One Missing File

When undergoing the tech job interview process, sometimes it's the little things that trip you up. This is an amusing (and hopefully educational!) tale of one such incident.

I received a phone call from a tech company (which shall remain unnamed) and what would you know, I forgot that why I had even applied for the job and when. Somehow I recovered from that boo-boo and managed to have a coherent conversation with my phone interviewer about all things tech. The interview concluded with the interviewer telling me that she would get back to me after processing our conversation with her team.

A few days later, I received an email which contained a PDF - specifications for the code test I needed to pass in order to progress in the job application. After taking a gander, I was blown away. Now this was a fun one. Instead of asking me to answer a series of technical questions that made me feel like I was studying for an exam, this tech company wanted me to create a simple web application using no frameworks and libraries. For me, this meant HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript.

So the weekend arrived, and I spent most of it coding. I gave it my best. Proper indentation, proper spacing, clean code, code test coverage. Made sure the solution fit the specifications as stated. Tested the solution on multiple browsers and screen sizes. At the end of it, I even wrote a ReadMe file.

No zip files allowed!

GMail flatly refused to allow me to attach a zip file, thus I uploaded everything to a GitHub repository and sent them the link. They replied by politely asking me to set the repository to Private after downloading my code, and I acquiesced.

One week later...

I received an email from those guys informing me that "we have decided not to move forward with your application", which in layman's speak, simply meant that I had failed this round.

No matter. I asked them; since my code was presumably not up to their standards anyway, would they mind if I continued my work on the web app and reset the repository to Public? Their response was to ask me to continue setting the repository to Private.

Now this befuddled me. Ostensibly, they had originally asked me to set the repository to Private so that other candidates they might be evaluating did not copy off my work. But now that I'd failed, why did it matter if anyone copied my work? They would be copying something that wasn't up to the mark, after all.

I obsessed over this, going through my code and trying to figure out where it was lacking. I even added my ex-boss as a collaborator and asked him to help review it. And he pointed out something that caused me to facepalm.

Oh, FFS.

I was missing one file. Not just any file. I was missing index.html! I'd checked my solution before uploading but somehow neglected to re-check after uploading.

Oh, FSS. Of all the stupid mistakes I could have made...

As errors go, this was really elementary and I was horribly embarrassed. I probably will never speak of this again, but at least it makes for a good story.

The takeaway from all this

Don't get carried away by enthusiasm. Maintain a healthy amount of detachment, because if you're too close to the issue, chances are you're going to miss something that will be glaringly obvious in hindsight.

Stay hungry, stay foolish. But not too foolish!
T___T