Last December i get a call from a headhunter telling me he is representing a hedge fund and they would like to interview me for a role. We have a brief chat about money and when i tell him how much i wanted, he paused and then told me to add 30 grand to what i said. its a shit tonne of money.
so i have a zoom call the following week and it seems to go OK, because they immediately want to arrange another on-site interview the following week. by now its mid december when everything is usually getting quiet, but they were in a rush. i ofcourse say i will go in an see them.
Meeting the manager in person, i realise he is very direct and blunt, which is not a problem a for me, but it just comes across a bit like an act. the he asks me a question about how i would reconnect to an esx server if it had fallen off the network in vcenter. i said i might enable ssh and connect and then restart some relevant daemons, or when that happened to me a few months ago, i would just restart the esx server, and that might bring it back. the exact same thing had happened to me on the first day of my current job, and i did exactly that any it came back to normal.
he said that was not an option and what the keyboard short cut was to get the console up locally on the server. its not something i would do every day, so i could not remember and would just look it up. i told him as much and said it might be one of the F function keys. if you google it, you find out in 5 seconds its Alt-F2, but whatever.
Then we were talking about Active Directory authentication, and i explained what the mechanism was when a client authenticates, but he disagreed with me and said it worked a different way to how i had said. i told him that i read it somewhere but that i must have misunderstood it, if that was the case.
anyway the interview carries on. he asks me questions about Linux, and AWS and Git, but I notice that whenever the conversation drifts towards a subject adjacaent to a technology he asks me about, but is not specifically about a particular app or tech, he ends the discussion and moves on to something else. we talk about GitHub, and when i talk about AWS Code Commit, which is Amazons cloud based git system, he is not interested. When i talk about WinFSx he loses interest, or when i mention CodeBuild and CodePipeline he ends the discussion quickly. same happens when talking about secrets management and we go from talking about Hashicorp Vault and i start talking about AWS Secrets manager, which he clearly shows he is not interested in.
anyway the interview finishes and i hear nothing for 3 weeks, after which i chase the headhunter to ask what is going on, and he said they had not been given any feedback so it would seem that they are not going to call me back.
it got me thinking about the interview again. i actually looked up the AD authentication question which he 'corrected' me on, and i found the microsoft article which i had read and which i had not misunderstood. i was right and he was wrong. i also think he had a certain experience with certain vendors or apps or tech and whenever the conversation drifted to alternatives or things that were similar, his disinterest and cutting off of those discussions belied a lack of knowledge in those areas to.
anyway 3 months have passed and he still has not filled the role, because i saw it advertised a couple weeks ago. I might be shit but surely not every candidate in London is shit. i suspect he is looking for a candidate that gives his the answers he is looking for, but that he does not know what he thinks the answers are, is actually wrong. It reminded me of that twat i worked with a private equity firm who also the that particular type of arrogant confidence that only ignorant people have.
Jaysus!, its hard being a contractor in London. i constantly have to learn things in the evenings and weekends and have to do exams, and then i have to constantly open myself up to scrutiny and judgement as i move jobs every year and have to be interviewed. i do enjoy learning things and whilst i get hired for what i know, i am interested in what i dont know, and that is why i move jobs so often. curiosity is a good trait to have, but i suppose for some people it can get tiring. I dont tire of curiosity, i tire of having to be interviewed by people that posses no curiosity or that see it as a threat to their positions or status and something that has the potential bruise their fragile egos.
so i missed out on the lottery win salary. fuck it. i dont need to work with people i can learn nothing from. you have to be a certain type to be a long term contractor in London. lose the ego. keep learning, ignore the ignorant and have a thick skin to be able to tolerate idiots who think they are geniuses, when in fact they are too dumb to know they dont know.
you need to be an acrobat in this game.
