Looking for a job is never fun so I was pretty happy when I got an offer for a dev position and it even was in the language I had my first real job in (and that I still love) Delphi
Delphi jobs being rare af I was pretty stoked to be able to work in Delphi again and with some nice people that all were pretty friendly in the interviews
The interviewer asked me to bring a Delphi project I had previously worked on, a pretty impossible ask given that I wrote medical software previously so NDAs up the ass besides I don’t take source code from work home especially not after leaving a company?!
So I foolishly offered to write a pretty basic programming language for them, remember I really wanted the job and wanted to impress.
So there I was at 6pm after coming home from my day job as the head of it security for a company, now having to write a compiler …
So I did the only reasonable thing made myself an espresso and out a simple interpreter written in object pascal (because Borland don’t run on Linux and it’s not free, how are new developers supposed to enter your language ecosystem lmao?)
Well after a long sleepless night it was done and pretty disgusting so the day after just before the interview where I was supposed to present the code I did some quick fixes and headed of to their offices, during the technical interview the lead engineer showed me their code base and we had a pretty good discussion and great time after around 4 hours (it now being 10pm) he said “and you brought us something as well?”
He took a single look just said “yeah that looks like pascal”
…
And that was it?! I left feeling pretty annoyed having invested my sanity into writing this project with a 2 day delivery window as well as having to work a stressful 8 hour work day on top.
In the end I can only blame myself for having the idea and even proposing such an insane project for a technical interview. No fault on their side, yet I would have at least wished for a more in depth talk about my efforts.
It all comes back to the old adage “we did it not because it was easy, but because we thought it would be easy”
To round it all off I have to say the company was a great place to work at even though I left a bit disappointed that evening, it felt like a family and work was pretty fun there all things considered :)
Alas on to a new company with new projects to stress myself out more then people expect me to