Interview Dream

I just woke up from a crystal clear dream, a job interview. When I was scrolling Facebook, a message popping up at the bottom right of the screen, asking for whether I’m ready for the interview now. It was like 5pm evening, the sun was starting orangish. The interviewer wasn’t the HR, it was like someone who are high jabatan, maybe the CEO itself. He looked like a chinese singaporean, but also understand to speak Indonesian. I clicked the video call accept button on my phone, didn’t have enough time to dress up, so I use my current grey T-shirt and sit on my chair.

The interview started really well. They didn’t bother to ask me to do leetcode problems, they said they are prefer an actual coding skills by portfolio and projects. As the time passes, I completely stomped the interview. They look like stunned by my skills and confidence. They were telling stories how they developed their software right now, and it turned out that their code is monolithic and a very legacy type of code. Slow and hard to maintain. I told them I’m specialized in migrating and rewriting services to make it better, “you can check my blog, there’s a write up how I migrated my company’s service to save a bunch of costs.” and I continued to suggest how they can make a better software. He’s not alone, I think he was with his assistant or something like that, sounds like a woman. After a long discussion, they asked my salary expectation. I answered it with confident: “I can make your company much much much better with my skills, what is your best engineer salary?” I asked. He answered around 10k SGD a month. “That’s quite high, for my salary, I think you can lower it a bit.”

They move back a bit for a private discussion, but I can still hear their voices in the background arguing how much they should pay me. I continue to eavesdrop. Finally, the woman in the background mentioned a number, “60 million to 70 million.” They used the Indonesian Rupiah which equivalent to 5k SGD—standard salary for living in Singapore. When I hear that, I jumped out of my chair really happy that there are actually people who appreciate my skills, unlike Indonesian companies who always lowballing and never wanted to pay much for an engineer at any level. And while they still discussing in the background, I shouted “YES YES, 60 million to 70 million sounds good.” forgetting that they actually not in the phone.

They talked like I’m accepted already.

And I woke up.