Job interviews

I have been looking for a new position for a few weeks now. For the first time in my life, I’m trying to be more selective about what I do, so I went through a couple of interviews. I have come to realization that I’m unlikely to ever work on a good position for a larger company, that actually has some “hiring process”. The reason for that is that I’m just not built for job interviews. At all.

I can’t objectively judge on how good a programmer am I, but I know for sure that I can’t solve problems under pressure. People who I work with would normally tell you that I’m able to solve problems quickly, but I absolutely need to relax, have a look at what I’m doing, think and only after that do something. If you stress me, even very slightly, I’m unlikely to do anything useful. Except that this is exactly what technical job interviews are usually about, solving simple algorithmical problems in artifical conditions and under pressure. I can with much harder problems, but not if you watch every character I write. The result is – “I’m a bad programmer.”

The other objective of a job interview is to see what kind of person are you dealing with and whether you would enjoy to work with them. I stutter, sometimes pretty badly. I have not found that to be a big problem at work, but it takes some time getting used to. I usually end up being an important member of the team, so I guess it’s worth the effort for my colleagues, but unfortunatelly there is effort. You can easily see how that leaves a bad first impression though and the result is – “I’m not a good person to work with.”

As I said, I cannot be objective about myself, but I see many companies disappointed when they contact me based on my background and they we go through an interview. I’m mainly writing this so that people who are looking to hire me for whatever job know what they are getting into.