In the NASA headquarters

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2011/08/30 by Mannix

It’s been already some years since I joined the elite team of to the mighty EU crusade. I did not know what to expect where I first applied, so I guess I just did it for fun and to find myself a challenge. I must have somehow impressed my interlocutors during the conference call I had! And come on, it was the NASA of Europe and they really considered hiring me! I estimated my chances to be rather low but still I wanted to at least have a memorable experience. And guess what, I was invited to their HQ for an job interview! It was a rainy day as far as I remember…After some minutes of waiting in the reception hall I got kindly requested into a small, a bit dark, meeting room where two guys joined me just after. I had talked to them over the phone something like two months before the interview and my reception was rather positive. Now I was about to talk to them live.

The interview got pretty usual. They asked my about my relevant professional experience and gave me a few practical questions which I found unbelievably easy to answer – provided you are a real IT person having some practical experience. Afterwards I got a practical exercise, to model some problem domain using UML. It was a piece of cake seriously. BUT I was fooled a bit! I  was told that I can call one of the guys interviewing me using the desk phone if I had some questions relating to the requirements. I was communicated like “Call the person X if you need details of the requirements”. So I did not call, why would I…the requirements were quite clear to me and so was the exercise itself. But well, that was a kind of trick which I still don’t know what it was supposed to prove or disprove. Believe it or not but this call I was given a chance to make turned out to be a part of the interview! So basically I just proposed what I thought would be the best solution taking into account the provided business description. Well they got me; I did not call the ‘project stakeholder’ in order to get some actual requirements…. Still, I managed to ‘sell’ my ideas 🙂 BUT then I really struggled in the next exercise – an Excel test….I seriously never learned Excel, I was intuitively using its basic functions so I failed at Excel test trying to approach the problem using fancy VBA functions! but in fact the solution was so simple, unbelievably trivial as one of the guys showed me after…So I was certain to have failed on the interview. But you know what? I did not. They actually hired me even though some internal people applied for the same position….I waited for like one month for their answer and it came around Christmas 2006. I almost forgot I applied for this job. And they sent me a nice e-mail from HR starting with “Dear…We are pleased to let you know….”. I was really surprised and at first glance just wanted to respond “Dear…It was just a joke from my side but it was still nice to meet you” 🙂 But having considered pros and cons, I finally decided to take this challenge sailing in the unknown waters…