27 April 2006

Job interview prep

I've got an interview tomorrow for a 3-6 month contract doing middle-tier J2EE stuff. Nervous as hell, but that's typical for me - no matter how long I've been playing the game, no matter how many interviews I've done, and no matter what kind of feedback I get (almost unanimously overwhelmingly positive, apparently I interview very well) I still get super anxious.

I try to get as much information as I can ahead of time. In this case I've already gone through the initial phone screen with the hiring manager, so I know what products they're using, what they're trying to accomplish, and where the team fits in with the company. I've spent the past 3 days or so doing little but skimming through as much as I can on the various bits I expect to need to know for the position. Strong unix (AIX and linux specifically - very strong linux here, very moderate AIX, but I've been a unix guy for 18 years straight anyway), strong java, middleware (the ejb/dbms/tx bit of J2EE, no real need for servlets, JSP, etc), some perl. They're a very large IBM shop, with WebSphere and Eclipse in heavy use. I don't particularly care for WebSphere, and very strongly dislike Eclipse, but I'm not expecting to walk into an IntelliJ shop either.

They're still on j2ee 1.3, which has posed a bit of an issue for me. Sun's RI won't run in a 1.5 JDK, evidently - I've tried in both Mac OS X and Windows XP (my linux box is tied up) - and startup fails while looking for some com.sun.corba.* libraries in both cases.

Back to pouring over j2ee 1.3 specs...

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