I was recently put through my paces in a three-on-one interview. Among the interviewers was a VP of Product. After a whirlwind demonstration of requirements gathering, I assembled a crude design concept for a product we had just come up with (muffins with "kick"). The challenge was then to come up with a front-end model that would put the website into the history books for its revolutionary design. How would I achieve this?
Tall order, eh? It's funny because I didn't think I would be able to answer the question but I ended up arriving at a decent response. Please forgive my writer's embellishment here, but what I am about to describe (using hyperbole, analogy and movie references) did happen, and my mind did kind of work this way, but I wasn't channeling Neo when I found what I believe to be the right answer.
I was thrown into "bullet time." For those unfamiliar, this is a hyper meditative state that Keanu Reeves's character Neo goes into when the bullets start flying in The Matrix. Time slows down, and the bullets seem to be moving in ultra slow motion. As I watched these "bullets" coming toward me, I immediately understood this was a training simulation and in the balance of my performance a job was hanging on the line.
Believing I would not arrive at a sufficient solution, I deferred the question and described a revolutionary front end model that had made the history books a few years ago. ESPN had completely redone their website and was the first commercial entity to launch a completely tableless wrapper (the structural HTML for the page contained no HTML "Table" tags). Those who know me well understand I am not an avid sports fan, so for ESPN to get me spending the amount of time I did on their website was pretty impressive. "Look ma, no tables!" I was familiar with the concept but at the time this was gutsy--there were still legacy browsers out that would choke on this model.
In my deferral, I described the situation above, and in telling the story I realized what the next revolutionary step would be. If ESPN had launched a site that worked well across all modern browsers and used only "box" containers to deliver the content, then the next evolutionary step would be to transcend the browsers altogether. Whether I am coming at the site with my PS3, my iPhone*, my Kindle*, webTV, an old-fashioned WML phone, or a conventional web browser, the content and functionality would be platform-agnostic. This was my triumph--understanding in bullet time that the next evolutionary step in web construction will be sites that agnostically deliver their payload to ANY platform.
I can't say whether I passed the training simulation (I'll let you know) but I can say I was at once intellectually exhausted and thoroughly exhillerated. My modus operandi is typically to ice up in test conditions. I might get an A+ on the practical, but I typically just squeak by on the final exam. Time will tell if my prognostication was correct. We shall see.
*No, I don't have an iPhone or a Kindle, but will happily accept donations or perform extended field testing on one or both if anyone is interested. :)
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Different types of interviews are really fun to experience (or would be if they weren't so stressful). I had an interview with a company that asked me to write a conversion spec during the interview itself. They left me alone in a room with a big cup of coffee and said they'd be back in 30 minutes. My strategy was "what in my experience is this most like?" and remembered conversion guidelines from a previous job which actually came pretty close! I would have found it very hard to do that while people were looking at me and expecting an answer, however. Kudos that you could do that on demand!!
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