Cory Doctorow hit the 30,000-word mark on his latest novel, usr/bin/god (ask a geeky friend who uses some version of the UNIX operating system if you don’t get the joke). To celebrate the milestone, he’s posted a 2,000-word snippet which includes this interesting paragraph:
Job interview! He cringed at the words, cringed at the memory of the grueling, humiliating pre-test he’d had to do to even *get* a job-interview, which had included fifteen essay questions on the history of the Internet, the fine points of Microsoft Foundation Classes, and SQL query-syntax. He’d had to define a glossary of no fewer than 30 technical terms, including “PEBKAC” (“Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair”), which had been his freaking *login* for five years on an underpowered Solaris box at his ISP.
Regular readers of this blog may recall a posting of mine about having to answer a dozen essay questions — many of which were meant merely to determine my 1337 bona fides rather than any techincal skill or experience — to even get an interview with a particular software company located in downtown Accordion City. After that, there was still the matter of a pre-interview interview, followed by an interview, followed by a presentation.
Cory noted the job interview hoop-jumping I had to do in two entries in BoingBoing back in November. It would seem that those blog entries provided some inspiration for a detail in the story, which seems pretty cool. (The mention of Microsoft Foundation Classes might have also come from me — see this blog entry — most of Cory’s geek friends are either those dirty Linux hippies or glaze-eyed Mac moonies.)
I am, of course, making a wild assumption here. Cory could’ve come up with that detail all on his own. However, as the World’s Most Humble Egomaniac™, my mantra is “It’s all about me.”