Sunday, October 20, 2013

(Old) job interview

Well played, day. You gave me some of everything. Play, sleep, buggy heat, pricky chill, a flawless victory, an opponentless (sense of) defeat, a ray of hope, a pout, a drag, new music, new equations, ideas and musings (presently grouped under 'idlings'). Annoyed at the end of the day seeing the inflation in my priority list, which is really just a graph of spikes (that's how i work).

At the end of the day my favorite career could be of a mathematician's - generating mathematical beauty in fusion with visual, aural (and sensory) beauty, or a cosmonaut - working onboard the ISS (in LEO).

Got a call from my potential employers, SE. It was Rajesh calling. From all the loose talk, I suppose he's one of the HR guys. He sounded yuppie, and had the imaginative capacity of an Alpaca. Do they teach them to be that way, or is that something they pick up from all the revulsive romcoms they sit and watch in those free hours in the office? 

He tried taking me on the issues of 
1. Taking a (long) break: he would've been mighty impressed when he opened me with something uncomfortable. Humour me for a minute here - so an individual cannot have the balls to take a break in this present employment environment? what are we, third world? my daily routine is: you eat, you digest, you do fertile things, then eat (and repeat). eat, eat, eat, gives you a heart attack and loose bowels. Extend that metaphor to a life track. But what'd yuppies care about.
There's a big reason why these few months are hard to explain. Because I think I found a lot. I'm not kidding. These are naked realizations, that the sooner they come the better, and unfortunately for some, never. Wanna read my two-volume thesis and the hundred-few blog entries to get a perspective?

2. A 18-month work cycle
Rajesh observed that I had quit both Accenture and Fagbok around the 18-month employment mark. He pulled me on the pattern. I forget his exact words. Well, for one, you cannot derive a pattern from a lone 2 statistics. I told him how I've been eager to get in and whatever for the next 5 minutes. I could've countered his analytical breakthrough by the simple fact that having me leave in 6 months would disrupt that pattern altogether. "make as you wish from that."
There's another word for such kind: rawgabbit. Don't engage until you can stop making assumptions and know the real truth (for real).

3. Highest ideals: 
"I don't know whether to laugh or cry at that," he quipped. Not funny.
"I would say you aren't being imaginative". Not as imaginative as an Alpaca, surely.
I don't get what is the problem with a vision of future that is in proximity to technology, and complex/evolving work structures, and life goals? All i said was that: I wanted to be a strong developer.

He's way in ignorance of what smart people (and few like me) are doing to the world. "I wanted to be a pilot".. well, I wanted to top Valeri Polyakov or Anatoli Soloyev, but there are some things you see realistically, as a projection from where you are and ideally can be.
I should've told him I wanted to be a 'fractillusionist' and 'bring science to the front of performance arts'. Maybe both his laughter and cry would've been a rending experience at that thought; brain explosions and burgundy walls.

To kill the silence i proposed if I could tell him about my college life, which he interpreted as 'could i humour you if you're bored'. I then narrated how I'd been chasing a lotta technology in small ways, and how the Pakistan thing came to work wonders. I don't know how leaps and bounds that helped, but his voice then picked a tinge of fascination.

Later he gave me a hypothetical scenario to work on. My immediate response to that was discussed for the next five minutes, to again arrive at the doors of the same response. By the end of this, he had to hang up, probably getting chewed up by the active effects of a yuppie lifestyle.  I worked up a document showing the best case scenarios to prove my point and mailed him.

No comments: