. Give some recommendations about how they could use technology to achieve these growth targets. Also advise as to the risks." We were supposed to create notes and flipchart slides. This was more or less the point where I realised I was unlikely to get the job. Not only was the brief astoundingly vague, I had given about three presentations in my entire life up until that point, two of them in other interviews. I struggled, and that's putting it mildly, although I did come to some interesting conclusions which were... well, to be honest, mainly wrong. To put it bluntly, the answer I entirely failed to reach was more or less "internet banking".

But the presentation itself was later. Next came the group exercise. Three other guys and I were given a list of 20 urgent tasks to take care of and had to pick the first five to deal with individually, then select a top five individually, then present and justify our decisions to some Barcap guys. We made one stunning blunder - we said we'd deal with the urgent voicemail from New York immediately, and the brief states it's 7:30am London time, which is obviously 2:30am New York time. DUH. Beyond that I think we justified our responses pretty well, though flaws did come through. One of the ones on the list which we threw out was "You have to give a talk to a group of new graduates at 8:15am, and you haven't prepared your presentation yet". It seems the people who wrote the question were thinking something different from us when they wrote that. WE thought that "new graduates" meant "new people coming to work in the Technology department, with this being their first day on the job", whereas THEY meant it as "job interview candidates who have come from miles around", i.e. ourselves, more or less. We argued that it reflected better on the bank to cancel the presentation and reschedule it than to give a sub-standard one; but if they had, indeed, come a long way, then rescheduling would be a massive undertaking, so we would do the best possible job of winging it. Anyway I think we were eloquent in defending our choices.

There was a third interview where I was asked about my website again and told once more by the interviewer that he intended to check it out afterwards, which is always encouraging - hi there, if you're reading! Lunch was, again, the kind of food I usually find myself just nibbling at while I wistfully long for peanut butter sandwiches. I spent most of the day living on ice water, frankly.

Then there was the case study presentation.

Oh dear me.

I'd spent lunch - a huge portion of which was sitting around doing nothing - running through stuff in my head and making additional notes, but when it came to it, to give the presentation, well... what I'd worked out I think I presented okay-ish, though I doubt I was especially articulate or confident (how could I be?). But the questions afterwards: how could I have not picked up that this was a retail bank? How did I not see "internet banking" as an answer? I had figured out for myself from the information given that the bank had a lot of individuals as customers. I was going on about establishing strong lines of communication to the Middle East to develop products deliberately targeted at businesses there to help them develop and thus increase revenue, having somehow stepped over this Grand Canyon of an obvious response somehow without noticing it. Then all these questions asked by the (thankfully solitary) interviewer proceeded to deconstruct most of what I'd said and propose an entirely different answer which I, frankly, agreed was a much better idea. I don't know.

All I needed, to be honest, was another hour, maybe? I don't have presentation-making experience. Thinking your way from one end of a problem to the other is a lot harder for reality-based problems than it is for technical or mathematical ones. For me, at any rate.

With that nightmare out of the way there was one last thing, a brief tour of Barclays Capital, which was five minutes' walk away down Canary Wharf. We saw a trading floor or two - those guys have five or six screen each, each screen crammed with more stuff than it should be able to hold, and telephones like air traffic control radars. The Technology folks seem to work at a much more sedate pace - relatively speaking, anyway. Nice carpets. Reasonable canteen. Good views from the windows, if you could get near them.

We walked back and claimed our bags and checked out. I contacted Andrew The Pearson for the second stage of my cunning weekend plan - meeting up to see his current flat, which he'd moved into some months previously but I hadn't seen. I wandered around Canary Wharf for a little while, noting an ice rink and a crashed flying saucer in Canada Square (?) then took the DLR to Deptford Bridge which is his nearest stop. P met me at the station but while getting off the train I was phoned by Express Recruitment with a job for Monday, to which I hastily agreed, being in no position for delicate negotiations while walking through Greenwich with a phone clamped to my ear. It was some minutes later that I hung up and was able to do the usual "Hello. How are you?" thing.

We had sausage and mash and then a little bit of cake before heading out for beers. I don't know: exquisitely prepared fruit, meat and vegetables, and I pick at it, but a plate of sausage and mash and I clear my plate. Three pubs, we visited: the first was serving a curious lager I had never heard of and didn't much like, so we moved to the second, which was next door - justifiably so, we decided, since the atmosphere inside was sufficiently different. This second pub appeared to consist of what was once two houses: it was divided into two by a (presumably load-bearing) wall broken only by the bar which ran through both of them. Beer here was nicer. We discussed radio, mathematics, teaching, London and job interviews. I decided I wasn't likely to get the job and expressed my misgivings about accepting it in the first place; he persuaded me I probably ought to accept it if I was offered it - after all, I could quit after the initial 18-month rotation if I really hated it that much.

The odds are very much against me getting it, really. 19 of the 32 candidates there at the time were going for the Graduate programme (the rest were hoping to be interns) - this was the third of three Technology Assessment Events which makes 57 candidates overall for what I was led to believe was 13 places, yielding odds of worse than one in four, all things being equal.

Third pub was also good, although there weren't many seats (it was also a restaurant). We returned to the flat and played Cribbage, an interesting game since there are lots of ways to get points so you almost always get lots of points on each turn. (Also, I won - beginner's luck, possibly.)

Slept on sofa cushions. The sleeping bag provided was amazingly warm and comfortable although, as P pointed out, not even remotely squishable or portable. Breakfast of Shreddies. Train home was at 12 that day.

I expect to find out whether I get the job or not - probably not - on Monday. That's also the first day of my new job, about which, more later.

Overall? As with all interviews, it's a learning experience if nothing else...

Update

I didn't get it.