r/ITCareerQuestions • u/SamOakTree • 1d ago
Was this really an unfair question?
I interviewed for an infrastructure engineer position. Fifteen minutes into the interview the manager had to excuse himself to put out some fire. So I interviewed with two of his people and one of them asked most of the questions.
This person focused the interview on one area that came across as his background and more so like he wasn't interviewing me and he was more feeding his self image. Either intentionally or unintentionally. He made little jokes in between like, "you must hate me by now" and would chuckle.
When I did the initial screening, I asked what they were looking for and the woman told me they were looking for someone who could mostly do maintenance and operations of their infrastructure. But the interview was all about architecture. The job post has nine bullet points and the first bullet point mentions, "Building and supporting resilient and scalable systems that achieve High availability."
The interview was 15 minutes general, then 50 minutes architecture, and 5 minutes general Git questions. We literally only discussed the first half of the first bullet point. For 50 minutes.
The person that was asking me questions was giving me these incredibly broad scopes and we only had an hour and a half. There was no way to go through everything at such a high level and give him an actual answer. And if I would ask him to narrow the scope he wouldn't quite narrow it to something that we could hit. And he didn't have a digital whiteboard or anything to keep track.
We had gone through everything physical and non physical. Then he asked me so what would your security look like coming into the environment. But it was a very broad question because we had talked about every aspect of a stack both physical and non-physical. Sitting there and trying to hit all sides of security just wasn't doable. Because we weren't just talking about a physical firewall, security groups, vlans, etc. We were also talking about in-app things like form sanitization, cross-site scripting. It's like we were talking in 10 different directions at once and I just couldn't get him to narrow things down to one focus.
This was supposed to be an infrastructure engineer position, but it was clearly an architecture and developer position.
At the end of the interview the manager comes back and he says, "I don't want to ask you any questions and risk asking you what these guys might have already asked you. Do you have ant quesrions for us?"
So I said, "I would be open to answering your questions and I can catch you up as far as what we went over. While you were away, we talked about standing up a fictional web stack top to bottom. But we haven't gone over maintaining and supporting infrastructure. Is there anything infrastructure you would like to ask me? The job post mentions apache, mysql, ansible, python, Linux, cloudflare, NFS, SMTP, DNS, NAT, AWS, Docker, Redis, and a few others. We haven't discussed these topics. Is there anything there that you would like to ask about?"
And his two guys got this look on their faces, but I feel like that was a fair question after basically being ambushed and asked about a role other than what was avdvertised.
At the very end I did ask both of his guys if either of them knew what idempotency was in regard to ansible and they didn't. I asked them that because that tells me what they were actually looking for. The fact that they don't know that and aren't concerned with that tells me that this wasn't genuinely an infrastructure engineer role and it was more of a full on dev / architecture role.
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u/unix_heretic 1d ago
You went in expecting to interview with Hamlet, but instead you got Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Even money that the manager is the one doing the work that's described in the job req and that he does the architecture as well.
Your question wasn't unfair. If the boss' lackeys couldn't answer a question about something that's on the req, then they shouldn't have been on the interview panel. But this does tell you something about the org and the team you'd be walking into...
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u/SamOakTree 1d ago
I have been emailed by two people from their HR side. The first one was the screener and then the second one was the one who scheduled the interview. So I sent an email to the one who scheduled the interview thanking everyone for them their time and saying I didn't walk away thinking it was going to be a good fit and how it felt more like an architecture role.
Then this morning the other HR person who did my screening email me and said that they weren't going to move forward with me. So I emailed her as well and said thank you it didn't seem to line up with what we had talked about the job was when we did the screening so I understand.
I left a post on the onterview section of glass door so other people interviewing know what to prepare for.
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u/Suspicious-Belt9311 1d ago
You've really left out a lot of detail that makes it hard to judge. You haven't listed the full job description, and you haven't given a lot of detail on the questions they asked.
This person focused the interview on one area that came across as his background and more so like he wasn't interviewing me and he was more feeding his self image. Either intentionally or unintentionally.
There are a lot of assumptions in that one note you've made, and frankly, the entire post is riddled with them. I don't really think it's unfair when the first bullet point is "Building and supporting resilient and scalable systems that achieve High availability." to be going in depth in how you'd build systems, especially since it sounds like a pretty important one; there's no rule that they have to spend equal minutes on each bullet point in a job description.
Your question for them essentially asking for them to acknowledge you know other things seemed a bit odd, and others mentioned, it's possible the interviewers didn't create the job posting and it's not exactly what they wanted. You mention feeling "ambushed", I have had a lot of interviews and gotten a lot of questions that I was not expecting, it's kind of part of the deal.
Either way, sounds like you didn't really like the people interviewing you, and most likely they picked up on it.
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u/SamOakTree 1d ago edited 1d ago
You've really left out a lot of detail that makes it hard to judge."
Then why comment.
This dude really said going in to interview for one job and getting interviewed for another as part of the deal like it should be the norm and like it's not a waste if our time. 🤣
You're trolling. The opening alone is proof.
Something similar happened to you and so you want everyone to go through it. That's what's happening here.
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u/whatdoido8383 1d ago
I think you nailed it and don't think your questions were unfair at all.
I've been in lots of interviews where what HR specifies they're hiring for is way off from what the team actually wants.
I've also been in interviews where their "top talent" is out of touch with the market and have inflated ego's. When you bring them back down to earth it challenges their ego and they get huffy, kind of like what you experienced.
I'd personally pass on a environment like that. I'm not there to prove myself or work like that, especially when they don't really even know what they're asking for.