In-FLEX-ible
In honor of my recent job hunt, I thought I might relate my worst interviewing experience as a job candidate. It’s not that entertaining a story, but it was definitely painful to go through.
It was around 2005 when I applied for a job at Macromedia’s office out in Newton. As it happened, this was just before the company was swallowed by Adobe.
The job was really cool (for that time): lead designer for a new product that would revolutionize the web by giving developers the ability to programmatically create and script dynamic forms and interfaces. The web had begun to evolve beyond static pages, toward more dynamic behavior and interactivity, and the question was whether that would be based on dynamic HTML or something like Macromedia’s successful Flash animation suite.
Naturally, Macromedia wanted to push Flash, but its authoring interface had been designed specifically for the workflow of an animator; they needed to create a new tool that would allow engineers to write programs that could build forms and dynamic pages on the fly. And that’s where this new product-called Flex-would come in. And they were hiring for the lead designer on an ambitious second version after a promising but not very useful proof of concept.
So I showed up at the Macromedia office at about 8:40am. Due to my own conservatism, I was about 20 minutes early for the scheduled 9am interview. Unfortunately, the office was still dark and locked up; no one had arrived yet. No biggie, I’ll wait.
And wait.
And wait.
The first person to show up-a secretary-didn’t come in until 10am, an hour after my presumed interview. She spent some time trying to track down the manager I was supposed to see, and eventually told me that he was “running late”. How helpful! At least she let me into the office to wait.
And wait.
When he finally arrived around 11, he told me that he had a meeting to run to, and asked if I would mind interviewing with two programmers on the team. It was immediately clear that neither of the developers had any idea what the position was about, nor did they have any questions to ask. We managed to kill an hour, achieving absolutely nothing. With the manager still unable to meet with me, they sent me home with apologies.
Despite the fact that the hiring manager had scheduled my 9am interview time, after over four hours on site I went home, having gotten less than 30 seconds of his time.
Needless to say, that made an indelible impression on me! Definitely not the best way to show a candidate that they’d be a valued member of the team.