So evidently everyone one that was interviewed by the hedge fund that turned me down a few weeks ago, turned out to be useless as well. good to know i am not the only one they thought was shit.
........but really?. in the whole of London paying a 6 figure salary and being able to attract talent from investment banks, hedge funds and tech firms, you still did not find anyone good enough?.
........or maybe the people at the firm are not good enough. maybe candidates show no enthusiasm for managing windows servers on old tech like vmware. maybe people are no longer interested in managing disks on a SAN. maybe some people dont give a shit about running on prem Exchange.
..........maybe the guy interviewing felt threatened by contractors with experience across dozens of firms and projects and who were interested in learning new technology and not upgrading old technology.
..........maybe he was looking for someone good......but not too good.
who knows. but yesterday they re-advertised the role looking for more candidates.
I have landed a new job already at a US owned payments processing firm and its all the stuff i am interested in. AWS and terraform and containers and kubernetes......but i got a call about a job at a hedge fund and it was paying silly money, so i thought why not go for it and see what happens.
I get sent the details and time of the interview and i do what i always do and look up on linkedin both of the guys that will be interviewing me. oh, thats odd, they have both been there exactly 10 and a half years. Oh, thats weird they both worked at the same firm before they started at the hedge fund. alarm bells are ringing. 10 and a half years at the same place!. are these guys just buddys who are comfortable and are they really going to be open to some outsider coming in?.
the interview starts with the first guy and his second sentence after saying hello, is he would appreciate if if i was honest in my responses as he does not want to waste his time and he would not want to waste my time either. what the fuck!. that is how you start an interview, by telling someone not waste their time????. i had 4 and half hours of interviews at goldman sachs and they did not tell me to not waste their time, but you are annoyed about interviewing me for 45 minutes.
anyway i knew it was going to be a shitshow from then on, and it was. he barely asked me anything and there were no technical questions at all. all done in 25 minutes. i thought you said you were not going to waste my fucking time dickhead!.
he asked me about Exchange server. He asked me about managing and administering Windows servers and VMWare. the job spec for the role had mentioned they wanted someone who knew about terraform and AWS, but he did not ask me a single question about either?????.
Towards the end he asked me what tech i was interested in, and i said AWS, Azure and terraform because lets be honest, managing storage and hardware and windows servers is really dull. i did not give a shit at this stage as its basically all the shit he does and has been doing for a decade. he dismissed it and said the linux team use AWS and terraform and look after it, not his windows team and changed the subject swiftly.
at another point i was telling him about my work history and mentioned i had been a contractor for 12 years, at which point he immediately shot back and said, yes, he had been one as well and was familiar with working on lots of different projects and moving from one firm to another. weird thing is, he has not been a contractor. according to his own linkedin profile he has worked in 3 places over the last 15 years and none of them were contracts, why lie?. feel a bit threatened do you?. yes, i could do that!. been at loads of firms and used all kinds of tech!!. no you have not sunshine.
Oh, i get it. just like the asshole who had been at the private equity place for a decade that i worked at a few years back, you feel confident talking about old shit that you know, but feel threatened by new shit because after 10 years at the same place you are putting all your energy in just protecting your position and keeping the lights on but not learning anything new. you lack the confidence to start something new from zero again technically in a new field, or professionally at a new firm.
anyways i did not get the role. unsurprisingly i saw it re advertised the next day. hey, maybe everyone he interviewed was not good enough. maybe we are all shit......or maybe its just you.
so i will be earning a bit less money in my new job (and a bit more than i earn now), but i will work in an environment that runs AWS upto their eyeballs and processes $300bn worth of transactions a year. i think i might learn something interesting. no they dont run vmware. no they dont manage their own storage on site. no i wont be managing on prem hypervisors. that is for donkeys, its 2022 not 2012 for goodness sake.
