I'm ... employed?
It's just like that. Wednesday I went in, for my first in-person interview since, uh, 2007? This for another job with the State of Michigan and I don't know why they wanted an in-person interview but, fine. I'd gotten my dress shirt dry-cleaned last week, and after ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger urged it I wore my very good suit, the one I got married in. And found a rubber band to tie my hair back, rather than let it be the glorious halo of hair that it achieves now when it's fully dry. My hair isn't long enough for a real ponytail, but this did give me the look of Senior Computer Guy Who Has Opinions About Endian-ness, or maybe a lesser signer of the Constitution. We're talking your Jonathan Daytons, here. (Don't look up Jonathan Dayton.) She thought I looked sharp and, yeah, I did. It turns out I might be not just a long-hair guy but a tied-long-hair guy.
The interview was at one of the state office buildings that I haven't quite walked to, in the past, but that I could if it weren't cold and for 10 am. And extremely windy; we spent the day with a steady, like, 20 mph wind heading east.
It was much more of a technical interview than I expected, although it was also a generally lower level of difficulty than I would have expected either. As in, the first question was to name the three kinds of list element in HTML. I was taken aback and asked, ``You mean, like, ordered lists and unordered lists?`` And was told that I had nailed it, with my instant reply to that. The third type of list they didn't even know of until they started looking up questions to ask, and it came to me about as they revealed it. (Dictionary lists, used for glossaries in the HTML standards guidelines of 1998 and forgotten about since.) Some of the questions I aced. One --- what the difference is between an SQL 'INNER JOIN' and an 'OUTER JOIN' --- I was prepped for because I'd bombed it at the previous interview. (I warmed up with the joke that ``the INNER JOIN is the one I always start with and then realize I wanted OUTER JOIN instead''.) Some I just went on too long about; the first fifteen minutes or so was me explaining longer than they wanted and being chided for that. I explained that as a former academic it's my compulsion to explain a lot and hard to get me to shut up, and then I remembered that the last thing I should do --- ever, but especially in this setting --- is be self-deprecating. Even when it's funny, it's giving the wrong impression to people who don't know the real you.
And some I just bombed, including failing to define ``polymorphism'', a basic piece of programming, although I was able to get enough of a chat going that I think they remembered me as having answered it? And I bobbled explaining what a ``foreign key'' is in a database, although if I'd just started talking I probably would have worked it out before the end of a sentence. (It's when one table contains the unique identifier --- the key --- for another table. So, like, if you have a table of user's names, it might have as a foreign key their ID number, used in other tables.) Near the end we came to a section on Angular, a technology I don't know anything about, and when I said I'd only ever studied it without deploying an example they asked if I'd rather skip those questions. I would be so grateful if they did.
If anything did clinch it for me, it might have been the last topic, about Americans with Disability Act compliance. Or as I see it, just simple accessibility. I've been trying to make accessible web sites since I first read about the issue in like 1997, so I was able to quickly rattle off things that make web sites more accessible. Like, not fixing type fonts or sizes. Using only high-contrast color pairings. Never using color as the lone signifier of meaning; you need color, shape, and texture at a minimum (texture being more a real-world matter, but you can style things so as to reinforce color). That for any audio you need a transcript; for any video you need a transcript and a descriptive audio. One question was what are some HTML tags necessary for ADA-compliant web sites and the obvious answer was image alt text, to explain the point of an image to people who don't see it. None of this was very deep, to my way of thinking, but I suppose I tend to think anything I know isn't very deep. I started to write ``anything I know outside my academic specialty'' but I also deep down feel I don't know my specialty very deeply either.
The oddest thing came at the end when the guy who'll be my supervisor asked, as a PhD, would I have trouble dealing with less intelligent folks like him, who has a bachelor's and an associate's, or one of the other interviewers (also a bachelor's). (The third interviewer had a master's.) And, well, no, of course not, and I tried to emphasize that a doctorate just reflects having a certain kind of persistance and diligence, and that intelligence doesn't have much to do with it. And, I pointed out, he knows things with a depth and thoroughness that I never will. I regretted not pointing out also that even if I were more intelligent than someone else, that doesn't make them less worth respect, or me worth more, but it didn't occur to me at the time, because I'm not that smart. (And at some point saying too much works against you.)
While walking me out my future supervisor talked about my Singapore teaching experience and whether I was looking to jump back to academia. And I admitted while I loved the life, it's over for me; the schools can get better mathematicians than me. And then I remembered about not deprecating myself but, well, what can I say? Maybe something that doesn't make it sound like I'm settling for programming because I can't get a job I really want. Mm.
I got home and wrote up my impressions for my recruiter, which amounted to thinking that while it went pretty well --- we ran long, always a good sign --- they're going to go for someone who didn't bobble simple questions like defining polymorphism.
And then Thursday, I slept in; it was the rare day that bunnyhugger was up and showered and downstairs before me. She said there was a message just left on the machine for me. The recruiter I was working with started out by saying she had an update for me about the job I'd interviewed for and I was ready to tell bunnyhugger they'd rejected me already, but the recruiter went on to say ``Congratulations, you have been selected'' and I stood, jaw dropped, at this. bunnyhugger saw me and asked what was wrong; despite hearing the message as it was recorded and again as it was replayed, she hadn't listened, which is how she failed to learn before I did that the longest unemployment of my life had its end.
I'm finally up in the photo roll to, uh, Halloweekends, like I just finished writing about in plain text here. Well, here, enjoy some pictures of the Merry-Go-Round Museum to start.
The entrance to the Merry-Go-Round Museum! The booth there, I believe, is taken from a vintage carousel's (Euclid Beach Park?), and it's where you go to buy admission and to get your wooden nickels, the ride tokens.
To the left (as you enter the building) of the entrance is the first set of displays, including one of the brass ring arms that carousels used to use before parks went to pay-one-price. I couldn't get a good look at the statue up top and I feel like that's new but am not sure.
Joy For Every Generation, as they've long had up front at the Merry-Go-Round Museum. The black-and-white photograph banners in back I believe are new.
Definitely new: this little coin-op carousel that bunnyhugger's examining.
All of the figures are neat stained-glass animals, a great idea for a piece like this.
Can you spot the flirting rabbit? (Actually I'm not sure it is flirting.) Anyway, lot of menagerie figures on this glass merry-go-round.
Trivia: Screen Gems made five cartoon shorts based on Al Capp's comic strip Li'l Abner. Source: Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons, Leonard Maltin.
Currently Reading: Bizarro #10, Dan Piraro.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-03 06:12 pm (UTC)I know it's been a very long road back to employment for you, and it must be such a shock -- and a relief -- to be working again. When do you start??
Also what do you think you'll miss the most about having to go into an office again? ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-04 12:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-04 04:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2022-12-04 01:36 pm (UTC)Congratulations.