Did I work for that company? I almost didn't....first we'd kept agreeing on when the phone interview would take place...and I would keep reminding them that we're two hours apart. But he kept calling me at 6am for the phone interviews. He had a difficult to understand accent...and felt like I had to scream answers to him all the time.
And, I did consider hanging up. Later I got a call saying he wanted me to come in for a face-to-face interview. And, then after the ticket was booked....I was told that I wouldn't need the return part, because I'm hired. Meanwhile...people that interned there....they would spend the first few weeks learning their proprietary programming language and then be maintaining code. The language was based on FORTRAN 66, with lots of macros. The macro processor was written in FORTRAN66, and it would process their language files....where macros would encapsulate calls to system level routines (written in assembler.) As years went on....the upper level code stayed largely the same.... and mainly change out the system specific layer for whatever new platform. I was hired, because there was a problem in the I/O routines on multiprocessor unix systems. So I was there for years, before I had deal with the macro code. Sure is annoying having to space things out just right....and hard wrapping and using continuation character..... When I started, the macro processor still spat out FORTRAN code, so I had to have FORTRAN compilers on all the build machines. Though eventually, they merged it with f2c....so that it would put out C code. Once I was working on a routine and spotted a familiar name in the comments, and my manager said, yes...once upon a time, our CEO was just a junior programmer. But, one of my co-workers was the remaining original developers of the program..... Even though the mainframe version had been out of support for many years....there were still big name companies still running it, and big enough that we had to provide patches for Y2K. I also got to port the then current version back to OSF/1, because it was discovered that the CD-R that the source escrow had been burned to had become unreadable. (and they couldn't get the source from their SCM, because the person responsible had opted to not migrated the old changes when they switched products....as part of their Y2K efforts, and the license had run out by then. He was also unavailable that period due to a botched LASIK procedure....fortunately he was able to see again eventually.) ----- Original Message ----- > > From: [email protected] [mailto:discuss- > > [email protected]] On Behalf Of John BORIS > > > > you would give a kid in Junior High. By the end of the test I had > > decided I wasn't going to take any offer from them so I spent the > > interview time playing with the interviewer. He never caught on. > > But it > > was fun and took the edge off the 45 minute ride to get to the > > place. > > I once had an interview so bad I got up and walked out. There were > various > tests, the first of which was a really antiquated computer science > aptitude > test, which is only still around because the company founder wrote it > 35+ > years ago, so it's indoctrinated into the culture. The interviewer > even > told me, "I know it's not that impressive by today's standard, it > will seem > dated, but it was really influential at the time..." or something > like that. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
