Clojure Hack day was quite a small event however it gave us a chance to work on our own projects. Worked with Mani on some basic Clojure skills. Als worked on building a simple ClojureScript React style website with our primary school student (accompanied by her mom)
I also did a little more work with Scalable Vector Graphics, in the system monitor project I started a while ago.
SkillsMatter were kind enough to invite us to join in the event, however, there was some issue with food and SkillsMatter did initially exclude the Clojure group although eventually we were included in the event again.
Considering my options for my next role. There have been a lot of really interesting roles I have interviewed for. There is one that seems to require the widest use of my skills.
The company is called Be-Social, a finance startup that is building an app to make spending money a more social activity and enabling friends and colleagues to share bills and other expenses.
The interview with the Founder and CTO when very well and the role was very clear to me. Unfortunately the follow-on interview with two developers when very poorly as they seemed to be interviewing me for a very different role.
The developers didn't seem at all prepared and were 'trying something different' apparently.
We started with what they called a 'pairing session' where they handed my a laptop (it was a Mac and I had not used one in a long time). I struggled to use the mouse to click and the developers couldn't (be bothered to) explain how they had set it up. I muddled on...
The 'pairing' continued where I struggled to use the Mac and IntelliJ (something else I hadn't used) to try understand a code base using libraries I had never used. I asked questions about the code but the developers refused to answer them, saying I should just experiment with the code.
As I couldn't figure out how the Clojure REPL worked in IntelliJ and they didn't know either, my ability to experiment was severely limited. It wasn't even clear how to start the application so I could see it running or run any unit tests. The developers just stat there and watched the screen or stared at me, without answering any questions.
By this time I was becoming quite disillusioned with the developers in front of me. I was trying not to focus on the question of why I wanted to work with people so closed as this.
You may have noticed that neither of the developers interviewing me were playing their part in the 'pairing' process and watched me struggle instead. Actually one of the developers was feeling so out of their depth that they didn't really engage in any part of the interview, except to say that they were feeling out of their depth when I did ask about their role during our brief introductions.
After 30 minutes of not 'pairing' with me, they proceeded to quiz me on obscure information about REST. One of the developers took great pride in how much they had learned about REST, the four levels of REST and lots of other niche information. This seemed to be the measure of how good an engineer would be, mainly because that is how his previous (and only) tech lead had worked.
I walked out of the interview at the end with the final words that they should talk to their founder about what they are looking for, to save everyone some time. I had no illusions that any kind of follow-up from the interview would be forth-coming. I was pleased not to have to even consider a role there.
Its not the first time (probably no the last) that people within a company have wildly different expectations. Its like they haven't actually talked to each other about the role :shocked_face_with_exploding_head: