twi.gs

My friend decided I needed to interview for a position at Redhat. For about a year he tried, and I always told him no. In late Nov, he convinced me just to try the phone interview. I did and they decided they wanted to fly me out for a face to face interview a few weeks before Christmas. Being that the holidays are always stressful, I asked if we could make it the first week of January. They obliged. January 3rd I’d fly in, sleep, wake up at 8 (I later realized this means 6 SLC time) for a 5 hour face to face interview then fly back home.

On the plane, a nice old lady sheepishly told me she could cut her sandwich in half if I wanted. I laughed and told her I had food in my bag that I could snack on if I got hungry. She scarfed the whole thing.

When I got there, picked up my rental, got to the hotel, and was bored. Raleigh/Cary has a Trader Joe’s. Utah does not. I decided I needed to go (after a bit of convincing from Joanna, who was my GPS with google maps). They have many wonderful things there including a box of peanut butter puffins for $3.25, a tin of sipping chocolate, and a car with a KTHXBAI license plate.

I got back, had a Chipotle burrito for dinner, did a bit of video chat while downloading a movie from iTunes for the flight back and hit the hay.

I woke up, threw on a t-shirt and some jeans and headed out for the interview sans hair cut despite suggestions from many.

When I got there, I sat in a little lounge area and waited to be called upon a’la the doctor’s office.

When I got called on, they put me in a smaller room without windows… a’la the doctor’s office.

Then it began. The first lady came in and talked to me a bit about stuff I forgot about. It was mostly just an overview of Redhat, a few basic questions and instructions on how to procure free food and beverage.

Next, the 2nd person came in. He didn’t care much for the preassigned questions so we talked about cars for awhile. His dream car is the Audi A3, but he drives a Mercury Tracer that just rolled over to 100K and possibly has warped rotors. I told him I used to have an A4, but sold it and drive a WRX now. He seemed slightly jealous and asked me how I’d get it to NC. I told him I’d like to have it towed there.

After that was Steve. He is the one that more or less got me into this mess. We talked a bit, he asked me some questions about how comfortable I am with system administration. He told me about some tools that seem pretty awesome like Puppet.

After that was lunch. The boss of the team took us to Red Robin. They all agreed that I had a bit of an accent which rules out West Virginia, Florida and Brazil (I think I heard) as my origin. Jay, the boss made a joke about how I’m probably from Mississippi, the worst state. When we left, Steve decided he wanted a balloon:

We came back, a couple more people asked me a few questions from their sheets, then just talked to me about computer stuff. These two, I don’t think were RE’s. When they were finished, it was time to catch my flight. There had been some confusion about me not having a seat on the way back, but the recruiter at Redhat fixed that for me, printed my boarding passes and sent me on my way. I dropped off the rental and caught a shuttle. The driver told me I sounded British as he dropped me off at my terminal.