My Career Journey: Graduating

When I graduated university, it was around the dotcom bust - 2001. Things went from “awesome, we’d love to have you on-board” for any tech company for any to “sorry, we’re not even taking interns”.

It was bad to be just graduating tech.

Fortunately, I had two other opportunities in my pocket.

• One was Apple, who I created great impression and contacts from my time interning at Sony.
• The other was Sony, who I had an extended internship during my final year.

Just to give perspective at the time.

• Apple just had Steve Jobs return and Mac OS X was the hot thing. This is pre-iPod Apple and there was a lot of uncertainty what would happen to the company.

• Sony was a totally different place - with PlayStation 2 just rocking the gaming world and they could do no wrong. Everything they did was certain.

What would you choose? Why??

I went with Sony at the time - for three reasons

One - I bombed the Apple interview bad. I didn’t even know what I was walking into. The whole “tech interview” was not even a thing I even heard about. 🤦

Second - Apple HR in my interview was absolutely amazing. I knew I didn’t get the job within the first interview round and here Apple HR was still here with me at the end of the day. They helped me get closure, which I didn’t even know I needed at the time, and find out what I really wanted for my job: Sony.

Third - once I knew I wanted to go back to Sony, I spent 36hrs traveling to be in Tokyo for 24hrs for a 2 hour interview.

When the heart knows what it wants, don’t get in the way - it will happen so fast that your head will spin.