Wow this is a blast from the past. I remember watching this in college around 2008 or so, and it leading me to apply for their internship program. I guess as marketing material it worked!
I didn't get the job, and don't honestly remember anything about the technical side of the interview, but I do remember them being very kind and gracious. I happened to be studying abroad in London and they didn't bat an eye when they had to buy what I'm sure was a way more expensive ticket than usual for the on-site.
Thanks for posting this - very interesting to see where everyone ended up!
Yeah it seems pretty unrealistic to expect Intel to catch up to the NVIDIA and AMD duopoly on their first generation of (modern) cards.
Intel seems to have rightly recognized that the driver advantage is a huge moat for those guys - they have to instead compete on price and focus on having good support for titles that will get them the the biggest chunk of the market.
That said, man, if they could have released these a year ago the wind would have been at their back way more than it is now with GPU prices trending back towards MSRP.
I used them, but only because they have a relationship with my brokerage that allowed me to get preferential terms.
If not for that I'd have preferred someone local, you could tell you were just a number over there, and there were a bunch of communication issues around
scheduling the appraisal that were annoying to sort out.
Hard to extrapolate from just what you've said here, but:
- This level of anxiety, especially if you experience it in other settings, doesn't sound normal and you might well benefit from some combination of medication and seeing a therapist. Many, many people experience this - it's nothing to be ashamed of and these things can help.
- As others have said, most everyone finds interviewing stressful! That's totally normal. It's also (especially for an introvert) a learned skill that will get better with practice. Don't sweat it too much if your dream company turned you down. Most places will let you re-interview after a certain amount of time, so don't consider it a forever dead end.
IIRC the level after running the water for 5 min in the morning was around 1 PPB, so not high enough to freak out about, but not zero. I just generally assume that I should not give my kids water straight from the tap, because the level _could_ spike for various reasons like them working on the water main, etc.
As someone else pointed out, Chicago has made some changes here - and they plan to eventually remove all service lines. That said - this is Chicago. The mayor had a goal to remove 650 lines this year and there was a story in the Chicago Tribune recently that so far that number is ... 3. For context there are ~400k lines to replace.
Not only that, but it's really difficult to get the service line replaced even if you're willing to pay for it.
We went through the exercise a few years ago. It can be difficult to find a plumbing service willing to do this kind of work because not only do they need a special certification (makes sense) but the company has to put up something like a $5000 bond on their work with the city.
On top of that replacing the portion of the line that goes from the shutoff to the main requires digging up the street, so it can only be done if your street is not currently on a "moratorium" because it was recently repaved. Finally, the city charges a significant amount in permitting fees before you even get to paying for the plumbing service, roadwork repair and landscaping.
We finally gave up on that project and given the relatively low level leeching into our water just decided that we could live with using water filters specifically designed to remove lead for any water that our kids drink / cook with.
If Chicago was really serious about tackling this they could start with waiving permitting fees and bond requirements and streamline the process for managing the part of the process that occurs on city property. That'd at least make replacing these more tractable during a remodel.
It feels like there is an attitude here that you should be able to recoup the cost of training a junior hire by paying them below market rate for for their new skills. This just isn't reality, as OP has discovered.
That means that the true cost of a junior candidate vs a senior candidate isn't just their 1st year salary difference on paper, you have to count in the cost of training _and_ retaining the junior hire. That doesn't necessarily mean the math doesn't work - especially if the market for senior developers is much tighter than for junior developers.
Also the idea that you'd be mentoring for 16 hours a week one-on-one seems like it is either inflated or there was a problem. Maybe the candidate was a bad hire even for a junior role, or the mentor is micromanaging, or the work product expected was never appropriate for a junior developer - but something seems off there.
Not to mention that AED's are more prevalent in public spaces these days. If you can provide CPR _and_ use the AED the chances of survival increase dramatically.
Personally I will always look through side projects or a GitHub if it's on a candidates resume. It's another source of signal and can be really valuable especially if there is code to look through.
That said as the role gets more senior the value of the signal goes down IMO. Side projects are typically done solo, and are small-ish in scope. Whereas a key function of a good senior IC, at least in my opinion, is to be a force multiplier more than a heads-down coder.
I didn't get the job, and don't honestly remember anything about the technical side of the interview, but I do remember them being very kind and gracious. I happened to be studying abroad in London and they didn't bat an eye when they had to buy what I'm sure was a way more expensive ticket than usual for the on-site.
Thanks for posting this - very interesting to see where everyone ended up!