HollyKing's Journal

I noticed that Rentrak is hiring again. I interviewed there in 2003 and fell in love with the company. I think I would fit in well with the office environment and working with the sharp folks there would rocket my Perl skills to 11.

Rentrak, or at least those who handle the hiring, don't have the same love for me. After my interview they never returned my calls and I've never received any response when I've sent my name in for other openings. I really wish I could find out their thoughts. Was it something I can fix such as a lack of skills or knowledge? Were there better applicants who had the skills they wanted? Heck, did I have some personality defect? I know I can go overboard when trying to appear confident and come off as arrogant. No matter what the reason I would rather know. That way I can either study and work hard to overcome the lack of skills and knowledge or just let it go if it's something I can't fix.

I'm approaching 6 years since I've worked a job where I wrote code for a living. For me this is hard because that's my bliss. It's something I enjoy doing, I'm good at it and I could do it forever. I don't want to be a manager and I'm not sure I would ever want to be a software architect. Working in an environment like I saw at Rentrak would be my ideal job.

The big problem is I'm not even sure how to restart my career and get back to coding. Sure, I get lots of calls for a job but thanks to the time I spent writing QA tools as McAfee everyone wants to hire me as a QA tester or validation engineer. They never actually read past the keywords they find on my resume (Word doc) to find out what my skills and strengths might be. In Kansas City this wouldn't be a problem because I have the connections to get a job without going through HR. Here I just feel like I've stalled and have gotten so off track I can't see my way back.

Any ideas or suggestions would be most welcome.

Today I had another extended with Qualcomm. Three more hours of designing state machines to detect three heads in a row from a series of coin tosses and writing a function to insert a node in a binary tree. I think I did really well again and even talked to the director for a bit about what my responsibilities might entail. Now for another week of waiting to hear how they thought I did... Sigh.

I lock the doors of my car and my apartment. It's a habit that I don't really want to break. Sure it means I can't just yell for someone to come in when I'm busy and they knock on the door. Then again it also means that random strangers don't just walk in to my living room while hollyqueen and I are sitting there watching Numb3rs. Weird.

Last night hollyqueen and I went to see Underneath the Lintel at the Portland Center for the Performing Arts (PCPA). I highly recommend the show. A very good performance of a very interesting play.

This morning I went for an interview at Qualcomm. I nailed that interview. The first 90 minutes involved design questions and methodology. I was very nervous about this part because while I have designed more than one system I've never done it as part of my job. Most places skip the design and jump right into the coding. (A bad move in my opinion, btw.) I feel very good about that part. I could tell that my design ideas were inline with what the interviewer wanted and I even contributed a few new ideas. The second half was all about coding skills. This interviewer started with simple questions and we ended up writing template functors in C++ and function generators in Perl.

The best part was when he asked me about my favorite algorithm. That's an easy one... One time (in band camp) I designed an algorithm to compress and decompress data. No big deal you say? Well, it wasn't a great compression scheme, the neat trick was the decompression step only required one buffer and kept all the variables in registers. I don't recommend that for everyone but in this situation is was just what the doctor ordered. Only needing one buffer cut the memory requirements in half and keeping all the variables in registers made the damn thing fast as hell. We talked about the problem with compression and how to handle a block of data that can't be compressed. Then we went on a tangent about compression schemes and how you can get better results if you adapt the scheme to the data. For example, when compressing a dictionary of words you can get better performance by treating prefixes and suffixes as symbols and not just each letter as a symbol.

Most of the work is in C# but they didn't ask me about any of that. They said they would teach me what I needed to know and that they were more interested in my skills and abilities than any particular language syntax. Well, I hope they call, because it sounds like an interesting place to work.