People sometimes say very odd things in job interviews. I really can't say anything more without violating confidentiality six ways from Sunday, but I am changing my opinion of the interview process a bit. I used to figure that certain questions were pointless to ask because everybody knows how they're supposed to answer them - but now I'm not so sure.

Though it always seems to be my co-workers who get the off-the-wall stuff. People are very well-behaved with me. Maybe I need to ask tougher questions.

I also find it interesting that although I've been very careful to give my contact info to every candidate we've interviewed, I have yet to receive a single post-interview thank-you note. I'm not about to hold this against anyone, since I can remember what an incredible chore it was to create seven distinct sincere-sounding thank-you letters after I interviewed at my company. I'm just surprised, because virtually every book I've ever read on how to get a job and every career counsellor I've ever talked to are unanimous - failing to write a thank you note is a breach of etiquette, and it can cost you the job. Given such unanimity of professional opinion, I'd expect more people to do it.

Daniel pointed out to me that most people getting interviewed for a job have probably never read a book about how to do it.

"But that's ridiculous!" I protested. "How could you possibly attempt to do anything that important without reading about it first?"

Spoken like a true tech writer, eh?

So, speaking of things one doesn't tell one's co-workers: I've always had a semi-official policy of hiding the fact that I write fiction from the people I deal with in my day job. Or, not so much hiding as not going out of my way to reveal. After all, I don't use a pseudonym, and anybody who googles me is very quickly going to come across references to my fiction work.

Keeping quiet about my writing was very clearly a good survival tactic when I was in graduate school. Grad students at UC Berkeley (like grad students at most places) have a rich samizdat tradition of grad student humor - pictures of professors' faces Photoshopped into stills from Star Wars and The Matrix, parody articles examining the effects of beer consumption on post-doc productivity, and so on. Whenever my advisor would come across one of these gems, he would loudly announce, "I know that none of my graduate students were involved in making this; they're all too busy working." So, I knew that if I told my advisor I wrote fiction, I'd be under constant suspicion for slacking, and he would never believe that I was serious about a career in research science.

Of course, it turned out that I wasn't serious about a career in research science, though it took me most of my grad school career for my advisor and I to figure that out. I did eventually come clean to him about my writing ambitions (when I got into Clarion West), and he's been known to tell people that one of his former students in on her way to becoming the next Ursula LeGuin. (Which would be a bigger compliment if he actually knew the names of any science fiction writers other than LeGuin, but hey, I'll take what I can get.)

So, here I am, happy in my new job. And I'm still kind of reticent about letting people know that I'm a writer. But, we have a new catch, which is that all of my co-workers know that my husband is a writer. (Because, well, he is, and unlike me, he doesn't have a steady day job, and therefore no convenient cover story.) And they all know that he recently published a story in Strange Horizons. And a few of them are actually science fiction readers, and are reading the story. And it feels increasingly strange to have my coworkers asking me with great interest about Daniel's writing, and having them ask questions about the writing biz, and to have people tell me that they've known lots of aspiring fiction writers (or been aspiring fiction writers), but never anyone who actually got something published.

And I'm really not sure if my reticence is serving any useful purpose anymore. But it's a difficult habit to break.