Mail team (2000-2004)

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Interviewing

Sometime in the summer of 2000, I interviewed with the Mail team.

I never intended to work in software engineering but I desperately wanted to work on Mac OS X, which was working on releasing the Public Beta within a few months. So a bunch of interviews with the Mail team.

The short summary is I sweated and laughed a lot. I alternated between being certain I was getting the job to being sure I wasn’t.

My most intimidating interview was with Scott Forstall, who was then was the head of applications and frameworks and the manager of the Mail team reported to him. This is what the entire interview was like:

Scott: It’s your first day in your new job, what are you going to do?
Me: Uh, let me make up some stuff on the fly while I sweat and write things on the whiteboard
Scott (expressionless and not acknowledging what I said): Ok, then what would you do?
Me: See above
Scott: See above

What made it extra fun was that the job descr…