clown

 Had an interview 2 days ago which was a plane crash. It really did not go well because the interviewer just focused on networking and VPN and Load balancing and just went more and more into detail, despite me saying that i had little experience in deploying load balancers and VPNs in AWS. 

Anyway, i wrote the whole thing off and was certain i would not get a call back. Then today i do get a call from them and they said they wanted to offer me the job. eh.....why..!!!!!??????. 

anyway i accepted and we are aiming for me to start in about a months time. I have had interviews where i thought i did quite well and did not get call backs, and this interview was easily one of the worst i have had and they offer me the job. what is going on?. 

maybe they figured from looking at my resume that he knows a bit about a lot of stuff and he will pick things up that he does not know. 

I am still a bit salty about missing out on that hedge fund job a couple of months ago and the more i look into it, i realise that the guy who interviewed me was a bullshitter. On his linkedin it lists a bank that i used to work at, and he claims that in the 7 months he was there he migrated their exchange mail servers to a new version AND migrated their virus scanning application to a completely different product AND upgraded their Windows 2008 DFS servers to Windows 2019, even though Windows 2008 had been out of support for 8 months before he started working at that firm. he also claims that whilst he did 3 major migrations in 7 months he also did regular BAU server support as well. that is utter horseshit.

In other parts of his linked in he bizarrely states the forest and domain functional levels of the AD in the firms he worked at and even more bizarrely it appears as though he he too had not used Vsphere 7 in any of his roles, despite wanting me to explain why none of the firms i had worked at did not use it. 

I strongly suspect the reason he was so focused on me not having used vsphere7 exposure is because that is the version he is currently trying to migrate to, and having problems according to what he said in the interview. a few things to point out about that. 

firstly Vsphere 8 was release almost exactly 2 years ago, so the only reason you would be migrating to vsphere 7 is if you started this project a long time ago before vsphere 8 had been released in Oct 2022. that means this migration project is taking a very long time. you really are struggling and yet its really not very difficult at all. 

secondly, vsphere 7 goes end-of-life in a year from now, in october 2025, and so the clock is ticking and you could be running a virtualisation platform that is no longer receiving updates which is quite serious. VMware release a new version number every 3-4 years, so at the rate he is going, Vsphere 9 could be out by the time they are finished migrating to Vsphere 7. then when they migrate to it, some asshole can ask him why he has not used Vsphere 8. 

thirdly, its surprising that it has taken him than 2 years to complete a virtualisation platform migration, when he claims did a complete Email messaging upgrade and migration AND a virus scan deployment and migration AND a DFS migration in 7 months. 

Maybe i am wrong, but i think anyone who interrogates a potential candidate about not having used a particular old version of Vsphere, which is not the latest version, is just someone being difficult and looking for any excuse not to hire them. You did not want to hire me, for fear of potentially being compared and found out as a bullshitter. 

I am an average skill techie and have met lots of people much more skilled and knowledgeable than me.....but i also have worked in investment banks and hedge funds and private equity and with actual rocket scientists and have used Vsphere and Windows and Terraform and AWS and RedHat and Ansible and lots of other stuff..........and did I not struggle using VMware converter to perform virtual to virtual and physical to virtual migrations. 

The bullshitter did not want to get found out. carry on with your old on-prem shit that is about to become obsolete. I got a job at a large US financial services company that wants to hire me to support the infrastructure they run in AWS. I dont know it, but they still hired me because they have a feeling i can learn it, and that is what he was afraid of. all the things i have learned and could learn.  

 

you's a clown to me.

Idiots authority

Had a telephone interview today and was asked this scenario question. 

You have a Windows EC2 instance and users say they can no longer connect to it via RDP. 

I would log onto the instance and check that RDP was enabled and running on the server by checking the service and permissions and see if it was listening on 3389 by running netstat -an, and I would check the AWS security groups to make sure RDP 3389 was still allowed?. 

-Yes RDP is running on the server and nothing has changed on it and none of the security groups have changed and allow RDP. 

OK, I would check any firewalls that might be restricting access. 

-No, they are all fine as well, what else. 

hmmmm, OK, so the server is running RDP and SGs are the same and no firewalls have changed. strange. I might need some more time to trouble shoot. 

- The server is down and has a Blue Screen of Death. 

Oh OK....???? 

What the fuck!!!. you just said that my netstat showed that RDP was enabled and running on the server when i checked it and now you say its crashed with a Blue Screen. you cant have it both ways!!!.

How i my supposed to diagnose a problem on a server that you say is running services but that has also crashed with a blue screen at the same time. eh!!!???????. 

i think this role has been open for a few weeks and they have not filled it. I did not apply for it and was approached on Linkedin by the senior tech recruiter of the very large financial firm that has this vacancy. He also said they needed to fill the role by Friday and seemed to be in a rush given that he was messaging me at 8pm last night arranging an interview for 10AM this morning.  

No wonder you are in a rush and have wasted weeks finding candidates. your techies are asking questions and coming up with scenarios that dont make sense. its not the answers that you are receiving that are wrong, its the questions that are wrong. I suspect you have interviewed good and competent candidates that could have filled that role and were knowledgeable, and they have been rejected because they did not give the answers you were looking for in incoherent scenarios they were presented with. 

fuck!, its tiring dealing with idiots. 

Get your Brits out

that role at the hedge fund has still not been fillled. this is the job spec. 

Comprehensive platform engineering and support experience biased towards the Microsoft server technology portfolio, including On-premise bare metal hardware deployments (preferably HPE), Advanced virtualisation design, architecture and support with VMWare, Microsoft, and containerisation with Kubernetes. This should also include enterprise integration experience with security, high availability, networking, load balancing aspects to deliver applications and infrastructure.

Experience and proficiency in translating requirements through to providing and supporting solutions and environments for both proprietary and commercial software

Platform engineering and support experience with public cloud platforms, preferably with a major Hyperscaler like Microsoft Azure or AWS.

Proficiency in Infrastructure as Code methodologies with On-Prem and Cloud IaaS, achieved through automation and orchestration of cross-platform services using tools such as Source Control, Ansible, Jenkins, Terraform and ServiceNow.

Demonstrable scripting or programming skills in languages such as PowerShell, Python and familiarity with APIs and data structures in JSON/YAML or similar.

Experience with GenAI technologies on-premise using Nvidia GPU or via Public Cloud, OpenAI, AWS, etc

I was asked a question about sites and services in Active Directory and to explain how replication works between Domain Controllers in Active Directory (KCC and ISTG nominating a bridgehead server in each site to create replication connections). I was asked about VSphere and why i had not used VSphere 7, but had used V3/4/5/6/6.5 and 8?????. 

I was asked about managing on prem SAN Storage, namely Compellent.....which i dont give a shit about. Who the fuck ignores EMC, NetApp, 3PAR and chooses Compellent?. the same kind of idiot who thought Hyper-V was better than VMware for the last decade but who has now decided in 2024 to migrate to Vmware, but not the latest version of Vmware but an older version which is due to go out of support in 12 months time. Vsphere 7. Brilliant stuff. Keep up the good work.  

I also threw in some examples of work i had done to migrate on-prem Windows infrastructure in AWS EC2 but that was ignored. I mentioned deployment usingTerraform but that was ignored. I mentioned source control using Git and automation using Ansible but that was ignored and he seemed completely disinterested. 

WHY have you not used VSphere 7, which came out 4 years ago and was superseded by VSphere 8 nearly 2 years ago???!!!!. 

What are you most interested in, on-prem or Cloud???!!!. 

- errr.....Cloud please, 

NO!!!!, WRONG ANSWER!!!!. We want people who are only interested in Windows 2016 running on premises on our own servers connected to a SAN, or running on Hyper-V connected to a SAN, or VMs soon to be migrated to a 4 year old version of Vsphere (not the latest version 8), running on our servers in our own DC connected to our own SAN storage!. 

After the interview i recall him being almost annoyed when i mentioned anything Cloud...ish, and then I started to wonder if I had read the job spec of another role and got it mixed up with these fellas. I had not. It mentions Cloud and terraform and IaC and Git and AWS through it and multiple times. 

no wonder they have not filled the role in 3 months. That idiot needs to read the job spec for the role. There is a disconnect between what he is asking, and what the job spec is asking. He must be wondering why every candidate keeps mentioning Cloud tech.....and its probably making him feel rather inadequate. I might as well be speaking Gaelic. 

all us mf'ers are sorry techies and still trash

so last week i get another call from a recruitment agency and it turns out that the hedge fund i interviewed with a couple of months ago, still has not found anyone that meets their exceptionally high technical standards.....in a firm that for 15 years thought that Hyper-V was better than Vmware, and nobody met the exacting criteria of their infrastructure platform manager who has a grand total of zero professional certifications in a 20 year career. No Cisco certs, no Microsoft certs, no VMware certs, no AWS certs, no Hashicorp certs, no.....

i told the agent that i had already gone to see them weeks and weeks ago and they did not call me back and surprisingly he asked me how i found the interview process. I have in the past slated recruitment agents and sometimes unfairly because its probably not their fault a lot of the time when it comes to no communication or not having the right information, and as a contractor i rely on agents and just like in every profession some of them are fucking useless but many of them are very good and doing their best. 

anyway i recalled my interview experience to him. i noted that the job spec contains cloud and related tech like ansible and terraform, but that the interviewer did not ask me a single question or enquire at all about how or where i had used them or anything about AWS or Azure. I told him the interviewer questioned why i had not used a single version of Vmware Vsphere 7, despite me using every single version except that one, in the last 15 years, and being certified in 4 previous versions upto VSphere 6.5. Even the recruitment agent said it was a strange thing to pick up on a single version of VSphere which is not even the latest version, and question why someone had not used it. I also told him that the interviewer seemed annoyed about my enthusiasm for Cloud tech, given he concluded the interview by asking me if i preferred it over on-premises infrastructure.  

I ended the call with the agent by wishing him luck in filling the role. 

...........and then today i see the hedge fund has just reposted the role on a recruitment board because they still have not filled it. surely they must have seen hundreds of CVs by now, given that is being recruited for by at least 3 recruitment agencies over the last 10 weeks. They must have interviewed at least a dozen candidates and it seems everyone in London has been shit so far, and the whole process was startlingly reminiscent of this previous shit show. that was another hedge fund looking for an infrastructure engineer that only was interested in on-prem old technology (despite their job spec) and being in a firm filled with stale techies that have been there for a decade and are protecting their salaries and bonuses and who have not learned anything new in a decade.

anyways, i bought a CD a few weeks ago for the first time in at least a decade, and ironically it was an EP that was released a decade ago. this is fantastic.