From: Craig Columbus (craig.columbus@columbusconsulting.com)
Date: Sat Apr 03 2004 - 11:24:40 GMT-3
What you have to remember is that an interview, especially for a more
senior position, is a two way process. Take what happened as a HUGE red
warning flag. It's very clear that this company either isn't organized
enough to put the proper people on the interview process or, they simply
don't have the right people to put on the interview process. Either
way, it's clear that this company has organizational and leadership
problems. Unless you're being hired to straighten out the mess (and
since this was a technical interview, I guess not), I'd suggest that you
be grateful that you found out the corporate culture before you accepted
the position.
On a personal note, I've been to a couple of interviews that proceeded
like the one you described. One was particularly frustrating since the
interview was with a fairly small company and the technical interview
panel was composed of the entire IT staff...a bunch of junior technical
staff members and one "senior" technical staff member who was not
particularly knowledgeable. I was interviewing for a newly created
supervisory position and everyone on the panel would have been reporting
to me. Well, the "senior" technical staff member grilled me about
several topics on which he really didn't have a solid grasp. Long story
short, he tried to "correct" me on several things that he simply didn't
understand, including basic IP addressing...an actual quote was "I don't
know what you mean by slash 24...there aren't any slashes in IP
addressing...we use a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 on our network."
Considering that the other staff members thought this guy was brilliant,
I decided that I'd politely decline the position.
-----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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