The Bull Og

Had a crazy interview today.   

So, today I get called in for a second interview at this one company.  I have no idea what’s going to happen but I assume it’ll be another round of questions, this time with the CEO present (it’s a small BioTech start-up and he wasn’t at the first interview.)  So, I get to the office and there are two other guys sitting in the waiting room.  Come to find out, they’re applicants too.  Another guy shows up and then a woman enters to tell us what’s going to go on today.  We’ll be split up in groups of three and given a problem and 60 minutes to create software to solve the problem with another 10 minutes afterwards for the presentation of our solution.  We’d also be observed as to how we interacted with our fellow team-members. 

We’re also going to conduct all of our interaction in English, we’re told, because not all of the applicants speak German.  “Ok,” I think, “this’ll be interesting.  I’ve got a natural advantage.”    Oh, and by the way, I was the only one wearing a suit and tie… 

So, we move from the waiting room to a bigger conference room where everyone who works at the company is gathered (like I said, it’s a small company) and given more instructions about what’s about to happen.  60 minutes to prepare, 10 minutes to present, German or English for the presentation, it doesn’t matter.  We’re then split off into two groups and I’m paired with two native German speakers (i.e. not the people who can’t speak German) to analyze the problem as it’s laid out in English.  We decide to speak in German, which made it interesting.   The next 60 minutes was a blazing frenzy of Software Engineering…in German. 

We hashed out a 30,000 foot model of how our software would solve the problem, a Class diagram for an overview of what we’d need, indivdual Use Cases for each of the classes, pros & cons of particular technologies, Input/Output, Web-based? everything, all in German.    In the end, we had designed a Client/Server environment which I presented an overview of in our 10 minute presentation (in German) and the other two covered the Client and the Server, respectively.

Had my first interview in Vienna today.  It’s funny; I guess it’s business and all and maybe I was expecting too much special treatment but how much more personality-free can an interviewer get?  I mean, here I’ve been in contact with the guy for two months and I’ve put all this time and energy into translating my resume (ahem, “CV”) into German as well as learning German in the first place and moving to Vienna and all he can do me the favor of doing is a cursory greeting at the beginning and never breaking a smile during the interview?  Cold.

Isn’t three months rent for commission a bit steep? Finding an apartment in Vienna has certainly been an eye-opening experience. Yesterday and today we looked at apartments care of several agencies, all of which charge three months rent for commission. You do the math when an apt. costs $660/month.

Ouch!

For that reason, we’ve turned to the classifieds but that’s another beast. They came out yesterday and by 2 pm today, out of 12 people I called, four apratments were already taken, I couldn’t leave messages for three people because their inboxes were full, three wanted a deposit of $20,000 or more, and two were listed under “To Rent” when they should have been under “For Sale.”

Today was also the hottest day of the summer in Austria. It was supposed to be a scorching 100 degrees Farenheit (hey, give us a break, it’s humid here) and so by mid-afternoon, we finally decided to go swimming. No sooner did we arrive at the pool (after a 45 minute ride) did it start pouring. And wouldn’t you know it, once we decided to bag the swimming idea (along with the other 500 people who decided to turn tail) and made then made it back home, the sun came out.