Real Reasons

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Real Reasons
2008-2-27 18:32:54
By Alex

  Lately, I’ve been interviewing with a small start-up called Infoclad, which is based in the Bay Area near SF.

F2F Interview @ Hilton Hotel, Shanghai
I had an interview with a Chinese guy (let’s call him W) on this cold rainy winter Sunday night. The meeting was called up 1 hour before it began. (No specific time frame was given the day before) W showed up in the hotel lobby after I’d been wandering there for 15 minutes, he was with a half-drunk bottle in his hand. (A BIG question mark popped up in my mind: Interview or Party?) There was no formal meeting place, we wondered the lobby for awhile and hit the bar at the corner. But 10 seconds later after we sit down, we were told by the waiter that we have to leave if we don’t buy any drink… So off we went.
Finally we settled ourselves down in a coffee bar, where there was really loud Jazz playing around in the background. And the interviewer left for bath room right after we were seated, leaving me behind facing the waiter and a menu. Minutes later, W came back. Started to talk… with a beer breathe. (Dude: clear your breath first!!) He started poking around my resume. Asking random questions about my school, projects that I’ve been through. I can’t hear him from time to time since the music was too loud and kept cutting us off. Really BAD location for interview. Finally I played my card and reject him on-site.

Email Lobby Campaign
After that interview, W started an email lobby campaign mocking my current company, pointing all disadvantages and short comings. And told me that I can join their training sessions in Shanghai to see what they are doing on a day-to-day basis. (That ended up to be disappointing too. The so-called training session in Shanghai is all on a dvd. And the contact person in Shanghai failed to get in touch with me for 3 weeks saying that he was away for holiday.)

Phone Interview with the US-based team
Scheduling: the interview was mentioned long ago in an email loop. It cost them an awfully long time to hammer the date down. It seems that those guys are really busy to squeeze several hours out of their agendas. The final date is set when one day I got an email saying that “Will you be available tomorrow? We will schedule sometime tomorrow afternoon to let you talk with our US-based team” Well, “sometime”… It proved that I waited for the whole afternoon for the interview to happen.
Interview: W and two other Indian guys started the interview. All general questions like, “Tell me about the most challenging project you’ve been in and why it was challenging”, “Who were the worst team members you’ve worked with”, “What people say about you, both good and bad.” And I blah along the way.

Tendering offer
One day after the interview, I got a phone call, and there came the offer.
$61,000 yearly income with a H1-B working visa.

Interviewed By A Client
Everything seems to be fine (though the 1st round of interview seemed a bit awkward.) until the I received an mail containing a interview question list. I need to prepare another round of interview with our CLIENT which is an iBank. What? I have to be interviewed by a client? My fear started to grow, what if I failed the visa application? What if this is all fake? I started my little survey around the web and found that their so called Beijing office has no employee working there, there’s only an office manager who has his contact information pasted around the web for second hand PC and server deals. And the address of the US office is associated with some attorney’s info in all Google results. I guess this got to be an talent out-sourcing company.

Well I guess I need to jot these things down to back up my decision.
Now I’m sitting inside a lousy Mc sipping a awful cup of coffee…