Weeknotes 2024 W22: Worst job interview

May 27​–​June 2, 2024
1900 words

Quick bits:

I lost my wallet, along with the cash and cards in it. Uuugghhhh.

There was a 50m stretch of road, and I am 100% sure I had it at the beginning, yet at the end my wallet was gone. I retreaded my steps — nothing. I triple-checked my pockets and bags — nothing. it is like my wallet vanished into thin air.

Come to think of it, maybe it’s more likely that I was pickpocketed? That’d be the first time in well over a decade.

The immediate scariest bit: not having any cash and not having payment cards meant that I had no way of paying for anything anymore. At least I managed to borrow some emergency cash. Whew.

Losing quite a bunch of cash, and then having to pay for a new ID card and a wallet is not fun, especially right now when I am unemployed.

I also got to experience, for the first time, the slight humiliation of not having enough cash on hand at the supermarket, and having to tell the person at the checkout counter that I needed to remove some stuff because I did not have the money to pay for it all.

As mentioned last week, I have re-started the job search. I’ve had almost a dozen calls this week, so there is some progress. Very, very slow progress.

As always, if you have leads or would like to work with me, help me out: Get me a job in 2024!

I am also glad that the Arbeitslosengeld1 came through. It is a welcome relief. While it does not cover all my expenses, it will keep me going for a while. I have tightened my budget further for the time being.2

I had the worst job interview of my life earlier this week.

This interview was run like an interrogation, with questions like “enumerate all the JavaScript data types” and “what is a hash map” and “what is the difference between let and const?”

This interrogatory interview style caught me so off-guard that my mind blanked on even the most basic questions, and then the interviewers hinted at me lying on my CV and still being a junior software engineer.

Theoretical knowledge questions like these are a terrible way to run an interview. To illustrate this: my mother tongue is Dutch, yet if you were to ask me theoretical questions like “list all six diminutive forms,” I would draw a blank then too.

The interview was just awful. Toxic. A giant red flag.

If I am already disrespected and abused by interviewers within ten minutes, then I do not dare imagine what working with these people would be like.

So, I bailed after fifteen minutes. This was the only right decision.

I am a fan of the Inter typeface, and I use it as my default font for writing. Still, there is one thing that bothers me, and that is the shape of the quotation marks.

By default, the left and right quotation marks are almost indistinguishable. The ss08 variant makes them square (like Helvetica, a typeface I still love). Compare:

I prefer the latter, as they’re easier to read.

So, I created a custom version of Inter using the OpenType Feature Freezer, enabling ss08 (square quotes), and also ss07 (square punctuation) because it makes sense for consistency.

I also enabled cv01 for a Helvetica-style 1, and cv09 for flat-top three. It’s got a bit of spice!

I had the idea of deliberately serving garbage to AI bots. With some mod_rewrite/RewriteRule magic, I could detect AI crawler bots and serve them deliberately fake information from my web site. Wouldn’t that be fun?

But then I thought — is it really useful? After all, the generative AI systems already know so little about me. When asking ChatGPT 4o about myself, it said the following:

Denis Defreyne is currently working as a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, with a focus on software development, particularly in the Ruby programming language.

He has previous experience as a Technical Lead at Weaveworks and an open-source contributor.

Neither of these statements are true: I have worked neither at Red Hat (although I have interviewed for them) nor at Weaveworks.3

Recently, a recruiter said they were impressed by the work I had done at Nord Security, where I also have never worked. I am confident this too was the output of some generative AI system.

Sigh.

What is the point of having a CV when it is not looked at by humans anymore? Is the battle truly just to create CVs that simply pass the mechanical ATS (applicant tracking system) checks?

Cycling in Berlin is regularly a nightmare. I had an accident and a near-accident the other day:

  1. A cyclist aggressively kept trying to overtake me, both from the left hand and the right hand side. On a cycle lane that only fit a single bike, the cyclist shoved me out of the way, and I fell.

  2. On the way back, a person walked out from between parked cars onto the street. I had to slam the brakes shut and just about avoided them. If this had happened with a car instead of a bike, they would most likely have been run over.

Drivers and cyclists in Berlin are unusually aggressive, and I think cycling in Berlin might become the death of me — literally. No amount of “safe cycling” is going to help me.

Cyclists are particularly egregious offenders, ignoring rules of traffic like it’s a sport. Overtaking other bikes from the right hand side (in a right-hand traffic country) is not uncommon, and running the red light — which I never do — happens frequently.

I found this video particularly inspiring: Why you SHOULDN’T set big goals, in which Maggie Appleton talks with Jason Lengstorf.

I found this interview relatable too, as I’m not very good at goal-setting, and in fact, deeply dislike setting goals further out than a few months. I believe life is too unpredictable to make big goals.

This tends to be a bit of a problem, however, when it comes to employment. Bonus programs require you to set goals a year out, which I have never done successfully, and I suspect most people haven’t either. In a recent job interview, I was asked what my career ambitions and goals were, and I said I didn’t have any.4

It applies to drama classes as well. Some of my drama teachers and coaches have told me that I need some sort of plan, with goals or milestones so that I can track progress over the coming few years. But life is inherently unpredictable: my current situation, with unemployment, does not permit me to spend much money, if any at all, on acting classes.

I prefer guideposts over goals. I am interested in the journey, not the outcome, in everything I do. I pick new paths (like fiction writing and acting) because I want to know what it is like to walk those paths. If I happen to like the new path, I’ll keep going. The only thing that matters is the journey — not the destination.

As for fiction writing, I’m about to give up on a project.

I had an outline and a draft of about 3000 words, before realizing that this particularly story is not really working. I already had my doubts during the outlining process, but I figured that I could fix the problems in the first draft. But alas! The problems are worse in the draft. There are issues with plot, with character, and with setting. I am unsure how salvageable this story is.

The good news, at least, is that I learnt a ton during this process. Putting those learnings into precise words is, as always, difficult. But I’ll give it a go:

There is more, but I can’t go into detail without revealing what the story is about, which I don’t want to do.

In all likelihood, I will drop the work on this story. I’ve gotten my learnings, and I think it is time to move on to something else and apply those learnings there.

Writing is hard, but I am enjoying it.

Entertainment:

Links:

Tech links:

  1. Unemployment benefit. ↩︎

  2. And then lost my wallet. Sigh. ↩︎

  3. The irony of quoting ChatGPT is that this information will undoubtedly eventually make its way into generative AI systems, which will reinforce the lies that I am a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat and that I was previously a Technical Lead at Weaveworks. But you know what? That is not my problem. ↩︎

  4. Reminder to self: don’t be abrasively honest and play the game! ↩︎

  5. Cory Doctorow, Red team blues (New York: Tor, Tor Publishing Group, 2023). ↩︎

  6. Divinity: Original Sin II (Larian Studios, 2017), published by Larian Studios. ↩︎

  7. Sherlock Holmes Chapter One (Frogwares, 2021), published by Frogwares. ↩︎

  8. Dishonored 2 (Arkane Lyon, 2016), published by Bethesda Softworks. ↩︎

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Incoming links: Weeknotes 2024 W23: Lost and found, Weeknotes 2024 W28: Triple accident.