My First Onsite Interview

The trip itself was fairly uneventful, but it contained a remarkable number of firsts: my first career fair, my first time flying alone in the United States, my first hotel stay on my own, my first onsite interview, and so on.

It began with submitting résumés at my university’s career fair in search of a summer internship. I was in a 2+2 undergraduate program, and this was my first year in the United States. However strong my grades had been in China, I had no GPA from my new university yet. In that situation, most résumés went nowhere unless the employer already knew the program and understood what those grades from China represented.

So off I went. I wore a proper suit and managed to look unusually respectable, while a new pair of dress shoes spent the entire day trying to destroy the backs of my ankles. Most of my classmates were dressed much the same way. Computer science was not yet as crowded a field, and students interviewing in other disciplines faced even stricter expectations about clothing. Later, as companies began hiring far more programmers, more and more people started showing up to career fairs in tank tops and shorts.

Predictably, nearly all my applications disappeared without a trace. Epic was the company that picked mine out of the pile. Two days after the career fair, I heard from them and had an interview.

I was extremely confident at the time. My background was in competitive programming, so I believed the hard part was getting an interview at all. Once someone gave me one, the coding questions would simply be easy problems I could tear through. This interview had come so readily that I mistakenly assumed many more would follow.

The first round was a phone interview. I remember nothing about it, except that I passed.

The second round was more entertaining. They asked me to go to a testing center, which I remember because I got lost on the way. On the map, it sat beside an S-shaped road. I thought I recognized the road, so I took a bus there, searched for quite a while, and found nothing. It turned out there were two nearly parallel S-shaped roads only a few hundred meters apart, and I had chosen the wrong one. I hurried over to the other road. Fortunately, I had left early and made it in time. I should have checked the address properly instead of treating the shape on the map as sufficient evidence.

Then came two hours of programming problems. I no longer remember exactly how many there were. What I do remember is that, with my competitive programming background at the time, none of them struck me as particularly difficult, and I finished them pretty quickly.

I passed the second round without any suspense.

Then came the onsite interview—my first. I would fly from school to the city where Epic was headquartered, stay overnight, interview the next day, and fly back. The company covered everything.

To be honest, I was a little nervous. In the United States, I had never taken a bus to the airport by myself, flown alone, or stayed in a hotel on my own. I was afraid I would have no idea what I was doing.

That fear was not entirely misplaced. The most alarming part came at the Madison airport, where the company had sent a driver to take me to the hotel. It was a minor miracle that I found him. I made a circuit of the airport, became convinced that I was lost, and started to panic, only to find him somehow waiting near the entrance after all.

I eventually reached the hotel without incident. I handed my passport to the front desk, and apparently that completed everything required of me.

That evening, there was a dinner with company employees. The email said attendance was optional, but that other people might be going. What was that supposed to mean? It sounded very much like a strong suggestion that I had better attend. But then there was the matter of my English.

Sure enough, at dinner I could not even understand the menu. I picked the first burger more or less at random, reasoning that a burger was unlikely to go disastrously wrong. Everyone around me chatted and laughed while I could contribute nothing. I just wanted to return to the hotel and sleep.

The next day, I arrived for the onsite interview. The campus was beautiful and certainly impressed the very inexperienced version of me. People there kept talking about how spectacular it was. Only much later did I discover that, judging by what I saw afterward, nearly every large company in the Bay Area seemed to have a spectacular campus.

I remember nothing about the actual interviews except one especially memorable answer. In the final behavioral round, the interviewer asked, “Why do you want to work here?” A perfectly ordinary question. I answered, without hesitation, “Because you hire international students.” An admirably unvarnished answer.

At the time, I saw nothing wrong with it. I was far too relaxed because I had never particularly intended to join the company. After that, Epic vanished into silence. More than a decade later, I still haven’t received a rejection from them.

The answer had seemed perfectly fine to me then. It was only many years later, looking back, that I understood just how inappropriate it had been. For all I know, the interviewer may have wanted to show me the door on the spot.

And so my first onsite interview concluded with precisely nothing.