I have a habit of falling in love with a company as soon as I leave the interview. Unfortunately, I've had a good deal of no's while looking for a new job. It's important to take the bad new gracefully, reflect on it, and prepare for getting that yes next time. Indeed, I heard a "no" today regarding an interview I went on this past Friday. Yes, I am bitter because I really wanted the job, but sometimes it's just not the right fit for whatever reason.
Find a Place That Will Let You Do You
I told the people at this company about Triplex Testing. I was kind of trying to get them to adopt it; to see why and how they needed perfect code. Of course, they don't do automated acceptance testing, and I doubt they even really do unit testing. It's sad that company appreciates this stuff, and to be honest I wouldn't really want to work at a company that doesn't understand the importance of automated tests anyway.
Crush the Coding Challenges
I'm very confident in my coding skills, especially when it comes to AngularJS. For this particular interview the first two hours was a coding challenge. They give you a basic AngularJS application, and you have to make any improvements you can think of, noting them in a README.md file. It's an interesting task, and I think I might use this one day if I ever find myself interviewing someone else. When the reviewer looked at my README.md file he literally said, "Wow, this is the best one I've ever seen!". Yes, my code is good. My code is the best. (ok, I may be exaggerating a bit, but seriously- my code is very clean looking, follows best practices, follows OOP concepts, includes performance considers, and is incredibly readable). For this project I even scaffolded out an entire yeoman Gulp-Angular project and set up my own acceptance testing setup. Yes, I set up the test project with full Triplex Testing support, with generated reports and everything! In the README I also noted pretty much every visual difference between the running application and the mock-up image that was provided. I went through all the JavaScript files and changed them to controller as syntax, added IIFE, made created a component-based directory structure, and moved the setting of one variable outside of a loop which prevented multiple digest cycles from being called unnecessarily. I also change the curly brace interpolated variables to ng-bind and used the filters in JavaScript instead of in the HTML, both for performance. Unfortunately, all this great code didn't help me land the job so it much have been something more than just an intelligent code generator that they wanted.
Price Yourself Fairly
I think this is an area that is hurting me. I feel that my actual skills are way beyond my actual years of experience (1 to 2 years of Angular, 2-3 years JavaScript, ~10 years coding and learning outside of work). I've been looking for a somewhat senior level role int terms of responsibility; one where I can really lead a team of developers with the principles of Triplex Testing. I've also been asking for 45 / hour (around 90k salary), but for a better chance of getting a yes I think that may be a little too much even if the office is right in Manhattan. I just want to be comfortable and get in at a good rate so I can plan to stick around for a while.
Don't Be Afraid to Say "No" to Them
One thing you realize as you get older is that some companies just flat out don't know what they are doing! If it's not what you want to do don't just blindly say yes to anything. Don't set yourself up for failure. Find the best people, the ones who know the most and build the best stuff; the ones who really inspire you. Those are the people you want to be working with (but, on the flip side those are the toughest teams to join)! Of course, you should go into the interview as open minded as possible, and remember your goal is to turn the job interview into a job offer. I looks much better if you turn down an offer than if you just walk about laughing at them.
Be Professional
It's a pretty awful feeling the moment you find out they declined to make an offer. What more could you want than perfectly working code according to specification? Sometimes the reason they don't choose you is something totally out of your control. It could be that they just don't like your voice, don't realize your skills, or think you are too young-looking. Maybe you just remind them of something they didn't like. In a short conversation it's pretty difficult to get an idea of how this person would actually do if put on then next project. It's important to stay professional and just keep moving. As much as you want to send them that, "Go *** yourself" email, stop. It's not going to improve your situation, and it might even hurt you in the long run. Screw them. If they don't want you it's their loss. You have to just do you. Do something relaxing, sharpen your skills, build more awesome things on the side, and get back out there.
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