More Testing

The sole employer I’m currently pursuing for a job wrote back to me today with a request for an all-day interview in Redwood City on Thursday, one week from now. Yay. I’m grateful that my two phones screens went well, and that they received favorably my 2-hour coding assessment I did on Monday morning.

Easy peasy interview? Not really. Their interview guideline outlines an evaluation on steroids. Not only will I give a presentation but also I face yet another 2-hour coding assessment. The presentation, fortunately, is a short 25 minute talk with 15 of those minutes for me to highlight one complex topic. I choose you, Turn Around Time Calculator, for which I may be able to salvage some old work graphs off of this laptop.

As for the coding assignment, I’m to build a simple database application using sqlalchemy and then load some data in, and query data out. Unfortunately, I’m not familiar with sqlalchemy, so expect here a 3-to-4 day crash course in this Python implementation of SQL databases. This afternoon, I bought a textbook off of Amazon, and I have just identified some online tutorials for sqlalchemy. This coding test, my second, may be more an assessment of how quickly I can cram in a new skill than an evaluation of the depth of my computational knowledge.

Further anxiety inducing, the list of prospective interviews is stacked towards executives, an odd choice for a largish company of 160 people. I’ll speak with my potential boss, her other report, the head of software engineering, the head of bioinformatics, even the Chief Technology Officer. The bad news is that this a stressful slate of conversations. The good news is that a strong showing on my part could help leverage a choice role for me at the company.