Archive for the 'Job' CategoryPage 2 of 4

Zattoo Non-Job/Internship Interview!

Published
by
Hung
on April 2, 2008
in Job and Nerd
. 4 Comments

About a week ago, I had an interview with Zattoo, a local startup here in Ann Arbor. I had met their VP of Engineering, Dug Song at a career fair and ended up giving him my business card. I got an email from Zattoo about them being interested in an interview. I’m not looking for an internship anymore, but I figured I’d have a chat to get to know the company better in case I want to work there after I graduate.

I talked to two engineers. I can’t really remember their names now! Oops. But basically we talked about the technologies behind the service (it’s a real-time streaming tv service). It’s kind of interesting that they use P2P in order to distribute the live tv content. I thought this might end up with a pretty big delay in actually getting the content, but one of the guys said there was only a difference of ~20 seconds or so.

One of the things that their website job page lists is that they want people with an interest in social networks. While I thought this was interesting and figured they might have something specific in mind, apparently they’re just trying to get people with knowledge in the area to maybe generate some ideas and build new stuff. Seems pretty cool.

Something nice about this interview was that while it went like a typical job/internship interview (they asked me a question about some engineering problem I’ve faced and how I solved it), there was like, no pressure for me to really do well. I mean, besides the desire not to sound like an idiot to other people. I kind of liked having no pressure on me during the interview. I should probably pretend it’s like that for every interview I take, since I think I answered their questions pretty “well” regardless.

So yeah, Zattoo is a startup in Ann Arbor. One of the few interesting tech ones that I know of. Though there will be more. More on that later…

Now That’s What I Call REAL ULTIMATE HR!

Published
by
Hung
on March 26, 2008
in Job and T-Shirts
. 3 Comments

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I met a recruiter from this company called imo.im last week at the Mpowered career fair on North Campus. Basically, the event was a career fair for startup companies. For some reason, some really big companies were there as well. I think I saw NEC…

Anyway, imo.im is some sort of web-based IM client, kind of like Meebo. I even asked the recruiter something like, “I’m sure you get asked this a lot, but this company is like Meebo, right?” Anyway, it seems the claim to fame for imo.im is that they’re financed almost exclusively by one of the first 10 employees of Google. This post isn’t really about their company though. It’s about their HR!

There were a bunch of t-shirts on the table. I, being a t-shirt connoisseur, especially of the company shwag type, asked if I could have one. “But they’re reserved for interviewees,” the HR person Marissa Huang told me. She also said she could mail me one when she gets back to their headquarters, since they have a lot. I gave her my contact info and figured I’d never get the shirt. Here’s a story!

When I went to interview at Google, they said I’d get some kind of awesome bag with Google related goodies in it. Like shirts and lava lamps and whatnot. Maybe not lava lamps. Anyway, it was supposed to be in my hotel room but I never got it. After the HR person at Google asked for my address for them to mail it, I felt that I’d get the stuff for sure, but I never did. It was like adding insult to the injury of not hiring me. By the way, I’ve fully recovered and hold no ill will towards the big G. Just throwing out this story to prove a point: why would imo.im go to the trouble of sending me a shirt when I didn’t even interview with them?

But they did. And it came today. Which is why I award imo.im the official “Hung Truong Company Shwag Award Seal of Approval!” I don’t know if something can be both an award AND a seal of approval at the same time, but whatever. There was also a nice hand-written note in the package, which is unheard of as far as corporate HR goes. But imo.im is a startup, so I guess that makes them different.

Anyway, thanks, imo.im, for the t-shirt. As a bonus, I’m even not adding a rel=”nofollow” to my links to you! Rock on!

Apple Internship Phone Interview + Verdict!

Published
by
Hung
on February 24, 2008
in Job
. 5 Comments

I had my Apple phone interview on Friday. It went well, except for all of the questions I couldn’t answer! orz.

About five seconds into the interview, I realized that the description given to me and the actual content of the internship would be quite different. The position was described as “iPhone QA Engineer,” which listed duties like “functional testing of iPhone applications” and “design and implementation of test plans and test cases, risk analysis, & integration testing across the system.”

The description that my interviewer gave was that I’d be working on an internal iPhone web application for tracking test results and other stuff. Definitely not as interesting as I thought it would be. It’s probably still kind of cool, but not as cool as doing actual QA on the iPhone.

By the time the interview had finished, I knew it would be a bad fit and that I would get an email with the same sentiments. Sure enough, about two hours after the interview had ended I got an email from the recruiter saying there wasn’t a fit. He said he’d send it to a few other departments in Apple as well. Cool guy.

I’m not too upset about this particular rejection, other than the fact that I feel it was incorrectly described, which cost me a bit of time in my preparation. It was still a good experience, and I got to ask a few questions about the company culture at Apple.

In other non-news, I actually got a successful internship offer, so to speak. But it’s not quite official yet so I can’t write about it until it is.

Microsoft Internship Response + Apple Phone Interview Get!

Published
by
Hung
on February 9, 2008
in Job
. 3 Comments

I heard back from the Microsoft person. Apparently they think I have “great potential,” yet they don’t want to continue with the interview process. Which is just the kind of corporate doublespeak I’d expect from a place like Microsoft. I think it’s unfair to judge a company as large as Microsoft by pigeonholing it into a “good” or “bad” category. But let’s just say things are not looking good for the company. First they seem to be losing the Yahoo takeover, then they reject me. Don’t worry, there’s some sarcasm in there! A little.

In other news, I just got an email from Apple for an internship in their iPhone software group. Cool! I think that would be the best fit as any with me + Apple since I’m not too into the low level details of OS coding. But doing iPhone software would be really cool! The listing on the website didn’t mention any kind of internship in iPhone, so I’m glad I took a chance and talked to the Apple booth when I went to the engineering career fair last week.

I still haven’t heard back from Zazzle but it’s still early in the internship game. Actually, I haven’t heard back from many companies. I’m not really sweating it or anything though. I’ll find something to do during the Summer, even if it’s not with a company.

Internship Status Update: Microsoft (Microhoo?) and Zazzle

Published
by
Hung
on February 2, 2008
in Job
. 0 Comments

Since the last time I wrote about internships, I’ve applied to quite a few places. The two places I’ve heard back from so far are Microsoft (I talked with some people at the Engineering Career Fair) and Zazzle (they replied to my email like, 45 minutes after I sent my resume and cover letter!).

Both companies I “interviewed” with (I got some short informational interviews) were looking for PM types. The PM here is either product or project management. I think they’re pretty similar and the actual job really depends on the context of which company it’s at.

I think the PM stuff differs quite a bit from standard software engineering in that you’re expected to think about the product as a whole rather than the implementation details alone. So that involves stuff like considering the design, the user, how decisions affect both, and tradeoffs that each solution results in. It’s pretty interesting stuff that requires a lot of thought. I’m sort of training myself to think a bit more critically about things than I have in the past.

Anyway, hopefully some more companies will contact me too. I’m still waiting to hear back from Zazzle and Microsoft (which might include Yahoo, who knows? But that possible merger probably won’t happen for a while). Hopefully I can get a better idea of what these jobs entail, and make a decision on what I want to end up doing after I graduate.