Interviewing for Sun Microsystems
As most people will know, I’m working for Sun on a one-year contract. My job involves setting up hardware configurations for support engineers. As part of the lab team I help run a large lab packed full of almost all of the hardware and parts Sun have sold in the last decade (or more). We get hands-on experience with pre-release, beta and even alpha hardware; we can work head-to-head with the engineers to resolve issues affecting customers.
In addition to this we get to play with some pretty funky software, for me this was playing with the Logical Domains support on the Niagara boxes way before it had even been announced to the customers.
The structure of the lab team in our office is probably quite different from many support organisations. We have the big boss (that’s Paul), David (who has an uncanny ability to remember all sorts of useful info) and then the five student “lab rats”. Paul would argue against calling us lab rats, but it does a good job to describe what our primary role is. In addition to the student guys is Wilson, an ex-student who is now back with Sun on a contract; he works on software issues and server maintenance. The reason the structure is interesting is because of us students… currently we’ve been at Sun for a little over six months, at the beginning of this period we were more or less new to all Sun hardware, software and the Way Things Work, but so too were the guys before us, and those before them, and so on.
In simple terms: every twelve months almost all of the accumulated knowledge in the lab team buggers off back to university to let a new bunch of clueless guys take over.
So, back on track: it’s six months since I started my job, and this means that it is time to interview second year university students to help find another five guys to run the shop once we’ve gone. We reviewed a whole pile of CVs before Christmas and let a number of applicants know that they had been successful in getting a telephone interview, the first of these was last Tuesday and was conducted by Paul and David (most of us students were still slacking off on holiday).
On Wednesday Anton and I sat in on a couple more telephone interviews and were given the opportunity to run the show the following Thursday.
The telephone interview structure is quite straightforward: Paul introduces the job, provides some more info as to what exactly it involves and then one of us begins the technical side of the interview by asking a number of UNIX questions. There is a short break in the middle for more non-technical questions and a chance for the interviewee to ask any questions she/he may have, before a few more technical questions to finish the interview off.
So what was it like to act as an interviewer for a job I was interviewed for just six months ago?
Surprisingly difficult. It looked and sounded very straightforward, but when you get down to it you know that the way that you phrase the questions has a direct impact on whether or not the candidate will be able to give the answer we want, and could therefore be the deciding factor in whether or not they reach the second stage of the interview—I quickly realised that if I bugger the question up and the interviewee gets the wrong end of the stick, changing their perception of the question is next to impossible. And, as Paul says, stressing out the applicants isn’t going to help us make any sort of decision.
My general feeling was very much for the person I was interviewing: I wanted them to do well and did it was quite difficult to put myself in their position and think how best to pose the question. Unfortunately I think I made a mess of one question, and then made it even more confusing by re-asking in a slightly different manner. That said, after sitting in on a few interviews even the most straightforward questions can be misinterpreted, but often with a little help we can appreciate that the person on the end of the ‘phone does know the answer, and that nerves or “newness” to non-face-to-face interviews are at play.
I originally started this blog entry on January 9 2007, but I’ve managed to keep it sat in a semi-composed state for quite some time. It is interesting to note that on January 9 2006 I was heading down from Manchester to Guillemont Park for my second interview. Obviously I got the job (goes without saying, right? ;) and I’ve been very happy ever since. I’ve got about five or six months left at Sun and then I’ve got to sort something else out or try and bribe Paul to give me a really good reference for somebody else in the company! In the meantime… I’ve got plenty of stuff to be getting on with.