Yeah, and I didn't get the job.
I got an email last monday telling me that they would "continue their search" because they experienced a "communication barrier". They found me hard to talk with. The odd thing is that I left the building with the exact opposite feeling, it's was very easy to talk to them and I was more concerned about if I was up to their standards when it came to graphic coding skills, but that obviously wasn't a problem. I'm still confused at least, been trying hard to make any sense out of it. As I went through seven different interviews I've been thinking like "who might have had a problem with my communication skills?" I've come up with three candidates.
Maybe Hansong Zhang, but that would be mostly because for some reason after a few minutes he came into the subject of nVidia's unified driver archetecture, then he spent like 15 minutes telling me stuff I already knew about it and I basically just sat there agreeing, saying "yeah" a little now and then. Maybe I should have just said "dude, I know that already, next question please".
Sim Dietrich? Possibly. He had the lunch interview where he brought some friend I can't remember the name of and we sat down in the local cafe talking. Well, Sim talked to that guy, not so much with me. Further it was kinda noisy in there, and I had some trouble hearing what they were saying, especially that other guy cause he wasn't that loud talking, and I didn't really feel I was a part of the conversation. Another guy (which later interviewed me) sat down too, but he wasn't talking more than me either. It was basically those. I don't think Sim asked me more than two or three questions during the whole "interview", he was just talking to the other guy, and I'm not the kind of guy that interrupts people talking, but maybe I should have just told him "dude, we're supposed to have an interview here".
The last guy that may have been a problem could have been that french guy (not sure if he ever said his name), I had a little problem talking to him, but I don't think he would complain, because the problem was that his english sucked. Not only did he misunderstand lot of things I said, he also had serious trouble to find words for stuff he was going to say, often he had would just halt in the middle of a sentence and go "no, uhm ... " and try again. Plus his french accent of course.
All the others I had no problem with. I'm also thinking that my english may have been too good in a sense, many people I met in the US would look really surprised and go like "but you don't have an accent" as soon as I told them I was from Sweden, so maybe they just expected me to talk like an american, maybe they would have been more forgiving if I would have an accent.
Oh well, I don't really know ... I'm trying to get something through at ATi now, but I've lost quite a lot of time.
