Tonight, our small new hire bootcamp team left the office a bit early at 5 to enjoy a happy hour together at a nearby bar. Our group of ten has been animated from day 1, and I’ve honestly enjoyed all of their company in some different way. The interaction across the group has been very positive, and it’s been fun to hear about everyone’s different experiences, from where they’ve grown up and lived to their quirks to their prior work experiences.
Two of the new hires on our team had previously worked at Adobe. Adobe is a company that is somewhat related to me because not only did I work for a company that got acquired by them, but I also spent a solid two months interviewing there for a Marketing Cloud position earlier this year. Adobe is oftentimes labeled pejoratively as a “frankencloud,” or a “company of acquisitions” that lacks innovation within itself, which is why it is forced to buy out other companies to then create the facade that it bringing the outside innovation in. What was so amusing to me was how much hatred these two previous Adobe employees had for the company. It was as though our new hire/sales bootcamp was becoming new hire/sales/Hate on Adobe bootcamp.
At the happy hour, they were interested in seeing what my experience interviewing there was like, especially since it was so recent, and both of them had left that company years ago. After interviewing with two internal recruiters and then the hiring manager, all the interviews that followed were easy. They asked basic questions regarding management experience, multitasking, and industry knowledge that any person even half interested in this type of role should know how to answer. But the most intriguing interview (from an over-drinks-conversation perspective) is the very last one I had, and that was with a guy who worked remotely from home, had been with the company for about two years, and clearly did not care at all about the Adobe interview process. He said to me from the get-go when he called that he thinks typical interview questions are bullshit, he doesn’t like that you tend to always have to reiterate the same story to every single person you interview 5-10 times, and he figured that since I had made it this far (and after reviewing my resume), he knew I probably had the aptitude for the job, so what questions could he answer for me that would cut through the crap. “The 8-10 interviews this company makes you go through is so stupid and senseless, and just a waste of time,” the interviewer said to me laughing. “I hate it, I don’t like it, but I went through it. So I know what you’re going through, and I feel for you.”
When was the last time you had an interview like that? He told me about all the politics, the lack of integration of the companies they acquired, but at the end of the day, he was there to do good work, provide for his family, and have a work-life balance. That’s all he cared about. All the other stuff didn’t matter to him.
And at the end of the day, isn’t that what most of us what — a comfortable salary, flexibility and work-life balance, and something at least a bit interesting to work on every day that prevents early onsets of Alzheimer’s?