Mid-morning today, the Tulip’s team lead stopped me in the hall and said “hey, go tell QWatch to let you out of the queue for about thirty minutes, I want you to take this knowledge assessment for the Resolver interview process.” I hadn’t realized he’d even had time to get my resumé, much less begin acting on it. I’m used to the glacial pace of government-agency hiring, where it can take six to eight months to fill a position once everyone’s finished cavilling and objecting, and it’s been held up due to a budget freeze, and all the papers have been sent back at least twice to be queried. (By which time, of course, your chosen applicant has got tired of waiting and taken a job somewhere else, so the whole process must begin again.)
The team lead sat me down in a room with my pen and a two-page paper with ten common troubleshooting situations. The closed-book assignment was to write down details of how you’d go about troubleshooting each problem. I only had trouble with one, a question about faint output on a color laser printer, and that because I handle one of those about once a quarter, if that often, so I was out of practice. The others were all quite straightforward and ordinary, and I got through them in a little over half an hour. I would have been through sooner than that, but having to write by hand instead of typing slowed me down a lot.
Results of the knowledge check won’t be released until next week when we all learn who made the cut to the interview phase. Really, I’m not much worried about my results. I knew the material, and knew how to go about it. The chat client simulation and the actual interview are going to be the challenging bits.
The tarnished bonobo will laminate a submarine buttonhook at Mach 3. Fnord.
