Baby's coming (2)

Well, this post I can finally stop convoluting the blog with my employment woes. 

I got an interview with a place I wanted to work at.  It was a little odd, actually.  The first interview was with five separate people, one at a time.  The overall theme was, "can you work in an environment that isn't a corporation, and doesn't act like a non-profit?"

I did that three years ago, so I told them that I could probably handle it just fine.  The rest was some technical questions, which are a standard in this industry.  They all seemed rather pleased about how I was progressing through the interviews--so I took that as a good sign.

I didn't hear back from them for several weeks. My contact for the interviewing process, said it was because of some internal deadlines.  When I went in for my second interview, they sat me down and said, "we want to hire you, you've sort of bubbled up through all the candidates.  The last part of this is that the director of our department wants to interview all new-hires.  He gives sort of a thumbs up or thumbs down for them all.  We've had one other candidate make it as far as you and he gave the thumbs down.  We don't know why--so we'd like to give you a written test.  We know he's going to ask you programming questions.  We figure if you do this and prove you have the skill-set, then we can come back at him if he gives a thumbs down with this much more evidence that you're the right candidate"

So, that made me nervous.  I was asked an interesting programming problem and I gave him two solutions for it.  When he asked me what the benefits were to each approach, I responded,  "Well, one of these wouldn't slow down with huge data sets.  The other one really only has the advantage of being quick to code for--could probably do it in about 3 or 4 minutes."
His response was, "Oh, really?  Would you write up the code for the second approach then?"

It took me about 3 minutes, but I wrote working code up on the board that solved the hypothetical problem.  His response was, "I've never seen anyone do that.  What position are you interviewing for?"

"System test"

"Oh good, we need more testers"

That was the end of the interview.  I heard back a week later asking for some data regarding salary and the official offer.  I start work on August 1st, which is the day after Dani's due date.  I'm hoping this kid comes a week or two early for that reason--and my mother has already planned to be in town July 18-25.  That'd work out so well if this kid comes early--because we wouldn't have to worry about N and V while we run off in the middle of the night to the hospital.