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When I was first hired at Expedient Communications, I had a feeling of excitement, and uncertainty. I had absolutely no idea what I was in for, and I had relatively little experience in the corporate world. I had worked at United States Steel for about 3 months as an intern, but I hated that experience because I was literally given nothing to do except for bits and scraps of projects. I mostly ran queries on Oracle databases for an Information Architect and wrote JSP pages. I don’t remember any JSP anymore.
At Expedient, things were different. I had lots to do pretty much the entire time I was there. I was introduced to a world of change control, tickets, SVN, and feedback meetings. It was basically what I had been desiring for a long time in terms of a professional environment. One of my biggest regrets I have about what I could have done at SAI was how unstructured all the project management was. Literally nothing was really planned, it was all mapped out on the fly with little to no documentation, or accountability as to when it would be done or by whom. I should have taken that responsibility and I didn’t.
At Expedient, my boss was 2 years new to the company and they had already given him control of our department, Systems Development. He was very good at his job, a programmer of extreme caliber who almost seemed to miss nothing when it came to planning a project or writing code. He gave me a great idea of what project life-cycles are like in the real world.
About two weeks into the job, I had a personal meltdown. For reasons unknown, I asked myself if this was really what I wanted to do. I was so freaked out about it that I almost couldn’t work for an hour. I had to talk to Lauren to calm myself down. I ended up being obsessed with it for another week and a half. I came to the conclusion that while I enjoyed the work I did at Expedient, my desired career would be to end up at a company whose business was web development.
I had been interested in a specific company for a long time. I had the benefit and pleasure of working with BarkleyREI when Cal U was getting a new website. They are an interactive media company located in the Strip District of Pittsburgh. I was so impressed by their work that I had always wanted to work for them, even while I was at Cal U. In fact, when I was planning to leave SAI, BarkleyREI was the first company I applied to. They didn’t have any positions open, so I simply sent them a resume to consider. I never got a response from them and ended up getting the job at Expedient about a month after I started looking. I was hired and started on Feb. 14th, 2011.
After 2 months of Expedient, I decided (on a whim) to check if Barkley was hiring. It was the following weekend after Easter weekend. It was strange that over the weekend I had expressed to my family my feelings about Expedient, and how I admired Barkley and wanted to ultimately work there. It almost seemed like fate when I pulled up their careers page and found an opening for a Front End Web Developer/Interface Programmer that had literally been posted that day. I immediately whipped up a current resume, pounded out a cover letter that basically gushed my love for their company, and sent them an e-mail. The following Monday, I got a call from someone asking to schedule a phone interview!
They ended up scheduling my interview for the following Monday. I was busy that whole week so that was the only day I could do it. I sat in the parking lot of a Taco Bell, racking my brain as they asked me questions about HTML, CSS, jQuery, web standards, and other things technical. They were extremely pleased with my answers, and as soon as I hung up the phone I started crying. I was ecstatic about how well it went. The very next day, I got an e-mail from Barkley to schedule a face to face interview. I told them I could do any day except Mondays after 4 PM. They said “how about today?” After a “Go for it!” from Lauren, I left work early to speed downtown and got there at 4:00 on the dot. I talked to about 5 different people, but they didn’t ask anything technical. I didn’t expect them to. They had already grilled me over the phone and this was just them having me come in so they could gauge me on a personal level and ask me some basic questions about what I expected from the job. I was totally honest about what I wanted my career to be, and they were all suprised about how I had found out about the job, and how I knew about Barkley from Cal U. Also, while I was there I saw someone whom I had met during the Cal U project, Chris Cox, who recognized me and wished me luck after saying hi.
I was sent home with instructions that I would be getting a coder test in my e-mail. I got it late that night due to their network giving them problems and my Gmail sending it to Spam. I opened the test and it was three assignments.
1. Take a flat image and turn it into a valid HTML + CSS file. It has to work in all modern and semi-modern browsers.
2. Create a calculator from javascript. I can use jQuery if I want.
3. Extend an XSLT file to include a for loop through any nodes I want in a corresponding XML file.
When I got this test, I was so nervous and intimidated by it that I threw up, and the next three days I was nearly crippled from stress. I even missed a few days of work because I was so messed up that I got really really sick and had to stay in bed. I barely ate anything for three days. I was so weak I could barely move. I got the test on Tuesday, and I completed it on Wednesday and sent it in. On Friday, I got a call from Barkley saying they got my test, it looked great, but I needed to do one more thing. I took a test called the Caliper test, which was a mix between a personality test and the SATs. It was really weird. Also, on Thursday, someone called me to talk to me about the benefits and ask if I had any questions. Things were looking good.
[ I have removed my salary and benefits from this post. ]
I’m so psyched for this job I can hardly wait. Today was my last day at Expedient and Tuesday is my first day at BarkleyREI. The future seems bright for me!
TL;DR I worked at Expedient for 3 months, then landed my dream job at Barkley REI. I start on Tuesday.
