Invisible Man In my defence, Officer… everyone else was doing it

Hat-trick

So I’m 3/3. Or, from a more accurate perspective, 0/3.

It’s been a year since I was writing this. I remarked a few weeks ago to Steve that it would be pretty interesting to see a graph of post count over time, and how it related to what was happening in my life.

And holy shit, it is pretty revealing. Clearly I’m an angst blogger.

(an aside: I really love how Office 2007 makes graphs look acceptably presentable)

Also, since this blog is a year old, it has been given a theme (as promised in the first post) and upgraded to 2.8

I had an exceedingly interesting week. Some of it was recounted in the last post, so I’ll skip to Tuesday. I thought I’d have to go to Australia Post on work related secret business, but apparently not. It was a shame, as I had actually been looking forward to wandering up to Lane Cove in the middle of the day. It was one of the small joys I had in the second half of last year, in that semester of pain, penury and strife. It’s nice to have the freedom to walk about in the middle of the day, even if I allowed myself only the time required (35-40 minutes) to go directly to the sushi bar and return.

That actually makes it sound like I was exceedingly diligent in my time keeping and habits, which is such a massive whopper. Anyway…

I didn’t have to go to Australia Post, so I instead went straight to Bulga to ’study’ with James. We actually did pretty well, for about two hours. By that stage, however, we were entirely bored with the subject, and the remaining four hours before the exam were occupied with football, food and Xbox. On the whole, this struck me as an ideal balance.

Then the exam: harder than I had been lead to believe it would be. Such is the inevitable result of hubris. I still did fine, though. I was the last (of the three of us) to depart the exam. I’m blaming the invigilator, and my lack of a timepiece. I was sitting there for 20+ minutes, waiting for the time at which I would be permitted to leave. I was expecting it to be more like 45 minutes, so the difficulty was definitely a blessing.

After the exam, we went for one beer. That sentence accurately captures our intent, but is in fact as big a lie as the one suggesting I had a work ethic. We drank several beers, and then several schnapps, and then had about as much fun as you’re allowed to have at QVB Stand C. That evening was in no way a sensible idea, but it turned out to be a most enjoyable one.

Wednesday: interview/assessment day at Optiver. I was hungover. I have no idea how I did the initial programming quiz, and especially no idea how what I wrote convinced them that I should be interviewed.
Optiver has the coolest office I’ve ever been in, and the whole day was quite an experience. I was damned lucky that I’d chosen DS&A for my elective this semester. It’s the first step taken towards being the kind of programmer they actually want there. It is also the only step I’ve taken towards that path, and it’s not certain in my mind that I want that path. I still don’t know what I want from my career. I think it actually needs to be more rounded than just being a developer.
I’m getting sidetracked…
I thought it went well on the whole, but it was clearly going to come down to how much they wanted to trust in my potential. To skip ahead somewhat to Friday: not enough. They will not be offering me a position.
There was actually some interesting feedback along the lines that they didn’t think I was passionate enough, weren’t sure I truly wanted to be a developer, weren’t sure I wanted to work there. I guess they read me pretty well, better than I even knew myself.  I had doubts about working there, and I didn’t bother to address them before the interview. I should perhaps have gone in with a plan, or at least a conscious effort to play the interview game.
What’s the point though? They interviewed me, a nearly completely honest version of me, with limited garnish.  We weren’t a fit for each other. That’s fair enough, and possibly saved a lot of trouble later on.

Wednesday’s meeting was unremarkable, I guess. The chicken katsu afterwards was nice (when it arrived). The sang chow bow spring rolls were not quite as good as I’d hoped for.

Thursday was not a heap of fun. The question posed on Sunday was answered, in the negative. Over email, so I was trying to appear sufficiently busy at work whilst also retreating into my head and composing a reply. One day, someone will say something to my face. One day, it might even be an affirmative response. Being in a different city is a pretty good excuse for the former, though.
The usual suspects were suitably generous in their consolations.

Even more so than last time, I’ve surprised myself with the generally philsophical response I’ve had to the happenings. I think things generally work out. When I’ve got my ego up a bit, I usually extend this thought to ‘things generally work out to my benefit’.
It’s pretty weird, writing obliquely about someone whom I know reads this blog. (p.s. hi)
Then again, I’ve basically been doing that for a month. I wonder if you realised.

Yesterday (although it was still today when I started composing) was a better day, but mostly only at the very end. Three very cool things happened. One was getting out the SMH Friday cryptic crossword. Even if it took four other people and we spent nearly 90 minutes, it’s a pretty sweet achievement. DA (the Friday compiler) is an utterly devious bastard, and normally quite inscrutable.
The second thing was going out for a sneaky 2:45PM Friday beer at the Redoak. (ssh!).
I chased Optiver, and finally got the news they had promised would be delivered sooner. When you don’t hear something positive right away, it’s often fairly safe to assume the negative is on it’s way. (This was not the third cool thing, this is:)
I then chased my manager, who had been saying that he wanted to talk to me for over a week.  He’d quite like me to keep working there, and said some rather ego boosting things. I definitely ended the week in a good way.

It’s funny, though. Without making any effort to curry favour at ING, or indeed trying very much at all, I’ve still managed to impress people. Yet another analogy for the benefits of just being yourself?

It’s a nice offer to have, but I have no desire to work full time next semester on anything which is not for Three Ring Solutions. I also consider that the offer from IBM has benefits that go beyond just a place to work. Assuming that offer is still on the table, it’s where I will be next year.

On the bus, on the way home, I finished Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. I really liked it, but I’m not sure whether it was the P&P or the &Z which was most entertaining.

I actually intended for this post to just be a couple of graphs, possibly with captions, and now I have in excess of 1200 words.

mostly to scale.

One outlier bucks the inevitable trend, vs the goal

Sample data available for one flow only.

Whoops, 2am.