On Tuesday morning I showed up at the recruitment agency for a little chat with my agent. It really was just a quick chat, after five minutes everything was settled and he sent me off to an interview with their client, the actual company I’d be working for.
There HR greeted me and gave me a short briefing about the company and it’s history. It followed a 1/2 hour written test on C# and SQL (programming for those unfamiliar with the terms). It went ok for me, although it would certainly have gone better a year and a half ago. I’m a bit rusty.
That test was followed by a technical interview, conducted by two of their development leads. Unfortunately most of it was about ASP.NET, CSS and other stuff I hardly ever use. I asked them if I was in the right room, as those questions didn’t have much to do with my field of expertise. They said they’d been told to interview a front-end developer – I have the skills for the back-end.
HR came in again and explained how they want to have new candidates interviewed by all departments. She also mentioned that the three months contract I was aiming for, would be with the front-end team. That was a bummer.
Yet she told me there was some openings in other teams and asked if I was interested in permanent employment. That came as a surprise but I told them I’d be up for that as well.
Now a permanent positions isn’t really what I was looking for but the company is very interesting and I can really consider myself lucky if I get any kind of IT job before Christmas. Should the need occur, I can easily quit after three months but till then, the job would earn me considerably more than any average backpacker occupation.
Wednesday was somewhat of a day off for me, as I only got a short phone call from HR, telling me they’d like to have me in for more interviews on Thursday.
Thursday afternoon I was back at their office and sat down for more than an hour with one of the lead programmers, answering his questions on programming. He had some tough ones up his sleeve but seemed generally happy with my answers.
When that was done, one of the development leads came in to question me about stuff around programming. Security, deployment, testing, debugging, everything. Another hour later that was done as well and they sent in HR for a final talk.
Basically what they offered me is a contract lasting as long as my visa with a pay based on 70-80k a year. They are checking my references now and want to call me back next week. Fingers crossed.
Just realized I haven’t uploaded any photos recently. I didn’t take many either. Here’s Auckland CBD.
