Interview thoughts

I’ve been preparing for my interview on Tuesday a little bit. Probably as much as I can. I’m feeling kind of nervous about it, but I shouldn’t be. The stakes are low. I’m not in a rush to leave this job, it’s just more of a medium term aim. It also looks superficially like a good match, because the tech stack they use is similar to what I used in my previous job, and they do healthcare software which I used to do in my previous job too. And that opens up a good talking point for me: I want this job because I want to feel like I’m working on something that helps people, as well as wanting to work with modern tech.

Also, in the past, often when I have not been offered a job, it has turned out for the best.

Last summer I interviewed at a place that was essentially a huge landlord for the hospitality industry (the job was developing the software they used to manage their customers/tenants). Between the phone and on site interview, it became public that they were being taken over by a much larger company. So that was a bit of a concern, because I suspected that the department I was interviewing for would probably be phased out in favour of the parent company’s. And then, 9 months later, we had a pandemic that has largely shut down the hospitality industry. That was a pretty good company to not work for.

Then there was the one from 9 years ago. I interviewed at an online retailer (that I’d never heard of). They were a very new company, and a few months later a lot of complaints started appearing online about them. Then newspapers started running stories about them… they went out of business a couple of years later. Which would be bad enough, but I later learnt the person who interviewed me had spent the past few years before setting up the company in prison for sexually abusing a child. Hmmm. That was also a pretty good job to not be offered.

I think this is just a first stage interview and there’ll likely be another stage if they want to go further. But anyway, it’s a bit weird to think that in a week or two I might have a new job. Or I might not. We’ll see.