January 30, 2007 – Second Interview Check

Went in for my interview at Westgate today. Believe it or not, Westgate Resorts is one of the best web programming teams in Orlando (from I’ve seen), with quite a lot of talented developers. There’s a huge IT department, only a quarter of it is actually the web dev team I was interviewing for. They use a lot of Coldfusion, Java, Flex, OO Javascript — overall a very big OO feel to every technology they use. Of the managers that interviewed me, one was a speaker I’ve heard talk at a few coldfusion conferences. Not about CF though, but about “FLIP (fusebox lifecycle process)” and “Secrets of Top Notch Development Teams”. Very open atmosphere there too. After the interview I met up with the developers and went out to lunch with about 8 of them. Nice to be able to hang out with that many passionate people and discuss so many common interests. There were one or two people like that at FCE, but for the most part people weren’t too interested in doing anything after 5:01. Interview process was on the difficult side. It’s not so much that any single question got me as much as being pounded with question after question for an hour; all thought provoking questions that wore me down. Often questions about how I’d handled projects in the past, things I could have done differently — as well as many isolated questions. Ended with a OO question where had to take specs, come up with a quick diagram (20mins) on a whiteboard and justify my design decisions, as well as asking what I’d do if the client then asked for this feature or that feature. Fun interview actually! Most professional that’s for sure. The only question I didn’t like was something along the lines of “If you had to change one thing about the Internet itself to make it better for a programmer, what would you change?” I went off on something about net neutrality from the start, and something about unified standards for web services and a few others things, but they were hoping for a lower level answer about the internet (ex, “you can use tcp/ip, or whatever you need”). What can be changed about the internet to make it better that doesn’t affect those? That’s the one question I sidestepped; but it might have just been a trap. :p I’m hoping I get it. At first I wanted nothing more than taking an extended break, but I think this would be a lot of exposure to new technologies. Java and Flex are two I’ve only have minor exposure to, but are the left and right hands of Coldfusion. Either way things work out.