My phone’s been on the fritz for the past few months it shuts off when it’s charging and every few days it restarts. Last week the hiring manager and I confirmed a time that’d work out for both of us. Since we’re on different time zones ~6-7pm here correlates to 9-10am over there. I told him 6pm (9am his time) works best but he won’t get that email until he goes into work the next day so I’ll just keep 6-7pm open.

5:57pm

Maybe the slight bit nervous but everything should be okay. Phone restarts.

Ohhh man. this better not happen during the interview

6:05 pm

Phone restarts again

6:25 pm

Phone restarts AGAIN! My phone’s never done this before, restarting that frequently in a short time. If I were a bit superstitious…this would be a bad omen for the interview. I’m beginning to wonder if international calls cause my phone to restart.

6:45pm

Looks like the hiring manager had a few issues in the morning and final got to calling ~9:45am his time. The general gist of the job:

A production sequencing plant in the boonies (Tai Po) of Hong Kong. The main HQ of the company is in Shenzhen but they have a secondary plant in HK. The position would service the machines at the secondary plant in HK. Every once in a while we might the call to cross the border to fix a few machines in Shenzhen.

Unlike other typical field service positions that travel a whole lot to different areas, this one just serves a single company. They’re a pretty big customer so we have a dedicated team for their facility. It’s kind of a production style maintenance team. At any given time a percentage of their machines are down for various issues and we service them. When we finish a case, we take the next case. A team of 1 account manager, 2 field service engineers and 2 field application scientists work together. that’d be my team…they’re all in their 30’s.

9-6 job…manager’s from the states so these are typical hours for US workers. Totally abnormal for HK so that’s a pretty nice plus.

Growth wise, this position definitely has less growth compared to a systems engineer or analyst. Field service engineers don’t really progress too rapidly, so the hiring manager cautioned that I’d probably need to look elsewhere to continue my career, given where I want to go and do.

All in all the interview went fairly well. I put my best foot forward and I probably hear back this week whether the team over there wants to hear from me. We’ll see how far this goes!