From: amilabs (amilabs@optonline.net)
Date: Fri Apr 02 2004 - 14:22:36 GMT-3
Chris, what happened to you is the classic gang bang interview. These
guys are just full of themselves and are very insecure. Could you
imagine the day to day pettiness that you would be involved in if you
came aboard?? I have been in the business for 20 years and consulting
for the last 10. I took the IE lab once and have 10 years of solid Cisco
experience, with documentable case studies and examples of my work. I
agree you cannot remember every little thing. One little tip to avoid
such situations in the future I have learned is that for consulting gigs
try or be adamant about having a phone interview first before going to
visit them.
If you are not starving, request a phone interview or you will just take
a pass. That way with the phone interview you can quickly determine if
by the questioning et. al. if this is a fit. This way you don't waste
your time or theirs. Any company not "flexible" enough to just do a
phone interview first should send up a red flag... I have been grilled
on the phone before, and passed, but I turned down the gig because the
guy on the phone was just, well, you know.... Sometimes they conference
everybody in and ask all the questions but at least on the phone after a
couple of minutes you discover that this is not for you can gracefully
bow out and leave it at that without having to go through their games in
person. Sometimes these companies try to get "free" advice by having you
come in and "whiteboard" their current "problem" then they go from there
without ever having the intention to hire anybody. I recall an
opportunity for like over $150 an hour for a governmental agency in NC
back in 01. They wanted me to fly down and do sniffer traces of their
problem and give them the feed back. This was the test all candidates
were going through. I said no and requested a phone interview first. The
guy on the phone was not a ccie but he was an old school lifer. Meaning
he has lived on his network for the last, god knows, 20 years. He was
grilling me on all the Cisco and older protocols they had. This shop had
everything, old and new stuff. I hung in there with him without too
much of a problem. I passed and they wanted me to come down to meet
everybody. I agreed to only meet with his boss and no stupid sniffer
test to fix their problem. They agreed. But by that time a local gig for
more money came about and I took that one.
Usually, from my experience, the banks and brokerage firms are to snobby
to have the phone interview and request you come in person. I always
pass on those. I have learned that they are not worth it. Now, another
reason they treated you like this was maybe they got burned in the past
by a bad hire, but most of the time that is not the case. Another reason
for that approach they used on you is that their manager is weak,
meaning he is so scared of making a bad hiring decision that he is
making everybody under him double and triple check every little thing
for each candidate. This is a red flag too.
Always request a phone interview first for sometimes you would have
been selected for a position that has nothing to do with what you do and
the recruiters are all mixed up. A 5 min conversation on the phone can
save an entire days time for an interview.
Good for you that you passed and good luck on your search...
Thanks for sharing you experience with us..
-----Original Message-----
From: nobody@groupstudy.com [mailto:nobody@groupstudy.com] On Behalf Of
Chris Larson
Sent: Friday, April 02, 2004 10:50 AM
To: ccielab@groupstudy.com
Subject: Bad Interview Experience
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.
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