Interview Time Again!

Wow, first of all - I had this idle hope that people would come across my posts in the future, and would be able to use my experiences to help them prepare for their own interviews. Then I kind of forgot about it, but today, lo and behold, comments! I was going to post a brief thing about preparing for my Hulu interview tomorrow, but I'm newly motivated to actually finish up the Bridgewater story - so here goes!

First, to those who are looking at Bridgewater Associates: please take a moment to review your internet presence, and I don't just mean your facebook or your Google search results! You'll see why in a few minutes.

So, as scheduled, I had the second phone interview with Bridgewater Associates on March 13th, with Ted Yang (instead of Rob Bruce, who was originally scheduled to do it). It was definitely in a class of its own. First off, there were no technical questions. While that's not that unusual for companies not used to recruiting MIT students (see Intuit, Vistaprint, Charles River Analytics) who seem to assume technical knowledge, Bridgewater isn't one of those. All in all, I only really had one technical question, the algorithm from my first phone screen.

In the second interview, all of the questions really centered around one issue: why I wanted to work at Bridgewater. I was asked this at the previous interview and was able to answer it with a generic, "correct" answer based on what I had read on their website. Bridgewater's founder's philosophy is all about an equal sharing of ideas - a conscious step away from the hierarchical model. And so on. Roughly what I gathered from the reading was that there is an emphasis on equality, listening to the little guy, etc. Whether that is actually true, I don't know - but it sure sounds nice. And it's a convincing enough reason for a little engineer to want to work there.

Or so I thought. Ted immediately called me out on my answer, and proceeded to grill me about why I actually want to work there. Here I started sweating; after a bit of discussion, I decided that honesty is the best policy (or rather, when under pressure, I'm not a good bullshitter), and we ended up talking about what was most important to me in choosing where to have an internship. The compensation came out as a very large factor (which Ted readily agreed with), as did the interestingness of the projects I would get to be involved in (this one took some explaining).

At that point Ted let me know he was in a position to offer me a job right then and there. He outlined the program and the housing and compensation packages. Without going into too much detail, the compensation for the 10-week internship he proposed was very good. It even has a sort of "signing bonus." Potential hires take note: it is hard to walk away when you hear this kind of information. I stuck to my original statement that the content of my internship would be very important, though, and convinced Ted that I could not accept the offer until I had a better idea of what the job would entail.

At the very end, before we signed off, Ted mentioned that one of the people I interviewed with was Irish, not Indian, but that he found the mistake amusing. Knowing that the only place I had ever mentioned the accent thing was in this blog, I asked him (with no small level of nervousness) how he found the information. Even though my name isn't actually mentioned on this blog, he had searched Blogger to see what people are saying about Bridgwater, and had come across the post and recognized me. Though he said that nothing I had written was bad (clearly, since I had the offer), let me reiterate my original warning: check your internet presence when job hunting!

Anyway, the story ends there; I got an offer letter (and T-shirt, in my size, though nobody at Bridgewater had physically seen me before) the next day. In the end, I took the Microsoft job, and I don't regret it, though the money wasn't quite as good (the project I managed was great).