It was Wednesday in finals week and we had just held a brief meeting to wrap up our capstone project for the semester. Actually, it was less of a wrap-up meeting than a meeting to assign work for the winter break. I cycled down to the BART station, locked my bike and helmet up and ran to the platform where I waited for 9 minutes for the train to arrive.
The train was crowded, perhaps unusually so for 10am on a Wednesday morning but I guess tech employees start work late and it's basically the holidays (for the seemingly limited number of Americans who actually are allowed to take holidays). Eventually, some time after we're passed through most of downtown San Francisco, I managed to find a seat. Soon after I found the seat nearly everyone disembarked from the train. By nearly everyone, I meant everyone except for one other person in carriage who happened to be my neighbour.
Sitting side by side, it was just my neighbour and I occupying the mid section of the carriage for the remaining 30 minutes of the journey. Being the patriotic British person that I am, I refused to strike up any sort of conversation and instead took solace in the comforting glow of my Kindle Paperwhite.
Reaching the airport, and after de-shoeing and re-shoeing through security, I patronised a bagel store - bagels being my go-to robust and relatively inexpensive airport food. There were two counter incentives at play here. Amazon, who had invited me out to Seattle to interview, were providing reimbursement of up to $65 a day for 'meals'. However, operating at scale, they would take between 6-8 weeks to hit my account and I would initially have to bear the cost of the my expenses.
Settling on a meagre but no doubt calorie-dense bagel with cream cheese of an unorthodox runny texture, I sat next to a power socket and tried, almost in vain, to keep the smart but casual red jumper (or sweater) bought during the Black Friday sale from getting covered in this cream cheese as I ate. In the interim greater-than-half-an-hour there was until we started boarding, I took out my laptop and stared at the extra credit Advanced Robotics assignment. Having struggled with these assignments (as mentioned previously), I was just shy of the mark necessary to receive an A in the course. The extra credit would have taken me there but ultimately despair and post-semester apathy prevented me from writing a single line of Matlab.
Boarding the plane, I squeezed in between a large man to my left and a comparably svelte young woman to my right. The large man was more generous with his food than his stature might suggest, giving me his complementary airline nuts. As a student with a steadily declining bank balance, I accepted. The woman to my right must also have been a student who had just finished semester because we both dozed off at some point during takeoff, waking up with the sound of the beverage cart some time after our aircraft had reached cruising altitude.
Landing in Seattle's Tacoma International Airport was almost the same feeling as landing in London. The humidity, cold and rain was reminiscent of 8 out of 10 return journeys home after holidays abroad. The carpeted, heated airport was not unlike Heathrow. Seattle is significantly cleaner than San Francisco, the city to which I have become accustomed since moving to Berkeley (perhaps explained by a lower population). Certainly the Link Light Rail that services both downtown and the airport was clean, comfortable and affordable (at $2.75 for a single journey). These are terms I wouldn't afford the Bay Area Rapid Transport.
From the airport, I went straight to (one of) Amazon's offices to meet my friend Ryan - a fellow intern and eventual escapee from the-investment-bank-which-must-not-be-named. He joined Amazon after the omnipresent bureaucracy reared its ugly head at said bank and prevented him from working for their New York office.
Sadly, my timing was unfortunate. My rather dry accounting final along with my intention to at least try the extra-credit assignment had pushed my interview date back to the point where my stay in Seattle would barely overlap with Ryan before he flew home for the holidays. Generously, he was able to take some time out of his work day to show me around the Amazon offices, indoctrinate me in the Seattle coffee culture and to catch up. Just before we parted ways, we took a photo in front of a large Amazon.com sign, almost getting a security guard into trouble when we asked if she would take our photo.
That evening I used the waning battery on my smartphone and my eyesight to navigate to the Space Needle, a rather ugly pseudo-futuristic hallmark of the Seattle skyline. An interesting side effect of travelling alone is that one becomes quite efficient at 'being' a tourist and I found that I was satisfied with my experience on the observation deck after just 15 minutes. At $20 that worked out to $80 an hour and I felt mildly disheartened at this somewhat frivolous expense.
Amazon puts interview candidates up at the Fairmont Olympic in Seattle, a lovely many star business hotel where I felt thoroughly out of place in my jeans and red jumper. Certainly, even their generous food stipend would barely cover a single main course plus tax at the hotel's Georgian restaurant. Feeling like eating, more out of meal time dacorum than any genuine hunger, I used to Yelp to find the geographically closest restaurant with three £ signs and good vegetarian food.
As it turns out, this was a restaurant called the Purple Cafe and Bar, across the street from the Fairmont. Half expecting to be enjoying the well lit but otherwise cold company of my Kindle that evening, I was happy to find a free slot at the bar next to a woman who was also travelling alone on a business trip. Sadly, dear reader, this post will not descend into some pedestrian tale of romance.
Conversation was mostly superficial but pleasant enough. We did, however, connect over our shared interest in obsessive data gathering. She had also brought her Kindle to dinner and used Goodreads to track her reading (having read some 30 books this year alone, impressive!).
Returning home after dinner, I had intended to spend a few hours revising for my technical interviews the next day but instead devoted some attention to my Kindle, having felt like it had missed out, perhaps unfairly so. I would like to say that it was the end-of-semester fatigue that put me to sleep within an hour of reading but it's likely the entire gorgonzola and pear pizza plus the glass of merlot at dinner contributed.
Waking up early the next day, I felt an almost immediate sense of failure as I realised the deadline for my extra-credit assignment had come and passed but resolved to bury it in the back of mind, where I store other similar failures to live up to arbitrarily imposed goals.
In the four hours before my interview, I attempted to revise some programming interview questions. While I've gone through many many interviews over the last three months, it has actually been nearly 1.5 months since my last interview. In Berkeley graduate student time, this is approximately two years. My brain struggled at first but after adjourning briefly for a coffee from Pegasus Coffee (the cup said that this was the oldest coffeeshop in Seattle) and a brilliant savoury brie waffle from Sweet Iron, I felt somewhat more alert.
This alertness did not translate into actually preparing for my interview though and I used a technique honed over years of not actually doing things when I'm meant to - productive procrastion - and finished off a number of other, less time critical but probably important, tasks.
As I prepared to walk to the Amazon office, I noticed a missed call on my phone and a voicemail that indicated Amazon HR had been expecting me at 10am. Calling them back, it was clear that there was some sort of confusion on their end over what time I was arriving. In an attempt to not inconvenience them further, I asked the doorman to hail a taxi. He, correctly, assumed I was heading to Amazon. When questioned why, he said "well, it's a Thursday and it's about that time of day". How astute. I assume that my bespectacled face, casual dress and relative lack of age (compared to other guests at least) must have also helped him come ot that conclusion.
Arriving at the office, it turns out that my interview was actually to begin at the time I had been told and what filled the time gap before that started was some amusing extended small talk with a member of Amazon's HR. The following interviews were straightforward - being easier than I had expected, especially without a huge amount of preparation. At the end of my first interview, my interviewer asked if the photos on my blog were from my trip to Italy - I confirmed and internally celebrated the fact that I had received one more pageview. Thank you, sir!
Ryan had warned me in advance about a 'bar-raising' interview. Amazon has a policy similar to other tech companies where they attempt to ensure quality by mandating new hires are at least better than their average employee. This manifests itself through a single interview which apparently is weighted more heavily than the others. It was clear that my bar-raising interview was the one immediately following lunch when two (versus the modal single interviewer) interviewers sat down and asked me more difficult questions than I had been asked previously. They also took more extensive notes, bordering on frantic at moments!
The interviews were over quickly and I wandered over to Pike Place Market - the next tourist destination on my list. This is a pleasant market that smells strongly of fish and houses the world's first Starbucks. (An amusing sight - people queued up out of the door to get the exact same drink they could buy from around the corner with no queue.) After completing a rather dense Russian 'cheese bun' (not the native name, I assume) I wandered over to one of the coffee shops my friend Arjun recommended. Since he's a (proper, i.e. PhD track) CS graduate student, I had a lot of faith in his coffee recommendations.
After irradiating the right side of my brain for a good 38 minutes, while talking to my parents and sister (who were, as it happens, also loitering in a coffee shop - albeit 8,181 miles away in Melbourne), I fired up my laptop and got to work.
My faith in Arjun's recommendation was not misplaced and I realised, while sipping an exquisite 'spicy chai latte', that in the moment, I was happy. The proprietors were playing reggae over the speaker system, the wi-fi was fast and there was a cute girl sitting opposite me. The only way the moment could possibly have been better would be if I was talking to aforementioned cute girl, discussing our shared love for reggae.
Eventually I had to leave the coffee shop and wandered over to the Central Public Library. All libraries appear to have these huge airy architectures and it was similar to that of the Law Faculty at Cambridge University. It was all-in-all uneventful although I was slightly bemused to share a lift with a sufferer of Tourette's syndrome on my elevator ride down from the vantage point on the tenth floor.
From here, I walked across to the Columbia Center to check out the most cost effective competing view of Seattle's skyline. Sadly, the highly reflective glass prevented good photos from the observation deck. (The Space Needle has an exterior walkway that gives you unfettered access to the city lights.)
After an uneventful dinner in my hotel room and a project video call until 10:30pm, I walked over to Vito's - an Italian restaurant that was hosting Jazz musician Jennifer Kienzie. On my way out of the hotel, my failure to dress like a typical Fairmont Olympic guest became apparently when the doorman wished me a good night as I left. I guess it didn't look like I was coming back!
At Vito's, I ordered a gin and tonic, took out my fountain pen (and promptly blackened the inside of my index finger with Parker's 'Quink') and started writing this post. When the performance finished at around midnight, I attempted to pay for my gin and tonic. Evidently there was some confusion though, because the bartender promptly brought me another gin and tonic. Not wanting to cause a scene, I thanked him and drank the second gin and tonic. Luckily I managed to escape the endless cycle of gin and tonics when attempting to pay a second time and walked home in the near freezing temperatures.
