It arrived in my inbox today.
Hi Matt,
[My company] has an opening for a tier 3 Unix System Administrator. Not sure if you’re looking for a move to the Southern California area, but I think you’d be a great fit. I’ve included the job description below. I look forward to hearing from you!
Simple. To the point. I’m not really looking for a move to Southern California. But the name of the company stuck out to me. I won’t disclose it publicly, but I will say that it is a major player in an industry in which I have a great interest. It’s one of only a handful of companies about which I’ve said, “Yeah. If they approached me, I’d be really interested in leaving this really comfortable, stable, good-paying job with Ultra-Mega-Corp as long as the salary was compelling and the benefits were reasonable.”
The job is doing what I do well: UNIX system administration. They went so far as to ask for code samples by tomorrow night at 6:00 PM, which is a big clue-in that someone in their recruiting chain knows what they are doing. That’s exciting, because few things about a job suck more than having a boss who doesn’t appreciate what you do.
I also hear it’s a fantastic place to work.
The HUGE downside? Southern California. Yeah, I know a handful of people who live there. I used to live there myself, once upon a time about thirteen years ago. I have a bit of a phobia about earthquakes as a result, since I was there during the 1991 Northridge earthquake. This experience, and the lack of power, clean water, food, and laundry facilities for an extended period of time afterward gave me a deep and abiding dislike of living in urban areas subject to routine natural disasters.
Additionally, my wife and I listed a few places we didn’t want to live when we were married. Tops on the list? Utah. Yep, the place we live now and have lived for over a decade. Well, if we’re going to be given a hand-crafted definition of “irony” by the Almighty, why not cover #2? Yep, that’s right, California. After visiting Northern California, I revised my earlier personal promise that I wasn’t interested in living in CA because, really, Northern CA is almost nothing like Southern CA. People live there. There is an ocean relatively nearby. There the similarity ends.
Also on our list were the backwaters of Alabama, New York City (a fellow at work misses living in New York so much, he says, that he urinates in his swamp cooler to remind himself of home), and several war-torn Third World countries. I now fully expect to, at some point, entertain the notions of living in Beulah AL, the Bronx, and Baghdad before I die.
I did the math, too. Wow. My mortgage costs me $940 a month. Including everything. If I wanted to live in a similar home with a similar commute near the major city in which these offices are located, my mortgage would be more like $3500 a month. Yeah, that means I would have to net more than a $30,000 raise just to pay for my home! Of course, there are other options I could entertain, like telecommuting part-time, working alternative schedules, and other options which would be cheaper for them and cheaper for me, but involve some modest inconvenience to both my family and the company.
So, although it’s a fantastic opportunity, I’m not optimistic about their desire to pay me what I’d need to make in order to maintain my standard of living. Also the lack of a real support system — people I know in the area — would make things difficult for a while until we became established. But on the other hand, it’s for a company with a great name, apparently great benefits, doing very well financially, and doing what I love to do.
Ahh, decisions, decisions. Regardless, I look forward to the opportunity to interview, discuss, and haggle over benefits. Who knows? Even if it doesn’t turn out, the worst I’ve lost is a day or two in sunny California talking about extraordinarily interesting things with people doing what they love.
Hrm…
There are nice areas of So. Cal.. but not by Utah standards.. still.. this IS the time to buyif ever you were going to.
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So what happened?
So what happened?
Still waiting…
With the holiday weekend behind us, we expect to find out if they want an interview sometime this week. We’re kind of interested in finding out what happens, too!–
Christy
Interview in about 3 hours
I have an interview with them in about three hours. I am dosing up on Tylenol Cold, because I picked up some nasty sniffles and don’t want to be sniffing mucous into the ears of three technical interviewers 🙂
I’m reviewing a few items I haven’t used in a few years, like process optimization using vmstat, netstat, and iostat, and boning up on newer clustering technologies since the last one I used with any regularity was Sun Grid. I don’t want to pretend to know anything other than what I do know, but there are a lot of tools I use irregularly that I really need more than passing familiarity with.
For instance, in an interview two years ago, I was asked pointed questions about setting up software RAID on Linux. Unfortunately, that was something which I had not touched for years! I mean, I would do it, but it was during install. My response was along the lines of “well, you select Disk Druid during the install, and RAID two of the drives together.” They kept asking more pointed questions until they realized I’d never actually used “mdadm” from the command-line… and the interview ceased shortly thereafter. They did manage to ask one more question about “how would you take an image of a machine”… I responded with a reply involving the utility “dd”, and they didn’t like that much either. They responded, “What, you have done this? It actually works?” and I replied, “For a machine with identical hard disk layouts, absolutely.”
I hate those kind of questions where they focus on an area you’re not at all familiar with. Had they asked about the differences between EXT3, UFS, and ReiserFS, I could have given a competent answer. Heck, if they’d asked about the fields returned by iostat, I could have at least made a reasonable showing. But I hit the brick wall because I didn’t have the particular expertise they were looking for. Alas.
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Matthew P. Barnson