Was contacted on InMail by a recruiter. He was very interested in my skills and we setup a phone interview on the same day.
I moved on to the first of two phone screen interviews, the first being a very easy programming challenge, and the second looking at knowledge in many subjects.
I passed both of these easily and was brought on site. The hotel I was put up in was very run down, and cheap. Not a deal breaker; but part of why I'm very dissatisfied with this process.
The on site consisted of about 6 different interviews / challenges.
The first challenge was a live debugging challenge. They give you a RHEL VM and give you several prompts that involve fixing the webserver. These were ridiculous. One of the issues was in a compiled binary that apache includes, and I needed to hunt down what line in the binary this was happening. I was told (after failing this part), that I was supposed to hot fix it in assembly. I told my interview; if I encountered this in prod, I would likely update the package and move on.
The second challenge was a whiteboard system architecture challenge. They tell you to draw and explain a system architecture starting out from a single server to several data centers. This was pretty easy.
There was then lunch with one of the managers and immediately after that; I had a behavioral interview with a different manager.
There was then a "grill you on everything" interview. It was absurd how detailed they asked me to be. One of the questions was, write pseudo-code you would use to re-create the "ls" command, almost certainly not something I would do as an SRE.
The last challenge was also a "grill you on everything" interview. He gave me a table of Nagios alerts and 60 seconds to prioritize which alerts I'd respond to first. I failed this hard because I spent the first 20 seconds reading the prompt, and I was expected to be able to decipher their cryptic hostnames. The interviewer was very condescending and asked me point blank if I've ever even used Linux before. I was then given a scenario where there was some database issue and I was responding to, and how would I go about communicating this to my superiors.
At the end of the last challenge, I had to get on a flight immediately. I had no time to ask questions or talk to anyone else. My overall impression of this interview was that they were looking for an operations person who was a competent programmer, with 5 years experience but would accept a entry-level salary. They said repeatedly that they weren't looking for operations people; but someone in the middle of developer and ops; after the interview, I find that hard to believe.
Several of my interviewers were rude and condescending, especially considering I was still a senior in college and only had a total of 9 months of hands on job experience. I got a call a few weeks later informing me that I was "too junior" for a position such as this. I think what they're looking for is extremely hard to find, and they did a poor job of communicating their expectations for the role.
