In my pursuit of employment, Jennifer suggested I apply with the church. One of the jobs had the title "Technical Genius". It wasn't clear from the description what they wanted, but it did say that those that were among the brightest should apply. In school, especially at BYU, I was the one that people would come to find answers to difficult engineering problems we were assigned to complete in our classes. So I applied.
I received an email on December 1st saying I was chosen to take a technical test from amongst the many candidates that applied. I was scheduled to take the test on the 11th. I had two hours to complete four sections: Problem solving, technical knowledge, logic questions, and writing pseudo-code for a sort algorithm.
I took the test and felt I did well in all the sections except technical knowledge, in which they asked for a picture of how people connect and interact to a site like amazon.com to purchase things, and asked for definitions of terms, most of which were networking and database related and therefore I know nothing about them. In fact I had never heard some of the terms before, such as SAN, NAS, HBA, 3NF, SATA, SOA, SOAP (no, not the stuff in the shower), and others. I did know a few, such as TCP/IP, grep, SCSI, NIC. I did my best to draw the picture of the amazon.com thing, but boy it looked weak to me.
The problem solving was mostly "story problems", and the logic section asked questions about people on a amusement park ride, sitting in cars. After specifying some elements like "Amy is in a car with someone else", "Gwen is in car 4 or 5", and "The car in front of Mark is empty and he is alone in his car", etc. they asked a bunch of questions. Then they did a similar thing with trophies on shelves.
I felt that I would not receive a call because the I did so poorly on the technical definitions section. But, to my surprise, on Thursday (the 18th), I received a call at about 8:00 am as I was styling my hair asking if I could interview that day, as soon a possible. Well, since all we were planning to do that day was put Venetian plaster on out kitchen walls, I instead put on a suit and tie and drove to Salt Lake in an awful snowstorm. I arrived late due to the snow/urgency of the request. I apologized to the interviewer, Heber, for my long hair and I was taken up to the "war room".
Those in the "war room" told me I had either the #1 or #2 score on the "genius test." Well, OK, I know I'm not dumb, but I flopped all over the technical knowledge section. So how could possibly be #1 or #2? The only thing I can think is that my lack of networking/database knowledge aided my score. The other sections were quite easy but I did use the full two hours of test time, and I left blank probably 3/4 of the definitions. This may have allowed more time to complete the other sections.
I was taken to a small conference room and the interview proceeded. They asked me a bunch of questions like, how do I learn, and do work best alone or in a group, how did I solve a problem in my previous work, what did I don, yada, yada, yada, you know, the standard drabble interviewers like to ask. Then they asked me the "General Authority" question, as they called it. And we discussed databases for a bit.
Then Heber asked me about the amazon.com drawing. Could I fill it in more? Well, no I couldn't. I told him I wasn't really a networking guy, and I know I bombed that section. He then took a look at scores from each section and said he didn't realize I had done so poorly on that section. Upon closer review, I missed 1 question in the problem solving section and aced the logic questions, with a decent score on the sort question. Oh blast, I said, I thought I had all of those right. I've now reviewed my answers and found I made an adding mistake on the one question I missed.
I asked them about pay, and, surprisingly, they pay well. Apparently they turned that around a few years ago to attract talent.
Heber told me I am a genius, but I would have a big learning curve to come up to speed on networking and data bases. But, says he, I am genius. Well, thanks Heber, now could you please hire the genius???? (No I didn't say that to him.)
Well, NO, they didn't! Turns out there was a hiring freeze, starting Friday/Monday (they weren't sure at interview time), announced on Thursday morning, so they called their top "4 or 5" prospects for an interview that day so they could make an offer Thursday/Friday. I called Heber Thursday evening and asked about the status. He said I was the second candidate for one of their 3 openings and I would know by Friday at 5:00 since they had found out that that was the deadline for offers. Alas, Friday at 5:00 has passed and I have no offer. Also, the kitchen is not done. Well, that's for tomorrow...
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