Vancouver

I just spent the week-end in Vancouver.

Vancouver is a little gem just waiting to be discovered. At about just 2.2 million people in its metro area, you'd think Vancouver would be a forest with a few people shacking up here and there, totally outnumbered by moose. Not so. For it's size, that city packs quite an urban punch.

The downtown core is densely populated and full of high-rise condo towers. The city has a light-rail system in place along with buses and commuter boats. The population is as cosmopolitan as it gets. People actually have a sense of fashion here, contrarily to what I had been told.

You can actually go to the bookstore at 21:40 or get dinner past midnight. Little, basic stuff like this which characterizes decent cities is not something I get at the moment in Seattle.

Being in Vancouver reminded me of what a city should be: dynamic and active. That's when I fully realized how unhappy I am in Seattle. That's when I took my decision to leave Seattle.

Then, I was faced with a difficult decision: what to do next? Should I apply for jobs in cool US cities like NYC and San Fran? Should I apply for jobs in nice cities in Canada like Vancouver and Toronto? Should I go back to Montreal? Should I apply for jobs on other continents? Should I just fuck it all and go around the world?

Sylvia possibly will have a job offer in the Seattle area because she met me. I couldn't have lived with myself if she had come to Seattle for me (even partly) and I had left right after. I also couldn't let Sylvia make her career and life decisions based on me as I'm at such an unpredictable juncture in my life right now that all bets are off as to where I'll end up in the next few months. So, we broke up. It was hard, but it's surely the wisest thing to do. Odds are we would have ended up being a long-distance couple otherwise and neither of us wanted that.

The morning after the break-up, I had an interview with Microsoft that was supposed to last the whole day. Microsoft are the ones who paid for my trip to Vancouver as this is where the interview was taking place. They were interviewing a bunch of Canadians for jobs in Seattle.

Maybe my decision to leave Seattle, the break-up and all its implications made me have a lousy night of sleep, but I had difficulties getting up (the truth is, I always do) and I arrived 5 minutes late for the interview. It got noticed and I got a comment on that. How can people actually be punctual at 8 in the morning anyway? At any rate, the interview process started. I was to meet four technical people and an HR person.

The first person I talked to is a software design engineer director. There was some chit-chat before the technical questions were thrown in. That chit-chat somehow led me to compare the quantity of crackheads in Vancouver versus that of Seattle; the fact that I now work for Amazon and my current salary there. Then, he asked me how I would proceed to read variable-length application messages from a TCP socket. I answered not so badly, but really not that greatly either. The question was not difficult, I just wasn't "in it" at that point. He also asked me what kind of processor instructions I could use to implement multi-processor memory access synchronization. I got to admit that this question was a bit heavy for me at 8:30 in the morning.

So, when came the time to see the second interviewer, she told me some jive about how Microsoft has a "hands off" policy towards new Amazon employees and that since I've been working for Amazon for less than six months, they can't hire me. I think they just didn't want to bother with me given the combination of my salary and my lackluster performance with the first interviewer. I was free to go to back to bed.