crazybobbles

Right kids, like the one for IBM, theres going to be some good and proper detail in this entry.

Rightio, lets start with the morning, woke up around 6.40am, feel ok, had a cereal and got prepared, suit and all, wore a white french connections shirt, a YSL suit and some cool ted baker shoes i got for £15 last night. All ready to go and all, brought all the details for the company with me and well prepared for questions like how was the company set up (though you seriously dont get them sort of crap questions during interviews).

7.00am
Rode the train all the way to St Pauls, took the District line to Embankment, then went to TCR via Northern line, then St Pauls via Central line, alot of lines but to be honest there are alot of ways to get there, you could even get there from Blackfriers. Anyhow, long story short, travel was quite a breeeeze.

8am

Yup, I’m one hour early, I head to the building and BAM! FUCK ME! Quite a sight et all. Not what I expected. The floor is made complete out of marble, theres a HUGE fuck off PLASMA screen near the recpetion area and the building is filled with guards and all.

As i enter the building i get asked by the security guards what I’m doing and they directed me to the reception where i told them I’m here for an interview, she had a few calls and directed me to the waiting room (small dingey room where people sit in? not this one :p) I also got a visitors pass, obvious reasons

Just some health and safety crap

Visitor pass that you have to wave over the rooms and all, like Oyster card!

The table at the waiting room

Feet

The room itself, massive

8.20am
Slowly the other kids turn up for the interview, first one up was Sonia, she was alright, talked for a while about the interview and what we were studying, she’s the only girl at the interview and also the only one who’s not from Kingston. Twas her first interview so hopefully that makes it 3 people to compete with :p.

8.40am
After some chit chat the others slowly arrive, we all sit around and chat until the main guy turns up, Iain Hume. He introduces us to the shit and off we go.

9am
We have a quick snack and get briefed a bit about the day, they served Merrill Lynch branded water, was quite sleazy actually. The day begins with 2 tests (from a company called SHL, and when I did it online, it was beyond hard, this one was alot easier), and interview.

9.30am
The tests were easy, just some facts and figures and jsut working them out to find the right answer. The verbal reasoning one was alright too, I prefered that more as its just reading text and highlighting what is there and what isnt, i managed to finsih that one, i didnt finish the numeracy one. I did reasonable well so I’m quite please

10am
Afterwards was a short toilet break, i noticed how the toilets werent as snazzy as the one at IBM with the motion sensored towel dispenser but nevertheless, it was pretty amazing.

10.10am
After the toilet break we did the interviews, two intervierws for each intervieweee. Twas quite mad as you dont know who to look at. I was second in line for the interview so it was a bit mad. During that time i took some photos of the workoffice place. I’ll go into more detail about that bit later.
Some pics of the office



Another thing to point out are the branded bottles they get, all branded with the Merrill Lynch logo, really classy.

Take them, we’ve got lots where that came from

Logos on bottles, *shakes head*

11am
Anyhows, back to the interview, when it was my turn i tried to do the whole thing in style, just be relaxed and informative. I answered all the questions pretty well and gave them some very odd questions such as “has anyone stripped butt naked and slid around the marble floors?”, apparently noone has ever done that as theres CCTV cammeras all about :p.

12am
After the interview we did another test, this was to simply test your skill, programming skills and all, it had 3 sections, Databases, Programming and Web Design. I rocked on all of them :p, i know my shit hehe.

1pm
Afterwards was lunch, they served sandwiches, I sat on the table where the sandwiches had meat in them, the others got vegeterian ones, twas yummy. I also had a banana and some orange juice. After some general chit chat we managed to get a tour of the place. Now like i said, this place is mad! They spend ridiculous amounts of money on things such as the Plasma screen (which costs £1 million!!!).

Here are some photos

Yup the place has escalators, not super snazzy, but still, a bit snazzy :p

This place is hard to explain, but its some place

This is where all the public conference stuff are done

Yup they have a gym in the building, £30 a month so not bad at all

Roof was NICE, going to be lovely in the summer, just go outside and eat The building has 6 floors

The conference room, that table is mad, theres little holes where people can shove their laptops in and display it on the big screeen. The table costs £16,000! And thats just the top bit (some fine quality wood).

Other places they showed that i didnt take photos of was the place where we’d work, LOTS OF TFT MONITORS, at that place the number of TFT monitors was like the size of your penis, people had 6 tft monitors working in just one desk, it was mad. Its all the hardcore stock stuff lie though so you’d expect that i guess.

2pm
The tour ended in some nice hand shakage and the winner will be contacted within 5 days. Hope to god I get the job :p hehe.