To BEA or not to BEA, that's the question

Yesterday I really used Google Streets for the first time. It turns out to be pretty convenient to look for a particular building after Google Maps show its approximate location. And the BEA office stands in one hell of a location – next to the Transamerica Pyramid with a terrific view of Telegraph Hill. Close to BART too. From what I heard most of their core engineering stuff is based in that building – from the telco team all the way to the WLS one.

Well, four interviewers in three hours seem impressive .. at first glance. Although the first three guys were engineers we mostly chatted about Parlay, telco middleware and so on. Turns out most of them are from Scandinavia and have been with the product (used to be a Parlay framework) for years. Extremely nice folks and you do not even have to explain them what JAIN or OSA is. Totally cool.

One technical question was asked though – to implement on the white board a thread-safe counter (from MIN to MAX) with two operations (naturally, increment/decrement). Fresh from my studies I was drawing something semaphore-like based on a reentrant lock and two conditions but was politely ask to stick to plain old Java :)

I had a discussion with the hiring manager (did his GC with BEA after an H1 transfer that annulled his previous GC attempt) concerning my GC situation. Frankly, I am surprised they are unwilling to hire me as an H1 consultant, after all pretty much everyone does it out there. I mean surely enough they are BEA but there must be some exceptions, especially if it is not the money which is a real show-stopper and not everyone from jNetX is on the market yet :) If he decides they can accept a full-time person only I am in trouble.

I want to work with them so badly (telco, networking, multithreading, decent QA) but making a visa transfer being already in AOS (in a pretty good company) is sheer madness. I would work Saturdays and ask for a noticeable salary decrease just to join them as a consultant. I might ask my present employer to let me go and pay for my GC process completion (I would shell out 50K annually without a second thought) but something tells me things are more complicated out there. Anyway, I promised to return in a year with a GC if this deal does not come through this time :)

An obvious conclusion – jNetX is stunningly cool [on the world scale] and the only reason to leave it is going abroad [to join a competitor]. And you financial folks in London - I am green with envy in respect of your employer-independent visas :)