******************************LONG POST ALERT********************************
I left Tuesday at noon and with three other guys drove to Silicon valley; the second trip in less than two weeks driving for more than 12 hrs one way. We were part of a group of about 25 BYU MBA students organized by the school to meet with a number of tech companies. Wednesday we visited EMC and Google. Then Thursday it was Ebay, Symantec, and Intel. At each company we spent a couple hours and had a chance to network. It was a good trip and it was fun to get inside so many companies and get a taste of the culture. Right after we finished with Intel on Thursday I took a plane from the San Jose airport to Seattle.
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| One of many of Google's self driving cars. More to come on this. |
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| Me standing in front of the OS that runs on my phone (Ice Cream Sandwich). You can see a bit of the prior gen. OS behind (Honeycomb). |
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| Inside Google's offices. Pretty sweet. Yes, that's a slide! |
Last week on rather short notice I was selected for first round interviews with Amazon. Surprisingly, I made it to the final round fly-backs considering I was coming off a period of 36 hrs with only 30 min. of sleep. The interview was scheduled for the following week which meant I had to cut my Silicon Valley trip short.
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| View from my hotel room (paid for by Amazon) on the 36th floor downtown Seattle. Not a fan of heights, this freaked me out the first hour I was in the room and I almost went back to the front desk to get a room a little lower. |
As you might know Amazon is a company in high growth. It is one of the best companies you could hope to have on your resume because of the type of experiences you can have there. People of all functions can really have a hand in some cutting edge stuff. They also pay extremely well, perhaps the highest all considered from the MBA program. They expect a whole lot from their employees. Both in the depth and quality of work but also of your actual life. One person who interviewed me who works in their notorious cloud computing group said that they expect 200 hrs worth of work per week and expect you to do it in 70 to 80 hrs. Catch that? 80 hrs per week! That said, they can give you experience that will launch your career.
Amazon is also notorious for having a very difficult interview process. After 4 hours of interviewing it lived up to the rumors. I left head down, feeling bruised and bloodied. The first 45 min I was given a laptop and asked to complete a case that I was purposefully given insufficient information and with an insufficient amount of time. Yikes, right!? This turned out to be the easiest part. Next was four 45 minute interviews; one of which debriefed me on the case. Two of the people that interviewed me were in general pleasant and I thought I did well. They asked mostly questions like, "Tell me about a time when you faced..." and then I proceeded to give them an example. The other two asked mostly case questions like, "Tell me how would you model the return on..." Then they would ask ten questions poking at my logic and testing my ability to handle pressure. At one point I was scribbling multiplication on a piece of paper filling up the half page I had left as the interviewer did the same on a computer to check my work then when I'd stop to draw the obvious conclusion he cut me off and tell me continue with the math. Brutal!!! I left with the certainty that I will not be getting an offer and mentally beaten. The only thing I had left was the resolute determination to spend the $65 for food per day that Amazon agrees to reimburse.
Unfortunately, a group of us agreed to have dinner with some Amazonians at some crazy upscale burger joint. A far cry from the juicy steak I was envisioning. Whatever. I was done. We ate, the food was fried and good, then one Amazonian's was super cool and took us to "the best view of Seattle" on the deck of the eleven floor of one of the 11 buildings Amazon occupies downtown.
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| "Lunchbox Laboratory" - Started with some fresh fried pork grinds (aweseome) and dork balls (duck and turkey puffs - less awesome), ate "the smoker" burger, and mushed it down with a Boston creme donut shake (a whole donuts is tossed into the shake - seriously awesome!!!) |
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| Not sure if you can see the in the picture but the fog is low and hides the top of the Space Needle. To me it looks like it a latter to heaven. |
It was a great experience but definitely one that I'm glad is over. It's now 6:30pm Saturday and all I need for my life to return to the normalcy I love is to wait patiently for 2.5 more hours for Ashley to come home.
