Advice

The phrase “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” is an old saying that stems from the theatre industry in regard to auditioners facing rejection. I’m going to co-opt this phrase and twist it a bit into how companies that interview candidates hold all the cards and act in a manner consistent with information asymmetry. I recently interviewed for a senior managerial position doing something akin to DevOps for a startup. I asked a number of questions about the type of work and such, very technical and job-specific in nature. I then asked about some things that appeared in the job description (see section “Job Description”). The interviewer (who was new to the company herself) said that she didn’t know the answer and that I should forward the questions to the in-house recruiter with whom I spoke with earlier. It seemed like a totally reasonable response, so I whipped up an email later that night and sent it off the recruiter. ...

Being the 10th anniversary of when this story took place, I would like to tell a story today. It is one of the many stories that I tell each of my student mentees each year. At first it may seem like I am airing dirty laundry, but the purpose of this parable is that the reader can hopefully steer clear of the mistakes I made once upon a time. I was working at the main IT department for UBC (then called ITServices, it is now called UBCIT) as a software developer. It was my first job after graduating from UBC (I previously held the job before graduation, but that’s beside the point). I had been working at UBC for 2 years before a new project was started: Campus Wide Login (CWL). At the time, this project was revolutionary. It was a single sign-on (SSO) system that would obsolete the various usernames and passwords around the campus, and centralize it all into one system. The design was based on Kerberos which is a ticketing system, very similar to today’s OAuth2 system. ...