Partial Recall

So I went down to the coffee shop inside the building where I’m doing some short-term contract work, sat down with my laptop, and waited for a phone call.

And waited.

My nervousness grew. This was going to be an important job interview. They were ten minutes late, and my bladder was growing full.

And waited.

Finally, at about fifteen minutes after the hour, the phone rang.

“Hello, this is Matthew.” (my customary phone greeting)

“Uh, hello, is Matthew there?”

“This is Matthew. Is this Earl and Verl?”

“Hello, Matthew. This is Earl. I’m here with Verl and Bob.”

“Hello, Matthew,” said voice 1.

“Hello, Matthew,” said voice 2.

(Names have been changed, of course.)

I could tell right away this interview would be interesting. One of the interviewers spoke English clearly, with only a moderate Indian accent, but the other two were very difficult to understand. To make it even more fun, there was a very high, whining noise in the background, and a constant rush of air as if someone were working on a server while on the phone.

“Hi Earl, Hi Verl, Hi Bob. Nice to meet you!” I responded.

There was a long, pregnant pause. I heard the faint shuffling of papers.

“Matthew, are you there?” came the voice of Earl tenatively over the phone.

“Yes, I’m here,” I replied, my nervousness mounting.

“Ah, Matthew, thank you for taking our call today. Let’s start with telling us a little about yourself.”

Wow, that was abrupt. Usually, in an interview, I’m used to exchanging a few pleasantries beforehand, getting to know them a little bit, and that kind of thing. “Well,” I thought to myself, “perhaps they are short on time.”

Now, I’d been prepped a little bit by my recruiter, Louis. She’d informed me that these guys had found candidates who had a wide variety of UNIX experience, but had always fallen flat trying to find someone with sufficient Linux administration experience. I figured they’d be tough, but I was ready.

“Well, as you know, my name is Matthew Barnson,” I began as I launched into my thirty-second, canned ‘get to know me’ introduction which I use for interviews. “I’m a career UNIX and Linux admin with experience in diverse industries. Not only am I a systems administrator, but I’m also a professional musician, having recently released…”

“Matthew? Matthew? I cannot hear you. Can you speak up?”

Crap. I had heard from a previous caller that the microphone on my phone wasn’t loud enough. Guess it’s time to replace the phone.

I spoke up.

“Yes, sorry, is this better?” I asked in a much louder voice.

“No” chimed a chorus of three voices from the other side. “Can’t hear you.” “Too quiet.” “Something wrong.”

“I hear a high-pitched whining noise in the background,” I replied, “that’s quite loud on your end. Is there some way to quiet it?”

“Let us call you back in five minutes from a conference room,” replied Earl, “then we won’t have the background noise anymore.”

“OK, talk to you then,” I replied, and hung up.

Now, for those who aren’t familiar with interviewing, this is not an auspicious beginning to a job interview. Not auspicious at all. Phone problems prejudice it from the start. I was nervous, I was off-balance, and I had just biffed my introduction.

How do I do that again without it sounding canned? I didn’t know. I guess we’d just plunge into technical details.

Seven minutes later, the phone rang again. I’d relocated myself to a more comfortable chair in the lounge of the building, and planned on speaking loudly. Well, it turned out I wasn’t speaking loudly enough again, so I relocated to outside where I could shout into the telephone.

I still heard a very loud hissing coming from the other end of the line. I suspect that was our basic problem, but who am I to tell them “move again! Your building is too loud!”

We began simply enough. “Describe how you create a filesystem on Linux,” he started, with no further preamble.

I walked him through the steps: fdisk. mkfs. mount.

“What flags would you give to mkfs to make the ext3 filesystem?”

Stumper. I don’t remember those flags off the top of my head; I just run mkfs, it lists the options, and I use the ext3 option. And I didn’t have a Redhat box in front of me. “I really don’t know offhand, but I’m certain if I were in front of a redhat box right now, I’d see the option quickly.”

That turned out to be the theme of the rest of the interview.

“Describe, in detail, how to create a Flash Archive Image on Solaris.” “What is the name and path of the file which stores MAC addresses for use during a jumpstart on Solaris?” “What is the location of the configuration file you’d edit to change a bind zone on Redhat?” (I knew what to use, but didn’t know Redhat’s exact path) “Describe how to create a multiple disk filesystem on Linux kernel 2.4” “How would you repair a bad superblock on a mirrored drive for a Solaris system?” “How would you clone a Redhat box?” (knew this one, after I described the process, he incredulously asked, “you’ve tried this and it works?”… Obviously, it wasn’t the answer he wanted.

We went on in this vein. I was batting about .500, nailing the answers that I’d worked with regularly, but I sensed stress from the tenor of the conversation. We made frequent requests on both ends to repeat the questions or answers due to the loud noise in the background. The fact was, that I flat didn’t know the command line arguments for a few dozen separate utilities which they apparently used daily.

The interview was not going well.

I realized that I’d spent far too much time in Gentoo, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD, and had not kept up with Red Hat and its derivatives, so I couldn’t answer some questions competently.

We finally got to the “what questions do you have for us?” part of the interview, and I asked a couple of lame questions about the business. I knew it was a formality at this point. I could have asked some more technical questions, but my goal was really to just get out of the interview fast. I haven’t choked during a tense situation so badly in years.

The worst part for me was, there were a few questions where I knew that I once knew the answer.

And I couldn’t remember them.

I don’t know if it’s old age, disuse, or something else, but that was the most troubling thing of all to me. Knowing that I once knew something, but could no longer remember the specifics. The panic from that was worse than all of the other nervousness put together.

Is that a normal thing that I shouldn’t worry about? Maybe I should just go into some sort of soft-ball profession where that kind of total recall isn’t expected anymore. Like sales. Or belly dancing. Or a circus sideshow.

So I’m hoarse from shouting into a telephone for an hour. And I’m tired from having to stand (actually, walk around outside, randomly) for an hour while explicating UNIX details.

And I don’t think I got the job.

Man, life is disappointing sometimes.