The Glade 4.0

So anyways I had an onsite interview at Google, and I'll be having an onsite at Facebook sometime next week. One possible future is that Google and Facebook will both give me offers, and I'll be able to negotiate up the compensation. Of course, another possible future is neither will give me an offer...

Google's office in Cambridge:

Neat

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Well Google passed on me, so that's no longer an option.

Lex, from your track record, you're venturing scarily close to the perception of unstable employee. When a person job skips, they are either exceptionally good, or exceptionally bad, and your last firing/letting-go doesn’t help with that perception.

A big company prefers a talent who’s willing to stick around and be developed than one who jumps ship at the sight of the first big number increase.

While you can get away with job skips pre 30, as you reach that age, companies become less and less forgiving. Consider a stable job with slightly less pay, but high job security and pull out a good 4 year stint. You’ll be much more desirable at the end of that than you would if you continued with your yearly hop.

Good luck with your career, it’s never easy to be let go

That's definitely good advice! On the other hand, job hopping teaches you all sorts of skills that are hard to acquire otherwise. However, my current plan is to stop f*cking job hopping. I'm done with it. Seriously.

Anyways, I just accepted a job offer at a Fortune 500 company. (neither Google nor Facebook). At first they were only going to hire me as a junior engineer, but then after the interview they upped my pay grade by two levels! Which is a great sign that they bent over backwards for me.

The accepted offer was:

Salary: $110,000
Bonus: $5,000 - 10,000ish I think, based on performance, but they were ambiguous about this
Signing Bonus: $10,000 after 30 days of employment
Company stock: $25,000 granted with a 4 year vesting period (and more stock will be given to me as a bonus every year)
Health plan: basically free since the company foots 90% of the premium (the other 10% is taken from my compensation)
Vacation: unlimited within reason
Stock purchase: 80% of original price with a 15k limit
401k: matching up to 2%
Other perks: free soda from the fridge. Also a cubicle instead of open office space

The only real drawback to working here is that the commute is 45 - 50 minutes away. Oh well.

I'm glad you landed on your feet,hopefully with some perspective. I've never gotten to work for a company that big. I did get to shadow for a major financial company. They had a great view of downtown detroit and 50 cent 20 ounce bottles in the breakroom. I think I could have gotten used to that, but I'm really happy at the tiny little firm here now, being a suburbanite commuter

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Thanks! Definitely a lot of perspective and a lot of humility. Also a lot of very negative feelings. Hopefully I got some value out of my period of unemployment, because I felt absolutely terrible.

This is my second time working for a big company. I worked for Cisco for 5 years in addition to a summer internship there.

I think the most difficult part of interviewing is that I can seem like I'm detached or too relaxed, even though I'm paying close attention and engaged. But I am often like that with other things in life. It sucks that in addition to saying the right things, I also need to show some sort of specific mental state.

I wonder if it's some sort of age discrimination thing where people expect me to be anxious because of my age? It also seems like young interviewers notice it more. I wonder if they see that I'm less anxious/reactive than them during the interview, and that bothers them somehow? Who knows.

Maybe I can fix it by drinking a ton of coffee before the interview.

Nonverbal communication is well over half of any conversation. It has nothing to do with age and everything to do wth visual cues.

Incidentally, internet foeums have no nonverbal communication. Make of that what you will.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Definitely true. I guess I'm trying to say that it's difficult for me to have the nonverbal communication that interviewers expect. Although older people seem to not care so much, or perhaps my nonverbals are better with older people.

I wonder if it's also related to the fact that I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2009, but I stopped taking medication since 2011 (against the wishes of my doctor). No idea though if this actually affects interviewing, it's just speculation.

I hear this quoted often. I don't buy it. First of all I don't know how you quantify content of a conversation, but I am fairly confident I can convey a full range of emotions with only text but I seriously doubt my ability to convey a complex instruction set using only non-verbals.

Well if your nonverbals are messed up enough, people might think you're about to stab them in the eye with a fork or something. And it will distract them from the complex instruction set you're trying to say.

Also if two people have physiological tension (like increased heart rate, sweating, etc.) around eachother, it is difficult for them to have any sort of lasting relationship. There's studies on it.

Or they just need to bone.

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You can't convey a full set of emotions with text, and to the degree you can convey emotions they tend to come across inaccurately. This is a major reason why there's so much drama on message boards and so much drama is generated over e-mail. It's also the reason why any idiot can write a story but good authors are hard to find.

Conveying an instruction set isn't a useful example because that isn't a conversation - it's simply transmittal of information. Written communication is perfectly adequate for that.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."