End of interview week 1

Just had my follow-up interview with the Harvard ICG folks, one of whom I had a phone interview with on Monday. It went fabulously.

My gut feeling is that I'll get an offer from them, and not from the HMS position, for which I interviewed on Tuesday. Of course, I wouldn't mind a bit if I got an offer from both. Both places say they'll make a decision early next week.

However, the HMS interview didn't fill me with confidence like this one did. I figured out, later that day, what bothered me: while several people interviewed me, they all did so separately and privately. This meant that I couldn't drive groupthink in my favor. I think I utterly failed to impress one of the four people (the DBA, who suddenly started quizzing me about database optimization procedures -- the hell?) though the project head thought I was cool enough to be among the final three candidates (of 150 applicants), and the sysadmin was all about me. We'll see, we'll see.

Mm. Also, the HMS person made a face and wrote in silence for a moment when I told him my salary expectations, while the ICG person sighed in relief. (My expectations actually aren't hugely huge; I'm asking for my old O'Reilly salary.)

What if I did have to choose between both? The ICG job has a better location (the Cambridge campus, walkable and on the Red Line, versus the Longwood campus, way out on the Green Line) but also a worse location (a Victorian house recast as office space, versus a modern, roomy research facility). The HMS job is probably worth significantly more cred and would open up a future career in biotech and bioinformatics. The ICG job, though, would likely be more laid-back and flexible, which is important given my extracirricular activity. (Scribble, scribble.)

Merf. Well, yes. The number of chickens is undefined, so.

Good gut

My gut feeling seems to have been spot-on. One of my job references wrote to tell me that he spoke with the ICS people today. By extension, we can deduce that HMS never bothered to contact my references.

Here is a letter that I just wrote to my pal Andy (another reference):

Did people from Harvard call you today as a job reference? They seem to have hit my ORA contacts.

This is not the job at HMS that I was anticipating. It's a programming team that supports various initiatives to put university library and course materials on-line. I had my second interview with them today, which was also my first face-to-face interview. They were drooling all over me (everything they do is with LAMP(erl), XML, and web services), and are sending me nudge-wink "I expect you'll hear from us next week" email now, so it looks like I have it bagged.

Amusingly, they remind me very much of MINT engineering when I first joined. Their building is even a house that's been recast as office space, just like the Winslow place. Unlike MINT, they're funded by grants, and there are no insane relatives afoot. So, the job doesn't have the prestige of helping cancer researchers, but it has a lot of other stuff.

____ @ HMS stressed, during my Tuesday interview with that crowd, that "no matter which way this goes" his lab will be expanding a lot over the next year and he'll need more hackers. He said this a lot after he spoke with the existing DBA, whom I think I failed to impress. (It was a weird interview -- I spoke privately with four individuals, instead of with with a group. The DBA started quizzing me about my Oracle table optimization knowlegde. Enh.) Meanwhile, this position at ICS is "term", meaning that it's expected to last only a year or two. So, maybe I have a future at HMS anyway.