I am right now recovering from the blisteringly, head-spinningly fast Fujitsu software development graduate programme interview process. I had a phone interview on the afternoon of Tuesday 10th July - the day I headed down to Horsley for the Allianz final assessment, those of you keeping track at home. This went pretty well but there were just SO MANY questions! Like two dozen of them. Still, I was told immediately afterwards that I had successfully passed and a follow-up interview was hurriedly arranged for Monday 16th.

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Luckily I have relatively little work to take care of at this point, and my line manager is extremely liberal with respect to me taking time off at only a few days' notice, as long as the work gets done, so arranging all of this was fairly painless. I spent the weekend preparing a five-minute presentation on myself and the skills I intended to bring to Fujitsu. I'm becoming more experienced with presentations but they're still pretty scary - I think I am more comfortable when I don't have such ample time to overthink them, frankly.

Bracknell is fairly pleasant. Another M4 corridor town, not far from London. Due to an "incident" on the platform at Reading my train arrived there late and I missed my connecting train, which was hair-raising, especially when I realised that I had forgotten the email with the phone number to call if I was going to be late - luckily, there was another one in half an hour and I was already set to arrive almost an hour early.

So I took a taxi to the Fujitsu building, which was very large, grey and boring from the outside and not significantly more interesting from the inside. Receptionists had difficulty figuring out how to sign us in electronically at the desk, due to perhaps having been given incomplete information? So not everything at Fujitsu is rosy and "just works", eh? Ha ha!

There were five of us altogether. I was the only one applying for software development - the others, two guys, two girls (or, as females of roughly my age are probably better described these days, women), were for customer service and project management roles and suchlike. This was novel and it also meant we weren't in direct competition with one another, which was more relaxing. The reception chairs seemed to have been set out in such a way as to make conversations as difficult as possible - all pointing away from each other in different corners. One lady, Christina, had come all the way from Spain for this half-day interview, which I thought was a pretty impressive investment of time.

We were collected by a very nice lady called Kam and led to a very boring and hot and rather cramped meeting room which had too-large but admittedly superbly comfortable chairs. She gave us a PowerPoint presentation from her laptop, where it was established that Fujitsu Services (in the UK specifically) is shooting up in size and profitability due to acquiring other, smaller companies at a disturbingly large rate, that Fujitsu is therefore taking on a lot of graduates (particularly software developers, so odds look good for me!), that Fujitsu hasn't had enough decent applications, so they've extended their application deadline more than once, and that, because we represented a fairly late bunch of applicants, we'd already missed the pre-joining event which the rest of the September 2007 intake had already attended.

Now, we each gave our presentations. To everybody else. Again, quite novel. With only Kam in the room actively judging us, it was almost relaxing as well. Then... ha ha ha. I had already noticed that Alex Mann Solutions was one of the email addresses through which Fujitsu had been contacting me - the same company which was handling my Ericsson application. The group exercise was the BRIDGE-BUILDING EXERCISE AGAIN! Well, I was MUCH better prepared this time around. We scored higher and worked together well. Go team!

And that was it. Train home via London. Only about three hours spent interviewing in total. At least I hadn't come all the way from Spain.

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So a day or two later I got the email from Kam inviting me to a final assessment that FRIDAY. Yes, last Friday, 20th July. A whole-day interview for which I had to take Thursday afternoon off work as well.

I booked the Travelodge. This proved to be a mistake. They provide a handy card explaining how much money they save by failing to provide things in your room, such as toiletries, and a phone, and a clock. Luckily, I was fairly well-stocked myself in this regard, so I managed, but it was pretty miserable. I asked reception for a receipt and they said I had to print it out from my email online, which was annoying. I had booked relatively late, which meant being forced to take a family room with a sofa bed for £75 - but for the extra money, all I found I got was, well, a sofa bed, in a room otherwise precisely identical to a single. Sheer bare-faced cheapness. Unimpressive.

Relatively relaxing night. By the morning the heavens had opened. I was umbrella-less. It bucketed all morning; I caught a glimpse of some news in the afternoon that suggested that my train home might be delayed... luckily, everything went incredibly smoothly.

Right, so there were eight of us this time around. Again, a mix of people for a mix of posts, only one other software dev guy. Only one other guy after that, and he disappeared very shortly into the morning under mysterious circumstances, leaving just us two guys and five women - one being Christina-from-Spain, who'd stayed in the UK (this was later the same week, of course). Kam was taking care of again, and we blasted through the same presentation as last time. Then there was the classic Individual Case Study preparation.

This was fairly challenging. There were LOTS of numbers involved and they were very confusing. I probably shouldn't reveal the details, but the cost of the subscription to this product directly affected the projected uptake, which in turn affected the expected cost of supplying bandwidth for said product... which in TURN would affect the subscription cost, thus creating an extremely complex three-phase feedback loop, which it took me some minutes to muster the nerve to dive into.

There was a group exercise (that's two group exercises, counting the previous one) in which we had to plan, purchase materials for, build, negotiate prices for and sell fully-fitted offices of various types. Plenty of lessons learned there - like, get the client's requirements BEFORE purchasing stuff!! I felt we could and should have done better. We ended up almost a million virtual pounds in the red, which I found amusing.

The individual presentation: I was over-confident about this and should have spent just a little more time rehearsing my spiel because it came out with a few too many numbers and I knew I was being far from as articulate as I usually am. Still, I fielded the questions raised pretty well, I thought, and if nothing else, I was confident of my mathematics, and the risks and improvements I had suggested. I did overrun. Took, I think, 15 minutes where I should have taken 10. Not good...

Lunch was mainly chatting with the assessors, in particular the Defence integration and test manager, Martin Hunter, my (well, my and the other guy's) potential future boss. Looking back now it feels like I didn't make enough effort to network at that meeting. Sure, I had a few conversations, got a lot of valuable information too, but not above and beyond what I usually try for. This and the chat with some existing graduates showed me that, among other things, you probably need to be able to drive for this here job. I should probably pick up my lessons again, huh?

Then, there was ANOTHER group exercise! Flipping heck, as I used to say when I was a child! We all gathered as a group of seven and were charged with brainstorming potential considerations for a particular business proposition. This was FASCINATING. Fellow coder-guy Will and I were pitching ideas of one kind and the women were all putting forward ideas from a completely different angles, angles I would never have considered. Brief conversations later suggested they'd, for the most part, done the same in their case studies and presentations. We got some good stuff down - not as much good stuff as I'd have liked, a few people tended to waffle on and on about a particular consideration which Will and I would have been quite happy to summarise in, e.g., two words: "Hardware compatibility". I'm concerned I may have interrupted such waffle one too many times and thus come across as abrupt and overbearing, as I'm told I have in previous interviews.

And finally - and I hate it when this is the last thing in the day - the face-to-face interview with, again, said manager Hunter. Pretty good to start with. We found some common ground: videogaming, the Wii et cetera. Had a good chat about that. Then, (as with Ericsson) with slight boredom, we turned to the scripted questions. Here, I think, I performed very well - several times he remarked "good answer" after I'd answered an unanticipated question - but a couple of times, with questions like "Name a time when you changed someone's mind" and "Name a time when you encouraged somebody" (at least, I think those were the questions) I dried up and ended up leaving him with a blank on his form. Bad? You know what? Sitting here writing this right now, I suspect he had already made his hiring decision by that point in the interview. I don't know how accurate that might be, but I'm sure my first impression was excellent, and they count double, do they not?

The best day-long assessments tend to give copious opportunities to get to know one's fellow candidates and we'd managed to connect up pretty well over the course of the day. I rode the bus, train and tube back to St. Pancras station, the other candidates' routes home gradually diverging from mine. We pretty much just spoke about the interviews. I was told more than once that I had come across as intelligent and numerate, which was kind of touching... as far as I knew, I hadn't really done anything particularly out of the ordinary on the day... and, certainly, I hadn't been paying huge amounts of attention to everybody else's performances, so, to my internal embarrassment, I was unable to return compliments with any kind of confidence. Such, once again, is life.

Overall I think about 90% positive result. It's a confident score but I've had better and I've had, as regular readers will be aware, no success ever, so I can't really say anything for certain at this point. I should know within two weeks... in fact, Kam said she'd try to make it one week or less. Stay tuned.