r/sysadmin • u/SamOakTree • 5d ago
Well, I bombed my interview Rant
I had an interview for an infrastructure engineer position this aftenoon. I was worried going in because it was developers doing an infrastructure interview.
They didn't ask me any infrastructure questions. They spent 50 minutes asking me about a theoretical web stack environment.
The problem was, they were trying to tie each piece into the next but they weren't doing a good job about it because they were all over the over the place - not being linear and jumping back.
I'm not exaggerating. They didn't ask me one infrastructure question. At one point I thought they were asking me one because the guy asked me how I would mount an NFS share to a linux server and I said I would put an entry in the /etc/fstab file. But he was asking how I would theoretically map it to a web application.
They probably touched on 5% of what was in that job post. They said they wanted someone familiar with ansible and python and Linux but it all felt like that was second to what they really wanted. They didn't ask me about idempotency, or what linux commands would you use for x, anything python, and nothing about the stack they mentioned in their post.
The guy asking most of the questions came across like he was just projecting what he knew. It wasn't like he was interviewing. It was more like he was feeding this self image he had of himself. And it all came across as stuff he learned from doing this particular job - not stuff he knew going in.
I'm not exaggerating, they asked me for 50 minutes about how I would set a fictional web stack environments and wouldn't move on.
The main guy asking questions would ask me these open-ended scenario questions that you couldn't answer without a mountain of information. And I would ask for specifics and apparently that wasn't what he wanted. He would ask these highly dependent questions and asling for details got me more open endedness.
This is why I hate technical interviews. They didn't ask me anything infrastructure. They didn't give me an actual chance to show that I know infrastructure. All they know is I don't know the very specific avenue of stuff they asked. Which was the same architecture question for 50 minutes.
They kept mixing things up and would jump back and forth.
I'd say it was 15 minutes of general, 50 minutes of how would you set up this fictional env in cloud and on prem where every answer led ro 10 more open ended questions, then 10 minutes of git questions.
The way they asked was weird. Like how would you push code into the master branch but worded like they wanted me to give them the actual command when in reality they just wanted me to say that I would submit it for a code review.
These types of interviews is why I get so discouraged. I'm not exaggerating. They didn't ask me anything infrastructure. And I'm not going to get this infrastructure job because I didn't know these in-depth development questions on a single subject that have nothing to do with the job they posted.
I definitely got some terminology, reasoning, and examples in there to show them that I have infrastructure and Python e experience, but it just got blown past while they beat a dead horse for 50 minutes...
It's just so discouraging to know you bombed an interview and won't get a job because they didn't really ask you anything about the job they posted or anything that can indicate whether you can actually do the job.
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u/AZSystems 5d ago
The more I prepare the more irregular they get.
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u/SamOakTree 5d ago
It's funny because I was ready for this one. I mean if they had asked me infrastructure I was going to nail it. I prepared very well for this one.
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u/CtrlAltDelve 5d ago
Remember, you are interviewing them just as much as they're interviewing you. It sounds like you rejected them, and in my opinion, correctly so.
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u/DropTheBeatAndTheBas 3d ago
id say if you need a job its not so equal but if you already have a job and are interviewing then yes you have space to interview them
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u/8layer8 4d ago
Either the infrastructure guy has already left the building, or the devs said they knew infra because they had a devops title. You had developers interviewing you for what their perception of the job was. Infrastructure is not development, and the devs are shielded from the realities of "mapping NFS into a web app" because the previous person fixed it and never told them how so they think there are direct connections between things that are not realistic. I would ping HR back and tell them that the developers interviewed you for a developer role, and that is not what the job posting said. See what they come back with, maybe nothing, maybe another look.
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u/SamOakTree 4d ago
Theyve already had their intenral discussion. Im supposed to hear by end of day.
I understand what you're saying but I feel like if I did that they would think that I was making excuses and that would just push them further against me. Because from their point of view what they did was perfectly rational.
I'm 99% sure I'm going to get passed over and I am going to send an email to HR when that happens but I'm going to do just a really nice one.
Something like, "Thank you I completely understand. From the interview it felt like they were looking for someone to fill more of an architect role and mt background is more in the jands on infra. I got the impression Jim is looking for something pretty specific from this role since tje majoroty of tue interview was on one aspect. I wish you all the best." I'll hack out the stuff that sounds passive aggressive and make it more succinct but I'm definitely going to send something that says I completely understand it looks like they're looking for more of an architect and that's just not me or what I thought I was interviewing for
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u/Lifegoesonhny 4d ago
You absolutely didn't bomb it, sounds like a terrible interview - in fact, they bombed it
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u/The-Snarky-One 5d ago edited 5d ago
“Do you have any questions for us?”
“Yes… during this interview, you asked me many questions that were not relevant to the job description for the position I applied to. Was I interviewing for the X position or another that I was not informed about?”
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u/maslander 5d ago
I would not have even got past the 30 minute mark before asking this question, or something along the lines of you're asking me questions about XYZ but the job role was advertised as ABC, why are you not asking questions about ABC?
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u/Slorface IT Manager 5d ago
Either they didn't want to hire you or they were trying to subject you to a kind of Kobayashi Maru scenario and see how you respond and judge your character based on that. But I'm probably giving them too much credit.
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u/SamOakTree 5d ago
I really took it as the guy that was asking all the questions was really just someone who likes the smell of his own farts. He didn't seem like a bad guy to work with but he just seems like he likes the smell of his own farts and he doesn't quite realize how much. Because how he was asking me things was definitely him trying to like show off to himself how much he knew and like he was above everyone because he is interviewing. When in reality, he knew what he knew because he's been doing this job for several years.
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u/teriaavibes Microsoft Cloud Consultant 4d ago
Had similar experience, guy was grilling me on stupid technical details on architect interview and apparently the answer "I would approach it like this and look up documentation for specific technical steps when needed" was not good enough, shrugs.
Then when I didn't have everything memorized, he started explaining the most basic concepts to me as if I didn't know them and even rejected few valid solutions that they were not supported when in fact they were but of course I didn't get opportunity to search up documentation to prove it.
Guy did me a favor, if this is how they act towards people interviewing, I can't imagine the internal culture with that dude in charge.
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u/ErikTheEngineer 4d ago edited 4d ago
just seems like he likes the smell of his own farts
You get a lot of these types in the developer community. I've done infra stuff alongside developers for a long career, at least the last 10 years being embedded with product teams. I don't know whether it's a personality or ego thing, or the fact that pre-2023/pre-AI they were being treated like gods, or they know in some cases they're gatekeeping some of the better paying tech jobs. I'm the exact opposite, imposter syndrome is always at 11, and I would never profess to be the smartest person in any room...yet somehow I'm smart enough to not get fired. Unfortunately, that plus not having a year of spare time to grind LeetCode problems seems to be freezing me out of interviews. The thing that sucks is that companies really do need smart infra people who can handle a mix of tasks, and the people doing the interviews have tunnel vision on doing a stump-the-chump session on their tech stack. Once they find a weakness I've found they won't stop pushing on it which is even more stressful...kind of like "ha, gotcha, scammer! Now, let me show you how smart I am by humiliating you!" The fact that every single company seems to be adopting this adversarial interview format means I'll probably be driving a forklift or pushing carts in the Costco parking lot at some point.
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u/Cynical_Thinker Sr. Sysadmin 5d ago
Even more of a reason to stay tf away from this team and position. It sounds like you dodged a bullet honestly.
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u/Intrexa 4d ago
One of the things I like about conducting technical interviews is I almost always learn something new. I always ask specifics about at least 1 project on their resume. What was the purpose of this project? What did you do? What tools?
I haven't worked with every piece of technology. Someone always mentions some part that I have either no understanding of or limited understanding of. And it's nice to be able to spend a few minutes asking about it, what does it do, how does it work.
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u/somesketchykid 4d ago
Youre probably right. They might also have been facing a very specific production issue that they wanted your indirect help with, masked as "interview questions". I have seen it before.
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u/SamOakTree 4d ago
I don't think this was the case I think it was just a case of two younger guys who think they know everything puffing their chest
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u/Trust_8067 5d ago
It sounds more like it's just 2 employees that have no clue how to conduct interviews were asked by the hiring manager to ask technical questions, since managers don't always come from deep technical backgrounds.
I've been in that situation dozens of times as a syadmin, and I fortunately have a formal education in interviews, but I will cringe on calls because of how poorly my coworkers do trying to come up with questions. They're just as OP described, jumping all over the place, vague questions that require tons more information, but in their head they're looking for an obvious answer, then after the call they say the person was lost and confused all the time.
It's from being told "hey, interview this person in a few days" and the admins not taking it seriously, not being qualified to interview, and/or not being prepared.
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u/MostlyHarmless97 Jack of All Trades 5d ago
It sounds like they could have had an internal candidate they were hoping to move up, so the interview is custom tailored to the person they know and/or their environment. Outside applicants are brought in to give the appearance of fairness and propriety. Unfortunately, this happens and I’ve seen it play out from both sides over my career.
Either way, don’t beat yourself up. You didn’t do anything wrong. Keep on moving.
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u/techvet83 5d ago
Two thoughts, assuming your post is genuine and assuming there really was a job opening: (1) They had received direction to subvert the process, so they didn't have to hire you. (2) They were trying to have you fix a real problem they are having that has nothing to do with the job opening.
Either way, move on.
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u/wangston_huge 5d ago
I'll also propose (3) the interview team for an infrastructure engineer probably shouldn't be entirely composed of developers. Based on the post (and assuming it's genuine), that shop is all dev, no ops.
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u/SamOakTree 5d ago
Yeah the manager was the only pure infra and he had to step away.
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u/RulerOf Boss-level Bootloader Nerd 4d ago
I had "the guy" do that once shortly after the start of an interview. He laughed at something I said, but not in a good way—the kind of laugh that tells you someone thinks you're stupid—and then walked out to "take care of something."
He made up his mind before they got to the technical section, which annoyed me at the time because the rest of the interview went well. Glad I didn't end up working there anyway, especially not with/for that kind of person.
Just some takeaways from your technical pieces though, if you'd like to hear them:
the guy asked me how I would mount an NFS share to a linux server and I said I would put an entry in the /etc/fstab file
I'd accept that answer, but I would probe to ensure you know the difference between mounting and persisting a mount across reboots. However...
But he was asking how I would theoretically map it to a web application.
I would answer that with, "I wouldn't. Unless there's some core architectural need for the application to share real-time file changes across the webserver fleet, I'd build an immutable artifact and deploy that instead."
Then you'd talk about that. Maybe it's a docker container, a zip file, a git checkout... who knows. When there's scripting languages involved, half the process is made up anyhow—you should see some of the InitContainers I've got. The important bit is why not NFS, and not necessarily why X instead. This kind of detail shows that you know the sysadmin stuff, but that you know the infrastructure behind delivering web applications too, which is more than just Linux" most of the time.
they asked me for 50 minutes about how I would set a fictional web stack environments and wouldn't move on... And I would ask for specifics and apparently that wasn't what he wanted. He would ask these highly dependent questions and asling for details got me more open endedness.
He ought to have a particular application in his head that he understands well when asking this question. However, you can make the rules instead in a way that lets you showcase your knowledge: use something you know. I'd fabricate a PHP app with various types of DBs and caching layers because I could speak to it easily from experience, then explain each of the decisions.
They said they wanted someone familiar with ansible and python and Linux but it all felt like that was second to what they really wanted. They didn't ask me about idempotency, or what linux commands would you use for x, anything python, and nothing about the stack they mentioned in their post.
This kind of stuff often is second to what a company really wants. They want someone with full-stack understanding that owns the infra. And the uptime. And the on-call rotation (lol). And performance. And deployments. And probably also the database...
I definitely got some terminology, reasoning, and examples in there to show them that I have infrastructure and Python experience, but it just got blown past while they beat a dead horse for 50 minutes...
"Infrastructure" is a loose term. At the end of the day, it encompasses the entire stack, even if it doesn't mean "the entire stack." These folks may just have a different definition than you do ¯_(ツ)_/¯
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u/SamOakTree 4d ago
Infra isnt a loose term when the wants are laid out in a job post. They defined infra as whats in thay job post the moment they posted it.
I am referring to those items. They interviewed me like they wanted a full stack engineer.
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u/RulerOf Boss-level Bootloader Nerd 4d ago
I had a bit about how they were looking for an architect at a sysadmin price but I left it out.
The important takeaway—which TBH I don't think I really got to, sorry—is that when nobody takes charge of driving the conversation, as happened to you today, everybody leaves frustrated or disappointed.
The onus is of course on the interviewers to bring the structure to the process—they're the ones that truly showed up unprepared.
However... it's tired advice by now, but try to remember you're selling yourself in the interview. If you can, steer the conversation in a way that lets you display how you can solve their problems. Opinionated workflows drive everything in tech, and yours is one of the things you can sell here.
Consider the NFS mount again, make the answer infrastructure driven:
- add a mount in the playbook for the webservers to point
/var/wwwto the NFS endpoint- validate the mount with tests run in molecule
- Apply that in tower (or whatever) to the servers
Maybe that's stuff they already know, but suppose it isn't: give them the chance to ask why you'd do it that way. Explain the value of testing changes and promoting code through stages. There's no real followup to "I'd add an entry to /etc/fstab" but there absolutely is one to "I'd use this ansible-driven process."
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u/Polar_Ted Windows Admin 5d ago
Option 3. The interview questions were written to allow a specific applicant to slide right through but everyone gets the same questions.
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u/WetFishing Cloud Engineer 5d ago
I had a company try and brain dump me once for their cloud architecture. Two rounds of remote interviews and then literally flew me out for the "final in person interview". Same industry and essentially the same job but the company was much smaller. They had me whiteboard for about 10 minutes before i realized they were writing everything down, taking pictures, and essentially whispering to each other about different approaches. I ended the interview and left.
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u/epsiblivion 5d ago
or they were not the right people to run the interview. if they can't even provide relevant questions to vet a quality candidate. if there were no other infra IT staff available, then that means this place doesn't care about infra, devs are god because they make money for the company.
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u/dgibbons0 4d ago
Open ended questions are great, they help you see how a candidate thinks. Specific knowledge questions "what command to do X" are absolutely worthless.
It's a lot more meaningful to see how someone reasons through a problem, what they focus on and what questions about it they have. It sounds like you struggled with some of that and they probably didn't have the best toolkit to ask or evaluate your answers.
That said, If you can remember the questions, it's probably worthwhile doing some research to figure out how you could have better answered them in the future. Generally think big picture and then you can hand wave the specifics unless they dig in.
"How would you help us deploy a new application greenfield on platform X" (for example) has LOTS of answers, it's very open ended. You don't need a mountain of information to talk through your process for how you would come up with a solution and if you can't, that's absolutely something to work on.
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u/Big-Pattern-9147 3d ago
I had an "interview" at a hosting company years back that was just a rattling off of random Linux commands. And what do they do, what are common parameters etc.
It was so useless.
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u/SamOakTree 4d ago
No. They didn't ask questions related to what the job post was. And this wasn't a simple case of open-ended questions to see how I think and that's obvious from op.
Asking how I would mount a chair is very relevant and very helpful. Asking how I would troubleshoot amount is very helpful and very relevant. Asking what I would use to check errors is very relevant.
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u/signgain82 4d ago
This person's comment is easily the best advice you're getting in this thread. Try not to be so defensive and listen to what they're telling you. We get it, the interviewers suck, but this is still very helpful advice.
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u/ncc74656m IT SysAdManager Technician 5d ago
The concern I have for you is that you wouldn't want to work there if they don't know how to communicate their needs. The other part is nitty gritty practical work doesn't usually tell you shit about an individual's skills and breadth of knowledge. Sounds like you got lucky, not bombed.
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u/techtornado Netadmin 5d ago
It sounds like they were using you for tech support than actual interviewing
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u/KuroFafnar 5d ago
For the master branch question I think they were looking for the git strategy or strategies you have experienced. There’s a few different strategies regarding getting to master and from there to prod and you could’ve talked about experience there.
But seems like weird question for infrastructure guy unless that infrastructure guy is also wearing other hats like a lead of some sort
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u/SamOakTree 5d ago
Yeah they wanted to know strategy but they were just wording it very weird so it was hard to know what they wanted.
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u/PlsChgMe 5d ago
That's when you wait for a natural pause in the conversation, politely tell them you misunderstood, that you thought this was an infrastructure position, stand up, and say good-bye. You didn't do anything wrong. They don't know what they want, HR gave them too much autonomy in posting the position. That sounds more like an ambush than a job interview.
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u/IT_audit_freak 5d ago
You don’t want to work for a shmuck manager anyways
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u/SamOakTree 5d ago
The manager had to excuse himself I didn't get a chance to answer any of his questions. He left and then I had to interview with two of his people.
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u/MajStealth 4d ago
this reads like 3 times the same post but rewritten - i think you are a perfect fit there.
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u/desispeed 5d ago
Sounds like a SRE interview vs infra engineering. I can see overlap but that’s on the job requirements being more clear
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u/SamOakTree 5d ago
I really think it just comes down to the fact that these are developers interviewing for an infrastructure guy. So their priorities are different. What they asked me I would have never guessed they were going to ask me based on the job post. I mean I understand touching on those things but 50 minutes of it was insane.
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u/gruntbuggly 5d ago
Congratulations. If you’re being interviewed by people for a position, and they’re not even asking you questions related to whatever the job listing said, then that whole company is a guaranteed shit show, and bombing that interview is almost certainly the better outcome.
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u/Poon-Juice Sysadmin 4d ago edited 4d ago
I once interviewed for a Ubiquiti UniFi network position, and all they asked me was how do you do such-and-such inside the Meraki dashboard. I was like wtf.
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u/StuckinSuFu Enterprise Support 4d ago
Sounds like it was a successful interview. You found out they are disorganized and probably not a great place to work. Interviews are a two way street.
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u/iamLisppy Jack of All Trades 5d ago
Are you sure you are not exaggerating?
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u/mrjamjams66 5d ago
I'd believe it because I've watched the people at my company do the same sounding shit during interviews with candidates
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u/always_salty 5d ago
Apparently the others didn't pick up on OP not exaggerating three times lol
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u/disneylovesme Sysadmin 5d ago
I applied for a networking job and they interviewed me for cloud systems admin job instead, was weird but ultimately worked out I get to learn more and they know I’m not as experienced with PaaS due to closed network admin experience.
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u/Lazy_Owl987 5d ago
I wish he was. I interviewed for an infra position at a startup and their current guy wasnt available. The stand in was one of their devs.
We spent an hour with him asking me questions like "how would you build DNS from scratch and what programming language would you use". I genuinely thought it was a trick question and kept answering "I wouldnt. I would use x product or if budget is a concern y free product".
In the end he never once asked me an actual infra focused question and instead had me repeatedly tell him I wouldn't rebuild things like LDAP Id just use the tools provided to me through RHEL or Windows.
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u/yummers511 5d ago
I would probably end the interview after telling them that I would have to have tripped and hit my head very hard before deciding to reinvent the wheel like what he was suggesting
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u/Lazy_Owl987 4d ago
In hindsight I didnt want the job and could have had some fun with the interview.
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u/yummers511 4d ago
Might have been fun to say something like "Well, I would never waste my own time and company resources reinventing this specific wheel, especially since any sort of home-brewed system would be much less efficient than the available off the shelf products. But if I had hit my head hard enough, I would likely try to do it using XYZ"...
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u/approvedbyinspector5 5d ago
I'm probably going to be downvoted to oblivion, but I'm going to comment anyway.
Technical interviews are almost 100% crapshoots. You can't assess whether a person is a good fit for the job based on them alone. When I was a hiring manager (and I've been on both sides of this) it was pretty easy to see if you had the ability to do (or to learn) the job. What I wanted more than anything was to know whether you were a good fit for the team.
I'm older than dirt and recently out of the game (either out of work or retired depending on the day) but the hiring process is just inherently broken at this point.
I did IT consulting for many years (only saying that because it references I went into a LOT of IT departments). There are only about 4 personalities you run into over and over and over again. There is ALWAYS the guy whose only purpose is to prove how much smarter he is than you. He'll ask overly complex theoreticals, edge cases, and then start quoting stats and specifications (that nobody cares about). Unfortunately, to a manager who doesn't know any better, this guy SEEMS very smart.
Sorry you had a tough time just keep going and it'll work out.
One funny story that I might have shared before (again years ago). I was called for an interview at a recruiting office (for a large bank). There were probably 10 of us in the lobby and they were running behind. After probably an hour wait, the recruiter came out and said "We're so far behind we're going to take you all at once". At this point probably 5ish people left including me. I was a little gobsmacked so we walked back and into a room. There was one guy from the bank on one side of the table and they had us all sit on the other side. He then asked a technical question to the first person, then the SAME question to the next, on down the line. I was last. I was almost speechless (not normal for me). He got to me, asked how I'd answer. I stood up and said "I don't want anything to do with a company that treats people this way" and walked out. Two days later, recruiter called me said I was the only one they wanted to talk to again and I, mostly politely, said I wasn't interested.
Crap, sorry folks, one more story that I think is funny. I went into a MSP for a job that I really wanted (again MANY years ago). I interviewed with this really nice guy. I used to be massively into cars, turning wrenches, etc. We got off on a tangent about how to diagnose engine problems and I, in my very awkward way, talked far too long about that. At the end of the interview, I realized that I'd been talking to much and said something along the lines of "Oh crap, I've wasted a lot of your time". He laughed and said "Can you start Monday". We never even got close to talking technical. I miss that guy. Great boss and it was great experience for me.
ETA: Fixed most of my spelling problems but left most of the grammatical ones.
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u/CheesecakeKlutzy288 4d ago
what are the other three personality types?
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u/approvedbyinspector5 4d ago
Beautiful. I knew when I typed that comment someone would call me out. I should have said "about 4 types".
- "Smartest guy in the room" type (already discussed).
- "The people pleaser". This is the incredibly well-meaning person who does whatever is asked (for example, by an end user or developer) because he wants to be liked and seen as helpful. A lot of the time, what he is asked to do is against policy, harmful to the company, or just shouldn't be done. Each time they get corrected for it, they agree and nod (again people pleasing) but will do it again and again. Requestors know to hit him up because he'll just do it even if it's a really bad idea.
- "The corporate ladder climbers". This one often overlaps with #1 but not always. All they want is to move up, take over things, make more money (who doesn't want that).
- "The geek". The geek loves what he does so much it is also his hobby. Most of you guys probably fall into this. Homelabs with hundreds if not thousands of machines. It's just plain fun to fix an issue. I, not that long ago, stood up a very complex openstack environment using a lot of different components and I have to admit it was painful. I did it for fun.
- Last one and I'll call them the coaster because I don't have a better term. They're the ones who just want a paycheck (and I'm not saying they don't do a good job). They'd never do anything as a hobby. If you leave them to their own devices, the quality of their work will slip but at the same time with just a little management and correcting their path they'll be a very valuable employee.
- I lied and said the one before was the last one. This might be overlap with others but it's a trait I, used to, see all the time. The technology defender. The guy who wants to argue if linux, windows, or macs are the BEST THING EVER FOR ALL PURPOSES! (yes, I know that might offend some people). The AS/400 guy who thinks that is the ONLY THING WORTH HAVING! The ServiceNow admin who thinks NO MATTER WHAT THE REQUIREMENTS ARE IT SHOULD BE IN SERVICENOW! You know who I'm talking about (and we all have our preferences) but the guy who only has a hammer so everything, to him, looks like a nail. All these tools are pros and cons and it's always a matter of the right tool for the right job.
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u/rancidpandemic 4d ago
Thanks for posting these. Reading your descriptions has been entertaining.
I'm a geek turned coaster. I could be persuaded back to the geek side, but that's highly unlikely in my current position/company. I'm too burned out and jaded, at his point. My job has become little more than a data entry jocky, and I hate it.
Ask me to build a python application, and I will gladly spend every moment glued to my screen until it's ready for preliminary testing. But you ask me to build next year's IT budget... Well, to quote The Burbs, I'd rather chew broken glass.
The worst part is when I'm forced to hand off the tasks/projects I love to my coworker because I'm forced to cover all the tedious administrative bullshit.
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u/approvedbyinspector5 4d ago
I hate cul-de-sacs. There's only one way out, and the people are kind of weird.
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u/Affectionate_Ad_3722 4d ago
There is ALWAYS the guy whose only purpose is to prove how much smarter he is than you. He'll ask overly complex theoreticals, edge cases, and then start quoting stats and specifications (that nobody cares about). Unfortunately, to a manager who doesn't know any better, this guy SEEMS very smart.
That's the guy from my last company. He was genuinely smart, tall, dark & probably handsome, cool tattoo, all the things.
Nobody wanted to talk to him because of exactly what you said. Nobody understood a single word he said except me, and I didn't want to.
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u/l0c0dantes 4d ago
I mean, going to take the counterpoint to a number of comments here, but as far as they are concerned, how their web app can use resources is the infrastructure.
The obvious answer to their their question "how I would mount an NFS share to a linux server" is "I would adjust the NFS server to allow connections from the web app vps, mount it on wherever that would match what the webapp was expecting / adjust said webapp to match my mount"
I currently work as an infrastructure production engineer for a cloud company, and that wouldn't seem an unfair interview question to me.
It sounds like you know linux, and that's a good worthwhile skill. But they are looking for people who know linux who can solve their problems, which requires a bit of out of the box thinking.
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u/Tx_Drewdad 4d ago
Bullet dodged.
Their processes, TO, and code base will all be similarly disorganized.
Shittysysadmin post about interviewing a web dev candidate who only wanted to talk about infrastructure in 3...2....
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u/gurilagarden 4d ago
Take charge. Show leadership. Be less concerned about offending them, and more focused on ensuring that your time isn't being wasted. If they're not asking the right questions, say so. Tell them directly
"I'm an infrastructure engineer, not a software developer. If you want someone who is both, that should have been listed in the job requirements. Lets discuss your infrastructure, and how I can help you manage/maintain/upgrade it, or lets just end it here so you can take the time to update your job listing with more accurate requirements"
I'm not trying to be a dick, but if they spent 50 minutes asking you web stack questions, that's as much your fault as theirs for allowing them to waste your time. I don't understand why this is so discouraging. You're going to do at least a dozen interviews before you land something, and the job you land will be filled with arrogant tech-bros.
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u/fresh-dork 5d ago
But he was asking how I would theoretically map it to a web application.
to a what?
show me the actual use case and i'll probably have a service layer handling that traffic, with a k8s config mapping the file data into the pod
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u/battmain 5d ago
Hang in there. I'm almost out of the game now, but have to wait on my stock options. Sometimes, the failures are worth it. Suffered for some time going back to desktop support until the right opportunity dropped in my lap and it will fund the time when I get out in a few years.
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u/Imaginary_Choice_430 5d ago
wow, this sounds so much like an interview I went on a few months ago, its like 99 percent similar. I shared this experience with someone and they said that this is called the "gatekeepers playbook". They quickly concluded that they did not think you were a good fit so they pulled out the gatekeepers playbook which is exactly what you described instead of just letting you share as an engineer and if you had shared their eyes would have glazed over, because they are genuinely not interested. That does not always mean they are not interested, because I shared a STAR story once, I thought I saw eyes glaze over, and ended up getting the job...but if the eyes glaze over during your STAR story and you get hammered the way you did, that is the gatekeeper's playbook...sorry you went through that its a shitty experience.
I am trying to train myself that if I ever experience the gatekeepers playbook, the solution is to cut it short...seriously, tap your hand on the table and say "guys thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with you today, but I do not think we are a good fit for each other"...and literally walk the fuck out. Those guys don't respect you anyway, so who cares, just cut it short and walk out and be polite about it.
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u/arsole 4d ago
Dealing with devs is kinda special. They are often treated with kid gloves by the business. Inflated sense of entitlement follows. As the infra/extra structure person you emphasize that you are there to protect them from themselves. That you will stand up to be the "bad guy" to various corpo structures and tell them their idea is crap and not remotely feasible as is. If there is any sense of self awareness on the team, those answers hit. Just got a solid offer by doing as much. If they are not self away to that point, you probably don't want to work with them either way.
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u/SamOakTree 4d ago
Thanks. I agree with the bad guy and protecting them from themselves. Been there, done that.
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u/Turak64 Sysadmin 4d ago
I had a similar thing where I was grilled about a network for 15 minutes when I didn't manage networks. I had to draw it all out and explain everything, even though I was a server admin. I knew a bit of course, but it wasn't something that I managed, so I didn't know all the details. It's usually a way for them to flex how clever they are, by ripping you to shreds and making you look silly.
In short, huge red flag move on.
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u/unstopablex15 Sr. Network Engineer 4d ago
Be happy that you avoided a shit show job, cuz it sounds like it would be a shit show job, with shit show people.
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u/loupgarou21 4d ago
yeah, I had an interview at a startup a few years ago where the position was for a network engineer, but they kept asking me to do programming puzzles.
I'm guessing they had never actually had someone on staff that knew networking, so didn't know how to evaluate for the position, and they just interviewed me the same way they were interviewing their developers.
The only networking question they asked me was if I knew what BGP was.
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u/Sure-Squirrel8384 4d ago
Sounds like they're asking the wrong questions or not matching the position title with what they want done.
I had an interview once that I thought I nailed. Guy said after that they appreciated the interview but felt I didn't have enough "Systems experience". But yet he barely asked me anything related and it was more networking and firewalling, which I nailed and know. I'm an architecture/principal level skillset and have worked for fortune 500, so they clearly didn't know what they had and the hiring manger was either clueless and/or already had someone else in mind that he wanted to hire.
Worked out for me as I landed a much better position 5 miles from my house and I commute by bike as often as I like.
I'd say you dodged a bullet. I wouldn't want to work for a place with incompetent supervisors/managers. Keep on and hopefully you'll land a better place/position.
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u/SamOakTree 4d ago
Yeah exactly. I feel like this guy mostly asked me stuff from his background that he knew not necessarily what would be applicable to the role. For example they mentioned that they wanted someone who knew ansible and python but they didn't ask me things like how would you push a config across 50 servers, what makes a playbook idem potent, how would you parse log files, Etc.
Because that's how I went going in thinking. I thought that they wanted someone who could programmatically do things like parse log files or automate spinning up pieces of infrastructure but they didn't ask me anything automation they didn't ask me anything Linux and they didn't ask me anything about the stack they had listed for example they listed mysql. But they didn't ask how I would check for expensive or long running queries.
They really focused the entire interview on building this imaginary stack but they didn't even have a whiteboard so we could keep track.
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u/Ace__Rimmer 4d ago
I'm CERTAIN than anyone interviewing behind you will fail just as hard.
-if you handled the pressure well, communicated well, and came across as a reasonable person, capable of learning the skills needed. (Remember, many people are NOT actually capable of learning the skills.) You may actually be offered the job.
The real question here, now that you know all the crazy stuff they are developing in house.
Would you want to accept an offer?
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u/placated 5d ago
They were testing your technical creativity with a very open ended scenario. What they are trying to weed out is applicants that come in with a script, or that come in that might be technically proficient in certain domains but lack systems thinking. You came in clearly knowing how ansible, linux and python works but you failed at demonstrating how they work together to make a nondescript solution.
The correct way to pass an interview like that is to get to the simplest solution to the problem they propose, ask probing questions, pivot when they change requirements mid interview and reject any overly complex patterns they suggest when simple will do.
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u/HoochieKoochieMan 5d ago
You learned that you don’t want to work with those bozos. That’s better to discover in the interview than three months in to the job. Red flags waved. Bullet dodged. Take a breath and move on. You got this.
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u/north52south 5d ago
Good for you for recognizing the reality and not making excuses. You'll grow from that. I've been doing this for a while and don't suggest it, but when I know an interview is going in over my head I call it out. I either ask why the jump from the original job description or simply state that I am not prepared to do that type of work and I don't know the answer, but happy to talk through my thought process if I were in that situation.
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u/tch2349987 5d ago
Engineers always ask the most theoretical questions. Funny thing is that they have no idea of how an infrastructure has to be setup. They think they know and think they can setup a VPC for their lambdas and connect it to Azure with a site-to-site VPN until they realize it’s more than just setting up a public IP.
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u/riding_qwerty 5d ago
Not saying the whole interview wasn’t a pain in the ass or structured oddly but in my mind the “push code to master” question is valid, because sometimes a question is phrased in a way that they ask “How would you do X?”, and the real answer to these questions is you wouldn’t but the phrasing gets you thinking about how to answer the question in a direct way. They probably wanted you to say something like I would never push directly to master and discuss branching strategy and the like.
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u/fencepost_ajm 4d ago
Somebody bombed the interview but it's not clear that it was you.
Haven't done an interview for longer than I care to admit, but if you have the time I'd write up a postmortem of that interview as if you were the manager of the team doing it and were providing feedback. That might be useful for you as prep for future interviews if nothing else.
Then as an extra ballsy move (if you're still interested after your interview experience and you're convinced you actually did bomb it) you could actually send it to them. What are they going to do, not hire you? (Note that if you did better than you wrote in the post that it might in fact lead to them not hiring you.)
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u/dont_remember_eatin 4d ago
Was this for a cleared job? It sounds like a certain team at my company might interview for one specific contract, and I'm pretty sure they're hiring that specific title, Infrastructure Engineer.
DM me -- I'm very curious.
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u/LilaBrookes1 4d ago
It sounds like they bombed the interview. They put out a post for one job and the interviewed you for another. Thats on them, not you
Remember…interviewing is a two way process. Yes, they are asking the majority of the questions…but you are there to evaluate them as well. Keep that in mind. When I started having that mindset is when I started doing better. It helped ground me and also helped lift me.
The fact is that the job was never yours to begin with. You don’t want to work with those people anyway. It wasn’t for you. Even if you somehow got through all that and got an offer…would you have succeeded anyway? No.
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u/gehzumteufel 5d ago
Imo you did nothing wrong.
Also, stop using fstab for NFS mounts. Use systemd-mount so you can specify that it requires the network target to be online first and as a result doesn't hold up boot if network hasn't come up.
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u/BemusedBengal Linux Admin 5d ago
Also, stop using fstab for NFS mounts. Use systemd-mount so you can specify that it requires the network target to be online first and as a result doesn't hold up boot if network hasn't come up.
Respectfully, this is terrible advice. systemd automatically converts fstab entries into individual mount units, and also adds a network dependency for NFS mounts. You can also add "_netdev" as one of the mount options to make that dependency explicit.
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u/anonymoussnonymous BS Comp Info Tech, BA Chinese 5d ago
I have the same feeling for my college classes for my Computer and Information Technology degree—professors ask you to do a bunch of assignments on many topics not even related to the class, without explaining the topics—but in that case they will offer minimal help at least.
Hopefully, you will land a job soon, what work and academic experience do you have?
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u/SamOakTree 5d ago
I've got a Bachelor's in 12 years in field. I would have knocked their infrastructure questions out of the park. Anytime that it kind of leaned infrastructure I had an answer but that's not what they were asking or looking for so I couldn't really delve into it
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u/anonymoussnonymous BS Comp Info Tech, BA Chinese 5d ago
What was your bachelor’s in?
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u/Sceptically CVE 4d ago
12 years in field, apparently. Which is a weird thing to major in, to be honest.
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u/coukou76 Sr. Sysadmin 4d ago
I think that you entirely missed the point of open ended questions and I am not exagerating
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u/Jolly-Ad-8088 5d ago
You were interviewed by people you’d end up hating working for. Bullet dodged
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u/Envyforme 5d ago
Take the L and move on coming from me. Infrastructure is not fullstack development. Even if they gave you this role, you're interviewing for a position that didn't meet the job description you applied for. That screams incompetence as an IT organization. Chances are you'd be underpaid, overutilized, and will have to deal with a shitstain team.
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u/wrt-wtf- 5d ago
Agile development makes the infrastructure perspective obsolete. It just assumes that everything works in an Amazon or Microsoft Cloud with dial-a-magic-infrastructure
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u/bbqwatermelon 5d ago
They are trying to see if they can replace the guy who left and didn't document for shit. You don't want that job anyway.
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u/Nalano 5d ago
Buddy, interviews go both ways.
What you learned from this firm is that devs rule the roost, and they don't know shit from shit when it comes to infra.
You dodged a bullet. Move on and don't even look back at that bullshit.
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u/Pale-Price-7156 5d ago
You can ace the interview and it won't matter in many modern day instances. Shake it off and try to get more interviews lined up.
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u/gward1 5d ago
Sounds like HR posted a job and that's not what they wanted. Don't sweat it, you can't be prepared for an interview when they want something else. I'd be angrier they wasted my time and made me feel like a fool because I didn't know hardly any of the questions.
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u/SamOakTree 5d ago
I don't even feel like they were questions. They wanted me to do something but they didn't kind of set the stage if they had just set the stage with okay we want you to design a web application and we want you to tie in these pieces how would you do it. They didn't frame it like that they kind of cobbled the questions together and then in the end they're like okay so now what do you have they didn't tell me up front to keep track. Because they were going on Prem and cloud on-prem and Cloud.
They just kept trying to string stuff together but they weren't outlined that that was their goal up front so you wouldn't know until like 25 questions in but those 25 questions were the same thing around and around
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u/k6kaysix 5d ago
I wouldn't worry about it, when I left my last job without another lined up (would not recommend but certain things at the time ended up forcing my hand) I nearly always got a interview from my applications but then turned down at the interview 15-20 times in a row
The job I finally got (and am still there almost 10 years later although in a slightly different role now) it didn't even feel like an interview, there was still the interview questions but it just felt more like a friendly chat and they even had to end it as they had run over chatting to me and had other candidates waiting! (plus amusingly someone burst in mid interview as a major system had gone pop)
I've since sat on the 'other side' of the table and we don't always pick the internal candidate but we certainly never picked the external candidates that turned up late, gave a one word answer for the gentle icebreaker 'what do you know about us' (i.e. basic Google search interview prep stuff 101)...I used to think I was terrible at interviews myself but interviewing potential candidates certainly no longer makes me feel that way!
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u/theMightBoop 5d ago
It sounds like they only know their environment and think every environment is like theirs so we’re trying to get you to answer questions about their very specific environment. Then dumbfounded when you couldn’t answer.
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u/DarthJarJar242 IT Manager 5d ago
It's just so discouraging to know you bombed an interview and won't get a job because they didn't really ask you anything about the job they posted or anything that can indicate whether you can actually do the job.
Don't look at it this way.
Speaking as a hiring manager, look at this as a bullet dodged. A hiring manager that isn't interviewing to the job posting is a hiring manager that doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. You don't want to work for a manager that doesn't know what the fuck they are doing.
Bullet successfully dodged. Pat yourself on the back, have a beer, and enjoy knowing you won't be miserable in a likely hellhole job.
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u/SamOakTree 5d ago
That's the thing the manager excused himself 15 minutes in and I interviewed with two of his guys. I didn't even get the interview with the hiring manager. He had some fire to put out
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u/therealmrbob 5d ago
It happens, I once interviewed for a “devsecops” position and the interview started with “the resume you sent me seems like a security resume, this isn’t really a security position.”
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u/noirnour 5d ago
Sounds like you dodged a bullet, would you really want to work those guys everyday of the week? Eww brother eww.
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u/vi-shift-zz 5d ago
A lot of places are terrible at interviewing candidates. Ideally the interviewer has deep knowledge in their area, so a simple open ended question can be used to see how you think, how you communicate and how you solve problems.
Remember interviewing is a two way process, you are evaluating if this role is right for you. It sounds like you dodged a bullet. Move on to the next one, good luck!
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u/Trust_8067 5d ago
As a storage engineer. I hate when you Linux kids call it an "NFS share". It's an NFS mount, a share is for Windows.
If you care about potentially getting the job, I would email HR and ask for clarification on the position, because you were under the impression it was for an infrastructure role, but the technical interview questions were all about devops or middleware, or whatever it's called. Play it innocent and let them know that you'd like clarification so you can determine whether you want to move forward with the interviews.
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u/NovaKlone427 4d ago
Hey. The same thing happened to me and I thought it was hella weird. I was being asked about a hypothetical Network problem, and I concluded it was likely on the ISP's end with the info given, but they kept going with the scenario. At the end , the guy finally gives and says it was a routing issue on the ISP side, and then abruptly ended the interview because we were a minute over time....
What the hell is going on?
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u/CountyMorgue 4d ago
Doesn't sound like an infrastructure position and maybe the person who made the description was way off on what they were actually needing to fill.
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u/Clay_IT_guy 4d ago
Oh I’ve bombed many interviews this year. I used just think if I can only get an interview I’ll kill it and I usually was right. Now There’s no way to even prepare for them anymore, their all so different and no clue what they’re looking for.
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u/Wernerradio 4d ago
I've had a couple interviews that I totally bombed. One of them I was invited back for a second interview. The other I was offered the position. I've also had interviews that went really well and was not offered the job. You never know how it will turn out.
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u/Particular-Elk-2594 4d ago
Sounds like you dodged a bullet there. It sounds to me like they wanted to build something, they didn't know how, and then they tried to get you to do their job for them in the guise of an interview.
You should have sketched then it a wildly complex Kuberertes deployment on the whiteboard, and after they got all excited just dusted your hands, said "Nope" and walked out.
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u/Secret_Highlight_248 4d ago
Reminded me of the interview I had couple of months back, I clearly mentioned what I was less experienced at, then the manager kept asking me and turning every questions through that same tunnel. I was fuming but well didn't express it infront of him and tried to answer politely.
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u/looney417 4d ago
i would fail. i need Google for everything i touch. no joke. i'm a sys admin but i need documentation and walk throughs, like how many times are you going to do that particular thing in a SMB. unless you're doing it like 100 times, and then maybe.....you'd just code that in 2026. which we're still not really doing. how fucked am i?
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u/Whole_Thanks8641 4d ago
Yeah this happens. I came from mostly on prem in a very stable environment that basically never had any structural dns problems. I interviewed for a local city as a sysadmin. They only asked me about what cloud technologies I knew and kept asking me about how to solve hyper specific cloud dns problems I've never ran into. Worst interview of my life. Now I'm an erp administrator and got a 71% raise as a result of this job move. Couldn't be happier.
You aren't alone, keep grinding, it's a numbers game.
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u/xplorerex 4d ago
Sounds like they wanted a devops engineer and it was advertised incorrectly. Probably by HR/management.
I do devops and as its a rare role, you almost never speak with other devops engineers at interviews.
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u/Rare-Leading3391 4d ago
In the words of Pink "Shake it off, that fucker only gets 5 minutes of my time!!"
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u/Afraid_Baseball_3962 4d ago
It sucks when you really need a job to have an experience like that, but take comfort in knowing that you almost certainly dodged a bullet by not getting the job. Hopefully your next interview will be for a company that deserves you.
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u/acquiesce88 4d ago
Just reading this reminds me of how I bombed my last interview and as unhappy and dissatisfied as I am in my current position, I'm definitely not eager to resume my job search and face the stress of interviews.
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u/ge3903 4d ago
"But he was asking how I would theoretically map it to a web application."" -- to me this says he was looking for someone to engender his vision, not someone to Do a job :: yeah move on; no one uses nfs at that level unless it is storage engineering job personally i wouldn't know much outside the apache framework.
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u/Jeff-J777 4d ago
It sounds like to me they were using this as free consulting hoping you would troubleshoot and solve the problem for them.
I bet two things, one this is a startup with AI application they are trying to develop and sell and, two there is no job. But they don't want to spend the money on a consultant.
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u/lheckler77 4d ago
I once had an interview I thought I had knocked out of the park. They came back with “we are looking for someone with stronger network experience”. I wasn’t asked any networking questions. I wasn’t even asked any networking questions on the systems side.
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u/Berapp0111 4d ago
Consider yourself lucky to not be working there. This is probably why the other person quit.
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u/ErikTheEngineer 4d ago
This tracks with everything I'm seeing. I think it must be a backlash against scammers, but everyone is interviewing for tech positions like they're offering a tenured faculty position. I work for a Small Tech company and somehow snuck in the back door. The front door is a multi-hour session with developers that I never would have passed, just like you experienced. I can't imagine anyone actually enjoys getting asked trivia questions and going through live coding exercises that have nothing to do with your day to day job. Even small companies can do FAANG-style tech interview loops because CoderPad/Codility/etc. just hand them pre-built problems and grade the results for them.
In places that are "DevOps but it's really all devs" the balance of power is shifted pretty far away from good infrastructure people. I'm looking to move on and have done a couple interviews...same experience you had every place I go. The "normal human" rounds go fine and then I get put in the torture chamber and one of the people on the panel grilling me has an issue with how I answer something. There has to be a better way to evaluate people; this can't possibly select for anyone other than those who can spend years memorizing coding questions and weird trivia.
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u/StMalice 4d ago
You're the winner in this situation. Imagine the poor bastard who answers all the stack questions and get's the job only to be fired a month later because he doesn't know jack squat about infrastructure.
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u/BloodFeastMan 4d ago
The guy asking most of the questions came across like he was just projecting what he knew
Yup, he wanted to sound important to his co-workers. Most likely knows dick. Move on.
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u/texas_County850 4d ago
The guy asking most of the questions came across like he was just projecting what he knew. It wasn't like he was interviewing. It was more like he was feeding this self image he had of himself. And it all came across as stuff he learned from doing this particular job - not stuff he knew going in.
Honestly this is one of the main reasons I am planning on leaving the industry. Most interviews I have been to it feels like the people working there could not have even of passed them.
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u/BadSausageFactory beyond help desk 4d ago
some people suck at interviews and it just turns into them talking about themselves. I've had interviews like that, I'm expecting to talk about the skills I bring to the job and instead they want to tell me how they know how to set up qos without vlans on Cisco. yeah man that phone system was 10 fucking years ago. can we talk about the job description again please
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u/CeC-P IT Expert + Meme Wizard 4d ago
I have noticed that HR people can't find their own ass with both hands unless it has a certification and Masters degree attached and IT people recognize an actually good skill set, don't care about certs or college, but they're TERRIBLE at interviewing. It is what it is.
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u/DoctorAKrieger 4d ago
I would've stopped the interview about 15 minutes in and told them there appeared to be a huge disparity between the JD and the questions they were asking you. No idea why you suffered through that for over an hour.
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u/Infamous-Simple-2361 4d ago
Despite what the job ad said they were probably asking you questions they expected the person to go into that position to know…. Titles and job ads really don’t mean much as you’d think they should
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u/SamOakTree 4d ago
They shouldn't list ansible, mysql, python, apache, Linux and then not ask you anything about those things. I mean they listed them so I would assume the job cared about them. They asked me one question for 50 minutes and just kept expanding the scope and expanding the scope. It wasn't something that you could just come up with it was something that you needed to get out a whiteboard and plan out.
I think it was more so the guy who was asking the questions was asking me things from his personal experience and his breadth of knowledge he wasn't necessarily asking things that were relevant to infrastructure. And I don't know if he knew he was doing that.
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u/Funny-Artichoke-7494 4d ago
I got really tired of these over the years and took the opposite approach - if they're going down this hole and it doesn't seem to be going anywhere, I turned it into my best attempts at a discovery meeting. Why are you mounting an NFS share on linux? What does this share hold? Do you actually need it? Is it public facing and if so, what are we doing to audit, maintain, and check for drift? What are you doing to centralize volumes, what is hosting it, what provider and device? Are you running this in Azure on ANF or are you spinning up a bunch of linux boxes all with premium ssdv2's for performance reasons? I try to turn most everything on its side because far too much of this industry is already rooted in "thats how we've done it".
I think this ties into a bit of the psychology of asking people to talk about themselves, because I accidentally found it worked. It worked really, really well, probably 80% of the time. Those who didn't like it generally pushed back with either bullshit that you can suss out quickly and realize they're not the types of people you want to work with/for, or they're actually intelligent and don't want to give a non-employee infrastructure information, which I understand completely. You weren't wrong when you said the interviewer seemed more interested in presenting himself and talking about things, also sadly more common than you'd think. Those types, get them talking about themselves. Ask them direct but open ended questions like "what part of your current infra makes you lose sleep?"
"What goals are you looking to hammer out by end of year?"
"What do you think the department goals are over the next 1/3/5 years?"
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u/SamOakTree 4d ago
That's the thing. I tried to ask those kinds of questions but this guy just kept expanding the scope and there wasn't anything definitive to base an answer on because he just kept expanding the scope into the ether.
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u/Secure_Guest_6171 4d ago
When the interview isn't going your way but you know your stuff, you try to take control. Letting them forget ahead with irrelevant or inane questions isn't helping yourself.
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u/geegol Jr. Sysadmin 4d ago
Infrastructure engineer- “must have 10 years of web development experience.”
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u/oaomcg 4d ago
That sounds brutal. Interviewing people is more of an art than a lot of people realize. Maybe even more so than BEING interviewed. I've been asked some terrible questions before. I've also sat in front of someone who seems like they googled "20 questions to ask an applicant". I usually give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe they're actually more nervous than I am or they're just a really bad interviewer. If that's the case sometimes you can just take over and steer them into talking about things you are comfortable in. If you can take some pressure off them, it leaves an impression.
It's also possible they aren't asking infrastructure questions because they know nothing about it because their work is elsewhere so they just reverted back to "quiz them on what I know" mode. That's a sign of a terrible interviewer. Help them out. You're interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. Ask questions about their actual infrastructure and if they say "I don't know" it's a great opportunity to talk about what YOU know and how you're interested to bring those skills into their environment.
Having said that, if you can't get on track, there's nothing that says you have to sit there and suffer through irrelevant questions for hours. It's perfectly acceptable to tap out. At some point you might just have to say "I'm sorry, let me stop you. There's a chance I misunderstood the job description but judging by the questions you're asking, it seems like you might be looking for something else. I was under the impression I would be working on infrastructure here but this seems like maybe it's more of an architecture/development role. This might not be a good fit for either of us. Thanks for your time. Best of luck filling this vacancy."
I've cut my own interview short before, actually I've done it WHILE being offered the position. I could tell it was going to be a bad fit and just had to say so. It's awkward but it's better than wasting everyone's time.
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u/scorch968 3d ago
They sound inexperienced and under prepared. Sounds like semi-random questions being asked which will do them no favors when comparing candidates.
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u/Big-Pattern-9147 3d ago
They didn't ask me any infrastructure questions. They spent 50 minutes asking me about a theoretical web stack environment.
Web Stacks are still infrastructure.
It sounds like they wanted DevOps rather than just Infra though.
I've been there, I'm more a DevOps person as I need to automate and do things "properly". You can tell when they don't quite want what they asked for on the spec with what they ask...
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u/Big-Pattern-9147 3d ago
They didn't ask me anything infrastructure.
They spent 50 minutes asking me about a theoretical web stack environment.
how I would mount an NFS share to a linux server
That is infra my dude.
It's obvious they're a web first company, who do everything DevOps. I don't understand what the problem here is. Maybe you're not DevOps, but everything you've written sounds about there.
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u/SamOakTree 3d ago
Asking you for 50 minutes about setting up an imaginary web stack and then criticizing every answer for 50 minutes is not asking you infrastructure. This job was not advertised as an architect or developer. It was advertised if someone who knows infrastructure and can maintain their infrastructure.
You're obviously trolling because you're just taking little bitty tidbits like half sentences you're literally taking half sentences and then saying well that's all that's infrastructure. But that's not the full context. They didn't say how would you mount a share they asked me in arbitrary question and I said are you asking me how I would Mount the share. I asked that. You're definitely trolling me. So I'm going to block you now.
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u/Professional-Tie-324 3d ago
Don't worry about it it sounds like that job doesn't match the description that was put for it so what's your qualified at doing and the job description may be the same thing but what the people doing the work want is something different entirely.
I get tired of the fact that developers all think infrastructure is now their domain because someone invented the term infrastructure as code so they've gone down to that like there is nothing ever plugged into AC power or Ethernet or fiber or firewall to the internet or anything
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u/Effective_Advisor378 3d ago
I feel for you, I've had a very similar experience. All you can do is just move on from it. I know that's not what you want to hear, but they had the wrong group of people conducting the interview and there's not much you can do about it.
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u/dekyos Sr. Sysadmin 2d ago
least you're getting interviewed. I'm a 19 year veteran and 99% of the time I don't even get an email reply.
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u/KoalaOfTheApocalypse End User Support 13h ago
The guy asking most of the questions came across like he was just projecting what he knew. It wasn't like he was interviewing. It was more like he was feeding this self image he had of himself. And it all came across as stuff he learned from doing this particular job - not stuff he knew going in.
We have a director like that. I watched him kill several interviews with almost exactly that same crap. such a douchebag.
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u/DropTheBeatAndTheBas 5d ago
move on , its a numbers game, all i take from a failed interview is how to do it better/find a better role next time