I was trying to locate 18 Fennel Street amongst the houses and flats. The street numbering was off, but I got there with time to spare. The doorbell was weak and needed a couple of pushes. I pushed once. In a room I faced a closet under stairs and a rack of border corners used for photo frame beefing. In my hand I held a CV but as soon as the interviewer, Tony Lee, stepped into the room I just knew it wasn't for me.
The practical interview was conducted on a dual monitor G4 Mac system inside the kitchen. The keyboard was extremely grimy and shiny. Opened was a family portrait in Photoshop 7. From experience in Paintshop Pro I tinkered a little with the Curves of the image to bring out the distinct colours and tones in the image. Adjusting the Brightness/Contrast just doesn't cut it. Then I had to figure out how to take out the shine from the father's bulbous nose.
This is where the "test" went sour. I stumbled trying to figure out what the keys on the board were as well as how the hell I was going to dull the lustre. I first tried a Smudging of the adjacent colours and then tried to use a 3 pixel brush on 100% opacity. Results weren't looking great.
Then he comes across and chooses a 50 pixel brush on 40% opacity and does it himself as a comparison on speed and efficiency. "I guess you could do it that way" I told him. Another hint was that he asked, "I take it you're not familiar with the tools here."
The second image was of a family in a park setting walking hand in hand in hand. The toddler's face wasn't good and so the task was to swap another, happier, face over it. I created a layer on the base, lassoed the face over on to the new layer and things went rancid. I was checking out all of the menus looking for the Free Transform box. He showed me where it was.
"Pretty distinct border there," he pointed out. There was a glaring border around the floating face that I could not figure out how to remove and I kept asking stuff such as, "what the hell?" "little help?" and "I have no idea what's going on here, do you?"
Either the twenty minutes was up or he just couldn't stand it any more, but he slid the mouse from under my hand and ended it with a definite "NO" It was one of those interviews any one could have gotten had they simply replied to the ad.
Wednesday, 23 April 2003
One of those interviews you find yourself in where you have no idea, absolutely none, of what the actual job is. So you end up talking about a range of things not knowing what's a hit, what's a miss and what you're doing there in the first place.
Interview skills on a rough patch, it was time to hone them again. To put the pressure on of sitting in a one-on-one meeting to figure out ever long questions. Questions like; what are your strengths, what are your weaknesses, what are you doing with your life?
Volunteer long enough and well enough and you've got yourself some chops in the skills area. What you still don't have however, are the skills that come in the grilling panel interview process. Think it's bad one-on-one? Try three against one and not being able to keep from sweating.
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