Shanghai Tech Writer

When I received the call for the first on-site interview, I hadn’t done my “homework” so I didn’t know that it was going to be a written exam. It was a good thing because I wouldn’t have been prepared for a real interview anyway (later found out that NI does behavioral interviews which I’ll write more about in another post).

It was my first visit to the company and I took a taxi there from school. It took only 3 minutes! Upon arriving, I was greeted and taken to a room for the written exam. I was surprised but relieved at the same time since written “interviews” are less intimidating and probably a better assessment of my writing skills. In China, many people put down they are fluent in English on their resume. I’ve done my share of reviewing resumes and interviewing people, and their idea of fluency is something like “I speak English fluent.”

Anyway, there were three parts to the written exam:

Part 1: Essay - I was given a piece of paper, a pen, and I think 25 minutes to write an essay on one of two topics. The first topic was something along the line of writing about something I learned that excited me. I can’t remember the details but the idea was to explain what and why it was exciting and how I proceeded to learn more about the subject. The second topic was to write about a software that I liked and to explain what the software is for and why I liked it. I wrote an essay that met both topics! It was about learning an object-oriented programming tool (Squeak) that was so easy to use/learn that I taught an afterschool programming class to some of the elementary school students at my school. The hard part was writing an essay with pen and paper! I can’t remember when was the last time I actually picked up a pen to write. I’ve always done my homework on computer since grade school so I didn’t exactly have the best handwriting. I turned in an essay with a bunch of scribbles and cross-outs.

Part 2: Editing - I was given several pages taken (out of context!) from a documentation and 40 minutes to edit it. This was really hard! Because the pages were taken out of context, I had no idea what they were writing about. It was a bunch of technical jargon — diagrams about circuits and connectors, explanations about them, and instructions on installation. I was thinking in my mind — yuck, what am I supposed to do?! Anyway, I guess it wasn’t important whether I understood the technical jargon or not. They wanted to see whether I could follow the logic and make grammatical and logical edits. I’m not sure whether those pages were actual drafts written by technical writers or they purposefully jumbled it up for testing purposes. I found a lot of errors (grammatical and logical) and made a bunch of markups. At the end, I felt confidentand was wandering how in the world any non-native English speakers would be able to do well on this exam. The local Chinese might have excellent grammar, but trying to understand the jargon gets in the way of following the logic behind it.

Part 3: Editing 2 — I was given back my essay from part 1, a red pen, and I think 20 minutes to edit my own essay. That wasn’t too bad. I knew I made a bunch of errors because I didn’t have much time to write or the luxury of using word processor to rearrange my thoughts I made a bunch of edits with the red pen and turned in something that looked like World War II on paper. I was not too proud of my horrendous handwriting and markups. I just hoped that whoever is reviewing them could read my handwriting.

That was the end of the first on-site “interview” and I was given some taxi vouchers to compensate for my trip. I was impressed by that gesture since I lived so close. The little things they do tell a lot about a company.

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