How I Landed at Viewpoint

06 May 2009

This summer I will be starting my seventh year at Viewpoint Systems…wow, seven years…that’s an eternity in the software world.  Anyone remember the Pentium 2 and how they were packaged in those large black cassettes?  Is anyone still using AIM, or are you one of the cool kids who is ‘facebooking’ and ‘twittering’?  The list of technologies that have risen and fallen in the past seven years is overwhelming.

I probably landed at my current job much like many of you have found yours, through an interview.  I just happened to have my first interview on campus, and my future CEO was causally swearing five minutes into our first meeting.

What?  You haven’t had an interview where there was some causal swearing involved?  You obviously haven’t lived.

It was the fall of my senior year at Cornell and interviews were in full swing.  The weather in Ithaca was finally turning from gray and windy to cold, gray, and windy.  Legend had it if one were to glance into the sky one might catch a glimpse of a rather large fireball, that when stared at for too long would cause a man to go blind.  Some would call this fireball the sun; while others would call those same people liars…no one has ever seen the sun in Ithaca.

Needless to say the weather was changing, and interview season was upon us.  My resume was newly minted, my clothes were cleaned, my ties were pre-tied…I was ready to interview for my future full time position.

What I wasn’t ready for was an interviewer who looked over my resume to exclaim, “You worked for company xyz?  Those guys are a bunch of assholes!”

This really threw me off my game.

Up to this point I had been through my fair share of interviews, two different co-ops, an on campus technical position, and in high school I worked after school for the computer services department.  Each interview had their own quirks…

::For my high school position I interviewed in front of no less than seven people in a big auditorium.  Question: how do you strike the fear of God into a high school student?  Line that student up in front of a group of supervisors, upperclassmen, his CS teacher, and ask him technical questions::

I have, however, up to this point, never actually had anyone swear during the interviews…I quickly decided this wasn’t going to be your typical interview, or typical company.

The incident stuck with me for the next several days, and through to my other interviews.  It made a lasting impression, and dare I say may have been the deciding factor for the reason I took the job I now hold?

No.

It would be a very silly thing to take a job based on casual swearing, but it did make a hell of an impression on me.

Did I find the use of the swear profane or offensive?  No…it was just the right use of swearing in the right situation that made all of the difference.  In this case it formed an impression on me about how a small company in Rochester, NY might be a little different than say a cooperate behemoth in Seattle, WA.

To this day, that still holds true…so as I am about to start my seventh year with Viewpoint I’ll take a moment to look back and take stock on how I arrived here.  I’ll reminisce about the good times, the bad times, the hard times, and the plain old fun I’ve had over the past seven years.  Lastly, I ponder how large a part the word ‘assholes’ has had in me arriving to where I am today.