Zattoo Non-Job/Internship Interview!
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…