From: Chris Larson (clarson52@comcast.net)
Date: Fri Apr 02 2004 - 12:50:03 GMT-3
My VistaPrint Electronic Business CardI just thought I would throw out an
experience I had yesterday. It was very unnerving and I wonder if others have
had similiar experiences. I have been in networking for better then 12 years
but only got CCIE certified in the last year. I have had lots of interviews
throughout my carreer, most have had a technical aspect but I never felt
uncomfortable in any of them until yesterday.
Yesterday I walked away from an interview for a consulting position with a
relatively large company that most people would know feeling almost as if I
had been attacked. The interview started with 2 people. The hiring manager and
another technical person. The technical person had some kind of attitude. I
wanted to just stop the interview and tell them that it didn't matter about
the job because there was no way in hell I could work with such an ass of a
person. This guy had an attitude that almost jumps out and rapes you. It
wasn't until later that I found he was in fact a fresh CCIE (not that all or
in fact any fresh CCIE's are that way, most I have met are not), but it might
explain his attitude and his ability to remember all the details of those
things you might need to know to pass the CCIE but have little relevance in
the day to day operations or design of a network and certainly the type of
things that don't require memory retention for immediate retrival. Most were
the type of things that you can get from the router or lookup on CCO if you
need to or would get down to using the ? key.
Anyway.... As the interview or "interogation" proceeded, 4 other network guys
came into the room. The focus of the entire interview was not my past
experiences at all. I was not asked one question about my past experiences or
the successes listed on my resume. NOT ONE. That is how almost every interview
I have been in starts. Kind of an organizational fit, "what have you been
doing lately" type of thing. Not this interview. From the very start it was 2
hours of trying to put me back through the CCIE. It was the most ridiculous
thing I have ever been through. It was at times unprofessional and rude. It
was very surprising coming from a company with such a reputation. A couple of
times the newly minted CCIE guy would make some snide remark or hmph or
whatever. I really can't believe they perform interviews that way or even let
guy like that in the interview. I would think it would turn anyone away from a
job if they had to be working with that guy.
The fact that I could not write out a full ios config for VPN on the
whiteboard or confused some of the ios crypto command syntax with the pix vpn
command syntax and totally forgot about transform sets or that I could not
recall where exactly a type 4 lsa was generated off the top my head in front
of a whiteboard in the middle of an interview was more important then the fact
that I had successfully rolled out several large VPN implementations, had lead
several large OSPF integrations and had successes and references to back it up
going back 12 years.
I also was never asked if I had any questions about the job or the work
environment. I was never asked if I had any questions at all. I can't
immediatly recall any interview I have ever been in that lasted any reasonable
amount of time where I was not asked if there were any questions I had. This
interview, if you could call it that, lasted 2 hours and I was never asked if
I had any questions for them.....about the company, about the job nothing.
It was just very wierd and unprofessional and didn't really seem to have
anything to do with interviewing a job.
After, I called the guy who set me up with the interview and he said that the
response was that I was strong in some areas and weak in others but they all
agreed I could do the task. I really don't understand how they arrived at that
conclusion. I don't think I would take the job unless the actual job location
is somewhere esle. It was a very unpleasant experience.
No point to this really. I just have never really experienced anything quite
like that and wanted to tell the story. I have to believe it did have
something to do with having the CCIE. In fact, toward the end of the interview
techy ass guy said something to the effect of "so you claim to be a big Cisco
guy, you even have the CCIE logo". I was so tired of this guy. My response was
"no I don't think I claim to be some big Cisco guy, why? Did I say that
somewhere in my resume". Well, I guess sometimes you have to interview to know
where you dont want to work.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Mon May 03 2004 - 19:48:41 GMT-3