Meebo Interview

Meebo Me!

So there's all this talk about some student at University of West Florida got an interview ticket with Meebo. Meebo is the wannabe Trillian but online website that allows you to connect to multiple IM clients at once. The idea isn't astounding, its just an implmentation done over the web. Interestingly, a computer science student at UWF actually implmented a C program that connected and login'ed a Yahoo user. So in that end, it's not unique nor difficult. It's just a matter of following the protocol that the other IMs use and implement it.

So in any event, let's go on to the interview dilemma with Meebo. Firstly, they tell you to answer their puzzles on their site and then to submit them with your resume in an email. If successful with the puzzles, a technical recruiter will grill you with questions you should already know if you were able to answer the puzzles on your own. In fact, Meebo gets many applications from students from Stanford and Pacific University, and so someone from UWF needs to stand out and show some passion, enthusiasm, as well as past projects and goals. There is a higher expectation because UWF is a smaller school, and the applicant needs to show he's got what it takes in the interview process with Meebo. THe technical recruiter, as far as I know, is very judgmental and bases his judgment on mere appearances without due regard to the facts of answering the questions. More on past projects and goals (3-5 yr range) than actually answering the questions. This is true because Meebo is trying to expand; however, the technical recruiter's knowledge is minimal and so it's easy to come up with things that are false but believable.

The only thing I have found that is against Meebo is their democracy in regards to students from schools that aren't as prestigious as Stanford University. There is almost a willingness to not even look at those students that are applying. This is truly unfair. Not all students coming out of Stanford University have passion, though they do have project they are working on. Projects don't make passion, though from a simplistic, dummed-down, amateruish point of view, it would imply that they do have passion because they are actually working on something. However, these are mere appearances, and you'd at least expect someone whose job is to inspect and detect what things motivate, inspirate, and creates passion in college graduates would be something more than "Are you working on current projects?" It's solely based on what is happenin now. Students are busy especially in their last semester, and what type of question is that anyways? There is no assessment in the past or even a consideration in their academic studies. Possibly, the technical recruiter really doesn't care that he finds someone suitable. And the fact that Meebo is trying to "double" their engineers in the year 2007, it doesn't seem that they'll be doing that with these types of bogus technical recruiters :)

The expectations from someone representing Meebo were weak and therefore, the Meebo experience wasn't worth as much a the UWF student thought it would be., despite the fact that the technical recruiter wasn't keen on how to judge applicants fairly.