I have one policy which, every time I break it, ends in tragedy. Never do a Friday Interview. I started this policy over twenty years ago while under contract at Waste Management. While I had done a lot of software development before that, I hadn’t really learned the ins and outs of corporate culture. I learned it there. Corporate policy meant everyone had to come into work on Friday, but, nobody actually had to work. The policy was that all software developers and accountants with PCs had to back them up before leaving the office at the end of their week.
Sounds simple doesn’t it? Sounds like it could even be a good idea. This was during the days of DOS when an 80 MEG hard drive was a whopping amount of storage. The image I found isn’t even close to the massive external tape drives the company bought. I was twenty something and I thought they weighed a ton. When us younger guys got done with them we offered to carry them over to a lady’s desk if she was next in line to use it.
Have you figured it out yet? That last part should have given it away. They bought enough tapes for everyone to use, but only bought a couple of tape drives. I think it was one per floor or something like that and this was data transfer over the parallel port. Slooooooow.
Pretty soon, everyone wanted a PC, not so they could do more work, but so they could avoid working on Friday. You see, people believed they couldn’t use their desktop computer once they backed it up, because, now the backup would be no good. They didn’t want to lose a day’s worth of work over the weekend. This lead to not being able to find a conference room on Friday because everyone tried to schedule meetings all day long. Some of those meetings were interviews for open positions.
We are a long way from the days of DOS, but the corporate culture hasn’t changed. Oh, everybody has to store stuff on the company server or cloud today and whoever supports that is responsible for backing it up, but, the mindset of scheduling meetings, particularly interviews, on Fridays is rampant.
Friday interviews suck. Nobody in the room is paying attention. When you see them look at their laptop, they are checking on their weekend plans, not your resume. Nobody wants to be there.
This past year I broke my vow of not taking a Friday interview. It was an embedded medical device contract I really wanted to work on. I forced a pimp I like doing business with to wade through the corporate morass and get me presented. I’ve been at this a long time, so I was highly qualified. I just had to interview on the following Friday.
Friday interviews suck.
Client had an entire week to get a visitors badge arranged for me. Didn’t happen. I spent 45 minutes in the “lobby building” waiting for the receptionist to find someone, anyone, who had heard of me before. Eventually, one of the people who was supposed to be part of the interview called the “lobby building” to find out where the Hell I was. That’s when I finally got a visitor’s badge and had to drive all the way around the campus to the building I was supposed to interview in.
Friday interviews suck.
Despite a heads up from the “lobby building” I was coming, I spend at least 15 minutes cooling my heels in the lobby of the target building. It felt like 2.5 hours. Just as I was picking up my briefcase to leave, the manager I was supposed to interview with came to get me. She made small talk about how her day was getting better because her last meeting only ran 10 minutes over so she might finish the day on time. I didn’t bother to point out my interview was starting over half an hour late.
Friday interviews suck.
The interview was only mildly confrontational. While the project sounded interesting I was predominantly going to be changing the diapers of a developer team “no longer with the project” and I was going to have little to no contact with the rest of the team. When you are a professional though, you just can’t tank an interview.
Friday interviews suck.
Early the following week I get a tentative start date. Pimp, while having direct contracts with the client, doesn’t have a contract with the illegal alien pipeline, also known as the Vendor Management System. The sloths which run this system, transferring terrorists far and wide and otherwise engaging in human trafficking, they are pissed that a U.S. Citizen who won’t be driving a van into a crowd or detonating himself in public has been chosen for this contract over the container full of people they have waiting on the dock.
Friday interviews suck.
I have a start date, so I turn down two other projects. One was a really good project. The kind you think about retiring after doing.
The illegal alien pipeline refuses to add a consulting firm which does not use visa workers to the Vendor Management System. This drags on for close to two months until the manager caves and uses someone shipped over in a container selected by the Vendor Management System.
Friday interviews suck.
Learn from history. I’ve had a three decade career. Every Friday interview ends up in a train wreck.
Never accept a Friday interview.
