Received invitation to chat via LinkedIn. Discussion went well.
Scheduled for phone interviews.
Was told very clearly that there were 2 flavors of COE: those with the systems experience, and those with a lot of java development background. I am _extremely_ strong in the former, and not very strong in the latter (although I've written C, Perl, Ruby, Shell, etc).
My first 4 interviews went great. In fact, I got the feeling I was actually giving some of the guys better ways of doing some things. Maybe not, but I was at the very least easily up to the task, and then some.
Then came the last interview. First, the guy was more than 20 minutes late, and no answers or message that he was running behind.
This guy kept going on about Java development. I had been crystal clear with the recruiter and all the previous interviewers that Java development was not my forte. I am an outstanding Systems Engineer experienced in almost all operating systems. Again, that was understaood and all the previous folks said 'Hey, of course. We are looking for Systems Engineers, and we have others who are on the Dev side of things. We work together.' Perfect!
But this guy kept asking about Java. I kept politely saying "I am not a Java developer. I can read the code, and follow it along, and do some instrumentation, but I am not the guy you want to develop an enterprise solution.' But he kept going there.
But here's where things went south, I think....
He asked me about a couple things with regards to shell scripting. it went like this
Q: Let's say you have a variable named X and you assign the value 5 to it. How do you show that result in your script?
A: echo $X (right)
Q: OK, now let's say you have a variable Y, and you assign it the value of X. How do you show it?
A: echo $Y (wrong, says he)
I say, Hmm....if it's good for X, then it's good for Y. I am very politely explaining this, and my understanding. And why Y would also equal 5. (Y = $X)
Then he says.... 'I mean that if you assign the "letter" X to the variable Y, then how do you show it?'
Seriously? In any case, the answer is the same - do you assign X, or $X? Pretty simple stuff, and I sure hoped that this was not in question.
About 5 minutes after that, I got the automatic 'Sorry, we have nothing that matches your skills' e-mail.
I must say that I was very surprised an somewhat saddened as I had spent a lot of time researching Cloudera and I had a great time in all the previous interviews. I just don't know why this last one went so far south so fast. maybe the guy was having a bad day? You never know what someone else is going through.
But the result was the automatic blow-off e-mail just mere minutes later, and I suppose that's what got me most.
It still sounds like a great place to work, and I don't have any hard feelings. Things happen for a reason, and maybe there'll be another opportunity.
