We Will Call You
Ep 6: Passionate, more passionate, hired!
Fact-based job-seeking-opera for geeks
“I see you understand business processes,” the manager said apathetically. “I admit that hardly any of your colleagues pay attention to them. All in all, I am not surprised…” He sighed with regret and added cheerfully just a second later, “Who would like to waste his time on this when technological revolutions are around every corner offering the possibility to bite into new things?”
“The range of problems that modern analytics faces is still expanding,” Domnall agreed, “but in my opinion, solid foundations remain pivotal.”
The man didn’t listen. He continued his own thread, “Do you know that even quantum machine learning tools that we normally use in real-time context data stream processing can’t cope with predicting IT trends that are worth following?!”
Domnall winced. Partly because he did not like technobabble, and partly because he associated the blind following of trends with the bitch-fight for attention between social media influencers rather than solid data-based research.
“Trends appear when someone comes up with a new solution to a problem, and then someone else raises it to the rank of a panacea,” he said. “I’m afraid in IT trend prediction you would be better off with a crystal ball or reading tea leaves.”
“Ha! Hilarious!” The manager sniffed. “We used blockchain fed cognitive computing to predict which technologies might find new applications in the future,” he said boastfully almost rising from his chair.
Domnall winced a second time. His interlocutor seemed to be passionate about buzzwords, the more, the less he understood them. This way, he had skimmed over business topics that he really knew about, with a slightly absent expression listening to Domnall’s answers. When the conversation turned to technologies that he had no idea about, he couldn’t even sit still.
“But less about us, more about you. This is our motto!” The manager leaned back. “Why would you like to work for us, specifically?”
“The diversity of your areas of operation…”
“Yes!” The man shot a finger at him. “We work not only with structured data but also with graphs, NLP, geolocation…”
Domnall waited for man’s breath to run out and finished his thought, “I just like the opportunity to deal with multi-layer problems in various fields.”
“Yes!” The manager’s finger was again in front of Domnalla’s face. “You can’t even imagine how many layers are there in the deep neural networks we build for our clients! Our investors are delighted when we show them how far ahead of the competition we are in super-sized data science in the cloud! It is not a mere data lake anymore. It’s an ocean!”
The manager froze, probably waiting for applause. Domnall wondered how to make him understand that the quality of data science is measured neither in petabytes nor in the number of neural net layers.
“I’ve read that you work with government agencies as well,” he began carefully. “I guess such responsibility requires a scrupulous quality assessment of the results. I shall add that I have some achievements in this field…”
“What libraries do you use?” the manager became interested.
“It depends…” Domnall blinked in confusion. So far, his interlocutor had not said anything suggesting that he knew at least one library by name. Domnall smirked. “University library, public…”
“We always use the latest libraries! Not only public ones but commercial as well!” The manager beamed with pride. “In addition, we always use the most efficient servers, the largest data sets, and the latest metadata, so that there is no doubt about the reliability of our results!”
“It’s undoubtedly great support for a thought-out analysis,” Domnall praised, struggling not to ask if working time in the company was also measured using the world’s fastest watches.
As if reading his mind, the manager looked at his wrist.
“Oh, how the time is flying!” he grabbed his head and hurriedly added, “I have one last question. What areas of technology are you passionate about?”
Domnall felt relieved seeing the transition to the “hobbies and interests” part of the interview. He was already fed up with the professional one.
“I guess space travel the most. It’s fascinating how…”
“Ha! Hilarious!” the man interrupted. “But I mean information technology.”
Domnall fell silent for a moment. He was tempted to get revenge on the interlocutor by overwhelming him with an avalanche of jargon, but eventually, he decided to show mercy. He answered truthfully:
“What excites me is finding out the truth. I have no emotional attachments to any data processing technologies. What ticks me is discovering the rules enabling me to model reality accurately enough to get some predictive power.”
The manager went limp, like an inflatable toy losing the air.
“Hmm … People in our team are usually more passionate about data,” he muttered disappointedly. A second later he remembered the polite smile and finished, “We will call you.”
We Will Call You Series:
Episode 1: Data Democratization
Episode 2: Stimulating Work Environment
Episode 6: Passionate, more passionate, hired! (current)
Domnall is a brilliant guy. However, job-seeking is long-term entertainment, and will probably take him a while. Especially that job interviews don’t happen every day. In the meantime, you may consider reading about other (equally brilliant) characters in our #Pharmacon sociological thriller.
