I had a really excellent interview with a startup bank recently and was excited by what they were doing – but ultimately I ended up declining the opportunity and deciding to walk away…
I made them a good perm offer with a generous reduction in earnings compared to my contract rate. But we couldn’t agree on a 4 day working week. My justification – I needed the 5th day to continue my counselling training and work experience in the local primary school.
But not really in any altruistic manner.
Simply, I felt the exposure and skills developed on that 5th day would help me better perform during the other 4 days in an Analyst / Developer role. I also learnt that I felt strongly enough that the 5th day was a core channel for my own further professional development. So I made the judgement call that by giving up that 5th day, they and me would overall be poorer for it.
I don’t necessarily believe they understand my motives for doing this, as a software engineer retraining to be a counsellor is a bit of an unusual thing to come across in potential employees.
Thanks anyway for your time Clear.Bank, it was a good initial experience and I felt fairly treated and welcomed. You also affirmed that my tech skills are now good enough to pass a decent technical interview (proving to me that my C# ASP.Net MVC SQL technical upskilling over the last 6 months has finally ‘come of age’).
Hopefully, we can still work together in the future, perhaps in some other way.
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Frank Ray & Associates is a software engineering consultancy that builds high quality software for businesses. |