You've Got to Lose Yourself...

i’ve had a couple of job interviews over the last few weeks with real live human beings, some that have even happened in person, though the last few have been over zoom.

yesterday i had a second technical interview with a company that wanted to run me through some scenarios to see ‘how i think’ and how i work under pressure. in the first scenario they basically threw me into an imagined disaster and it was my job to describe how i would react and how i would gather as much information as i could about what was going on. i felt like i did pretty well: i asked the right questions and even guided my ‘dungeon master’ into creating an even more dire situation as i tried to anticipate potential worst-case scenarios. but as the interview went on i started to struggle.

they had told me that they were going to ’throw me into the deep end’ and not to worry too much if there were questions i couldn’t answer, but as we went on the questions got easier, which made me nervous, and then even easier, but for some reason i was having a harder and harder time with them even when i knew the answers. they asked me about some very basic port numbers and when i failed to tell them what protocols used those ports they asked if i could at least tell them what a port is in computer networking. i have explained what a port is to students countless times.

so when someone asks me what a port is and does i like to explain it like this:

if your computer was a fancy high-end hotel the ports would be like the entrances to the hotel, and just like how fancy hotels have different doors for guests, for employees, and for deliveries, your computer has different specified ports for different kinds of traffic. port 80 is for unencrypted web traffic, port 443 is for secure web traffic, and so on. this keeps everything organized and makes sure that different data is greeted correctly and directed correctly once it gets inside and also makes sure that there aren’t traffic jams when a lot of different data comes in at once.

except this time i didn’t tell that fun little story i have told a million times.

this time i opened my mouth but the words didn’t come out. suddenly my palms were sweaty, my knees were weak, my arms were heavy, you get it, mom’s spaghetti: my mind went blank and i choked.

i couldn’t even get out a word. from there it only got worse. they gave me multiple chances to redeem myself but all i did was look more and more like i didn’t know what i was talking about and like i shouldn’t have even been there, and honestly at that point i don’t even know what i was saying and probably shouldn’t have been.

finally, they cut the interview short saying they had heard enough. they were nice about it, but they didn’t even give me a chance to ask questions.

the worst thing is, i know that explaining technical concepts in simple terms under pressure would have been a huge part of the job that i was applying for. so not only had i failed to show my knowledge in the interview i actually failed the second test of keeping my head and communicating under fire.

i can’t say i didn’t learn anything from the experience, i actually feel like i learned a lot, but what really smarts is that i didn’t just feel like an idiot, that would have been bad enough. no, i felt like i proved to them that i lacked the mettle, that i would crack under pressure: i felt like a wimp. a stupid wimp, and the pain of that feeling definitely lingers…