The GovTech Experience

Late last year, I went through a delightfully different recruitment experience.

Someone from HackerTrail called me up and asked if I was interested in a position in GovTech. For some background, GovTech is a Singapore Government agency that deals with software, internet infrastructure, cybersecurity and all that good stuff. It's a restructuring of the former Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA).

I was under contract to another firm (and still am!) and when you're in that kind of position, you simply don't say no to an opening like that. Besides, all HackerTrail asked me to do was take one of those online coding tests.

And, you know, I absolutely love that shit. When I have time, I actually do these for fun. And now I get to have an interview opportunity if I pass?! Son, you had me at Hello World.

Stage One

The test took three hours and it was by no means easy. The coding problems were certainly straightforward enough, and since my Apache server happened to be up, I did all of it in PHP. The first few tests ran beautifully, but my solutions probably failed on efficiency. Still, I documented my code, submitted and put it out of my mind. I probably wouldn't get called up, I reasoned; any serious algorithms practitioner could do better.

Online coding problems.

To my surprise, a few days later, HackerTrail called again and informed me that I'd been selected for a recruitment event at GovTech next week.

Wow. A recruitment event. With a table of events, opening speech and everything. It would begin at 3PM and last until evening. Stage Two would start around 3:45PM after an opening speech. This would be followed by a catered dinner and networking, and Stage Three at 7PM.

At this point, I was under no illusions that my code had been exceptional or anything. In fact, considering I hadn't heard of this event until now, one week before it was scheduled to begin, I suspected that attendance was low and I'd simply been drafted to make up the numbers. Still, other than half a day's leave, what did I really have to lose? It was a job opportunity that looked worth exploring.

Also, I liked the way they hooked me with an online coding test first. It may not have been guaranteed to bring in the finest minds, but if they had intended it to attract people who actually liked doing this, well, that was pretty damn clever. And the fact that the coding test had not been stack-specific, was a bonus. Some companies want to hire for a particular technical stack only, a practice which I consider really short-sighted. It suggested to me that GovTech was hiring based on foundational skill rather than experience in any particular language, and in my opinion that's the right way to go.

I should also mention that HackerTrail offered all candidates a 20SGD Grab Voucher for the specific destination and time of the event. Nice. These guys were covering all the bases. They must have really wanted attendees bad.

The event begins...

The day arrived and at 2:30PM, I was having a leisurely drink at a nearby cafe. The HackerTrail representative actually called to ensure that I was on my way. I'll be damned, these guys seemed even more anxious about attendance than I was.

At 2:45PM, I made my way to the lobby of the Sandcrawler Building that housed the GovTech headquarters. There, I was brought up the office to register my attendance, where I was issued a pass for the evening and told to enter my particulars in an online form.

Now, my opinion on the ultra-lame practice of filling in forms at an interview has been well-documented (or perhaps I should elaborate even more at a later date) and while their online form was well-designed, this only served to make the experience only slightly less lame. At the risk of coming off as arrogant, I didn't apply for this. They invited me. And now they wanted to act like they didn't already have my particulars? Something seemed a little off here.

The candidates took their seats. There were maybe forty of us. Later in the evening, someone told me that over a hundred online profiles had been shortlisted for suitability and invited for Stage One. Apparently, only forty of us had passed. The others had somehow failed, or more likely, hadn't even bothered.

Sweet! A ping-pong table!

Decor was pretty nice, though. Just the right mount of casualness (non-matching couches, funky fonts on the walls) to give off a hip and comfy vibe. Even had a ping-pong table! Not that I actually play ping-pong, but still.

Stage Two

After an opening speech which, if I'm going to be honest, wasn't particularly interesting and I didn't pay a lot of attention to, we were split into groups of four. Each group was sent to a room where we introduced ourselves to each other. Guy A was a Ruby On Rails dev, and sounded Filipino. Guy B was a DevOps type dude who used Docker. Guy C had an Indonesian accent and called himself a "full-stack .NET developer".

A group of
random devs.

And then there was me. No special labels to speak of.

We were set a project that was to be completed within ninety minutes - an impossibility in itself considering the scope - and graded on our cohesion, presentation and problem-solving approach, all under a tight deadline. Guy A pretty much took charge and broke the project down into tasks so we could each do stuff. Halfway through, I realized that my Git wasn't working, and contented myself by being totally useless acting like some glorified Project Lead and trimming the list of User Stories down to size.

Not my finest moment, to be honest.

Then again, I'm not sure any of us really covered ourselves in glory here. Guy A handled the database schema, Guy B failed to get Docker running, and Guy C pretty much hard-coded the front-end. As a team, we were an absolute failure.

Dinner And Networking

Then it was time for dinner. And let me just say the buffet spread catered for this event was more than just decent. It was smashing. Fish, seafood, huge chunks of roast chicken, dessert. GovTech certainly wasn't holding back.

Fancy.

It was at this time I took a look at the door gift that the reception area had given me upon registration. Oh, wow. A wireless mobile charge with the GovTech logo on it! Too bad my mobile phone was an older model. That aside, this was pretty cool.

There weren't enough assessors to conduct Stage Three for everyone at once, so some of us had to wait. As we waited for Stage Three, we got to talking. Like me, everyone here had been headhunted by HackerTrail. We started discussing, like a bunch of programming geeks, how each of us had solved the coding questions in Stage One. Surprise, surprise - just about everyone else had gotten similar results. No one I spoke to got a 100% score, or even a 50% score. This made me feel a little more optimistic about my chances.

Stage Three

I was ushered into a room with a HR Representative, who told me that we were waiting for an engineer to arrive. She looked tired. "Long day?" I ventured sympathetically, and she exhaled in affirmation.

The engineer tasked to assess me presented me with a pair programming exercise - and to my surprise, they reused the same coding question I had been posed in Stage One. The coding problem had been modified slightly so that I could reuse my earlier code to solve the problem with the updated specs. Only, this time, I was using a borrowed Mac from my ex-boss and didn't have Apache server installed, so I couldn't reuse my old code. The engineer was pretty nice about it and even offered to let me download the software onto his Mac, but seriously, it was just code. I could do it in vanilla JavaScript just fine.

Pair programming.

To heck with it, I just redid the whole thing and modified the code on the fly. Sure, my code wasn't up and running by the time limit, but he hopefully got a good grasp of my thinking process.

The engineer looked kind of tired too. I wondered aloud just how many times he'd had to walk through the same damn coding problem today, and he responded with a chuckle.

Finally, the representative from HR and the engineer sat down with me for some good old Q and A. It was the very standard "tell me about yourself" and "why do you want to join GovTech" shtick. The engineer asked me about a few projects I'd worked on in my spare time, and gave me the opportunity to brag. I have to give this guy props; he understood the dev mindset very well.

I was then given a chance to ask them some questions of my own. I'd actually prepared a few over dinner, many of which were applicable either to HR or co-workers. To their credit, they answered in adequate depth and detail and with little hesitation. I wasn't really looking at the answers themselves - I'd probably find them out myself in due course - but rather how they answered them. Did they appear confident? Evasive? If by some miracle I managed to get in, what kind of people would I be working with?

Aftermath

Finally, it was done. I shook their hands, filled up the goddamn exit questionnaire, and left. The time was 10PM. The entire recruitment process had taken seven hours. Exhausting yes, but I suspect it was worse for the event organizers.

Two weeks passed. No one from either GovTech or HackerTrail got back to me, and I have to confess here - I'm disappointed.

I'm disappointed not because they didn't want to hire me. Expecting them to choose me out of forty talented candidates would be a tall order. My ego isn't that big.

But Christ... would it have been too much to send a polite mass email to the ones who didn't make the cut? It's not like I expect this from interviewing companies normally; but the amount of work GovTech had put into the recruitment effort had let me to believe that their rejection efforts would meet the same standard.

Someone dropped the ball there. It's a blot on what was otherwise an amazing experience.

Final thoughts

No regrets. It had been fun. I was there, done that, got the t-shirt (in this case, it was a wireless mobile charger) and I had an interesting tale to tell my friends and colleagues.

I saw this on the GovTech blog.

Show us some code - open source contributions, side projects and school projects.

Since my tech skills aren't anything spectacular, I can only surmise that I was selected due to my online presence, which includes my GitHub repositories and website. And it's always nice to know the work I put into those, paid off.

Another nice thing was that I told my colleagues about what I went through, and they were not only happy for me that I got the opportunity to experience it, they didn't use this as a stick to beat me with or a knife to stab me in the back with. See what I mean about contractors? We stick together.

The fact that I gave them the wireless mobile charger to use, probably didn't hurt.

Ah, well. Another day, another opportunity!

The path of true Gov never did run smooth...
T___T