So I went for my interview at Intersect today. It’s a not-for-profit organisation that does projects for research institutions. It went pretty smoothly in my opinion. My interview was scheduled for 9:30am and I got there just in time.

Interview started off like any other, brief run down of the company, asked some questions about myself and what I do. Finally they decided to get technical. Gave me a rather simple problem. You have a char array and you want to reverse it how would you do it?

My answer was…”Well, I’ll first look up if there’s any inbuilt functions to do so”. I was pretty sure there isn’t such function in Java but in python it’s just one line. They replied with “Let’s assume there isn’t, but that’s a pretty good place to start.”

They then left me for 5 minutes which was more than enough time to write it up.

When they got back the Director of Engineering said “It’s wrong” and then the Senior Software Engineer replied with “That’s absolutely correct”. So I’m guessing I heard incorrectly but it left me to ponder on words that could possibly sound like “wrong”.

They then showed me a simple ui diagram and asked me what I would test to try and break it. I replied with the usual stuff like division by zero, overflow and underflow, letters and symbols, rounding errors etc…

They seemed fairly happy with my replies and said they’ll get back to me after all remaining interviews have been conducted.

As I was walking home I began thinking about the upcoming months. If I do get the role it’ll be a 3 months contract. By the time it ends it’ll also be around the time that exams kick in. After exams is Internship period. Now if I happen to be working for Intersect and if they do happen to hire me after the 3 month contract with a more long-term role would I still be with them? Or would I take up the internship? It’ll probably come down to money.

It’s a decision between working for a not-for-profit organisation that’s dedicated to helping research institutions or working for the corporate money hungry giant.

On a side note I recently re-discovered this childhood anime of mine. I watched it in China and when I came to Aus, it was on Cheez TV. I could never remember the name and whenever I described it it was something along the lines of “These people have these things that they hold in their hand and then they transform into these robots…except they’re not robots but humans…”. It’s called Tekkanman Blade and it’s extremely extremely old so I doubt anybody would take interest in it. I’m watching it again to regain some of my childhood memories. If you’re interested just wiki it.