After interviewing twice, i got called back today and did not get the asset management firm. the feedback was that i did not have the NetApp storage skill levels that they really wanted. No shit i dont know NetApp!, who the fuck uses NetApps in 2025!!!. The last time i saw a NetApp was in 2013!. Why are you still using that shit?!. i should have suspected something was not quite right, when the manager in the 1st interview was mentioning upcoming projects and mentioned Exchange 2016. eh????. you still have on-prem mail servers????.
you sometimes read job specs and you figure some parts of it are more important that others. i really did not expect NetApp to that important. i figured it was a legacy storage system which some legacy servers were still using, but nothing new would be using it. the guy in the interview asked me if i had configured snap mirror. i felt like asking him what day is it?!, what year??!!!.
Like the hedge fund that seemed to be upgrading to Vsphere 7 a year before it went out of support, and kept emphasizing how i not used that one version of it, having used every other version over the last decade, i now get rejected due to on-prem storage.
The only reason i wanted to land this role, was to get me out of my current place, and not because i thought it was a great role. Its probably a good thing they rejected me. i could not give a rat arse about on-prem storage, and if that is what is really important to you and that is what you are really looking for, then you can keep it.
fuck, my current place is getting worse. i can sense the mood has darkened amongst all the engineers. the unhelpful established guys seem even more dismissive and unhelpful than normal, and the newbies in Pittsburgh and Dallas and myself are getting more isolated.
I have been through this before, when i have been in a role and the existing engineers just hate you from the beginning. i managed to escape that, and hopefully i can escape this situation as well. hope my new friends in NY who called up with the hedge fund roles in London come through for me.
its so much stress being in a job and then trying you escape. too much noise in my head. I sometimes i wish that i was like those people who are content to just muddle though doing what they know in a job for years, but then i come back to my senses.
The same agent that put me forward for the asset management firm that interviewed me at the end of last year, but then did not hire me even after interviewing candidates after me who they said were not as good, called me last week about a contract at an asset management firm. it all moved quick and they interviewed me on Thursday and then said they would like to interview me again which they did this morning. it seemed to go OK from my side and i will hear back in the next couple of days if they want to offer me the role.
as is usually, a few hours after my second interview this morning, i get a message on Linkedin from a recruiter asking if i would be interested in a job at a hedge fund in London. I reply i would be and they immediately call me back. When i see the number on my phone it looked a little strange and the recruiter was actually in New York and he had been tasked with trying to find a candidate for a couple of US firms, 1 multi strat and 1 quant. I said i was happy to be put forward for both of them. fingers crossed something comes through soon.
In a twist, the multistrat fund is based in the same building as the multistrat that went silent on me after the interviewer got his facts wrong in an interview just over a year ago. How awesome would it be to bump in the guy in reception if i landed this other firm. remember me you numpty. Do you want to tell me how clients find DC's again?. Your confidence far exceeds your skills.
the thought of staying at my current job is so depressing. the unhelpfulness of the existing senior team members has now given way to rudeness and frustration towards us, the new starters in London, Pittsburgh and Dallas. its go to the point that us newbies have arranged our own team calls amongst ourselves to discuss issues and try and help each other, rather than dealing with the other assholes.
hopefully the end is coming soon for me at that place. my mind has already checked out.
remember it was my choice.....to fall into the sun.
In December 2023 i get called out of the blue by a headhunter recruiting for a multi strat hedge fund in Mayfair who says he has been tasked with finding a candidate for them. He asks me how much salary i would be looking for, and when i tell him he literally says 'they are made of money' and says i should ask for more and ups it by another 30grand.
2 weeks before Christmas 2023 i get a team call interview with the infrastructure manager just covering my experience, and explaining that they dont have much in the way of internal IT because it was all outsourced but that they want to hire their own techies as they move it in-house.
1 week before Christmas 2023 they call me in again for an on-site interview. they change the venue 30 minutes before the interview was due to start. I go into their secondary office and meet with the IT manager. he seems about the same age as me and with about the same amount of experience in the industry though unlike me, he has spend 20 years at a single firm, before he landed at the multi strat 2 year previously.
He asks me about Active Directory (AD )and sites how clients find and authenticate against Domain controllers. I had just carried out an AD migration and had been configuring sites and subnets and domain controllers.
On how a client finds a domain controller i said it would first try and find a DC on the same subnet as the client, and if not it would then find another DC, and if this other DC happened not be in the same site as the client making an authentication request, the DC would then direct the client to authenticate against a DC that was in the same site. He disagreed and said that was not how it worked. I said i had read it on a Microsoft site but that i must then be mistaken and not understood it correctly.
The interview then carried on and he asked me about AWS and Terraform and Git. I told him i had used them all and for a Git repository we had used AWS Code commit at my last place. He said he was interested in Github and dismissed Code Commit as if it was something completely different and not a git based repository using the exact same commands. whether its Github or Bitbucket or CodeCommit, they are all git based and work in very similar ways. its the same thing in the backend. git commit, git pull, git push. its all the same.
He then asked me about Linux and some question about installing packages, changing file permissions and file ownership. He asked me about ESXi and how to get into the command prompt for it. I said i had not gone directly onto the console of an ESXi in quite a while but that from memory it was something like F2. He told me that it was actually ALT-F1, as if that was some nugget of wisdom that could not be googled in 5 seconds.
I remember thinking i answered most of his questions on Linux and VMWare and AD and Windows and AWS, although he did make a point about Gihub being better than CodeCommit?????, but then i did not hear anything back for weeks and then the agent emailed me and said they had not heard anything back and it looked like they had moved on from me. fair enough. its not like i applied to it. maybe they hired someone better. i know there are lots of really great techies in London, because i have worked with some of them.
After the interview I recall that i did look up the active directory authentication question that he said i was wrong about. it turned out he was wrong and i was right.
For example, the client sends a DNS Lookup query to DNS to find domain controllers in the client's subnet. Otherwise, the client does a site-specific DNS lookup again with the new optimal site name. The domain controller uses some of the directory service information for identifying sites and subnets.
So i am looking through linkedin yesterday and i see that they just hired a new infrastructure engineer a few weeks ago. he has 4 years experience in total. he has no Linux, no AWS, no terraform, no git, and only active directory administration experience and vmware. 5 months after they interviewed me, they also hired another infrastructure engineer, but he has no AWS, no Terraform, no git, and he made a point of saying his experience with VMware was to resize Virtual machines, which is basic admin shit and a trivial detail. i resize AWS instances every week in my current job, and i sure as hell do not write that on my CV. no one is impressed by carrying out a basic admin task.
Between them they have no certifications listed for anything. I am AWS solutions architect, Azure administrator, Hashicorp certified terraform associate, MCSE Cloud and Platform infrastructure 2018, Vmware VCP, 3 and 4 and 5 and 6.
There is no way in hell you asked them about which obscure key stroke (Alt-F1) you use to get to the console on ESXi, because they have not mentioned anything about ESXi or configuring vsphere on their experience in their linkedin. you did not ask them about package managers on Linux or which version control system they had used. You did not get into a debate about the merits and disadvantages of using Terraform cloud or of storing credentials in terraform vault as opposed to AWS Secrets manager in their interviews because they have never used either of them.
it confirms what i suspected and have seen and heard before. I worked in a private equity firm about a decade ago and there was a senior IT infrastructure manager who was a complete prick, who used to come out of interviews saying 'barbecued another one'. He seemed to take delight in deliberately sabotaging interviews. I actually knew someone who he interviewed having worked with them at a hedge fund a couple years before, but i did not say i knew him before he went in for his interview. He did not get through the interview and did not get the job because of this asshole. evidently working in one of the largest hedge funds in the world, and also at Bank of NY Mellon in London was not a good enough learning experience. This person he rejected is now a senior DevOps engineer at a bank. the asshole who interviewed him is still at the private equity firm doing the same shit desperately trying not hire people who might show him up.
the same thing happened to me a few months ago with the other hedge fund, where he just asked about AD and windows and why i had not used Vsphere 7 but every other version over the last decade and a half. why are you persisting in focusing on trivial details like not having used Vsphere 7. I have used Vsphere 6.5 and Vsphere8 so i know my way around it. the same interviewer was disinterested and then almost offended that i kept mentioning cloud technology despite it being on the job spec. maybe the reason he did no like me mentioning it was because it was not something he had any knowledge or experience of according to his own linkedin profile. was he deliberately sabotaging the interview because i was talking about things he knew nothing about and he was scared i might know more than him???. he did not even ask me any technical questions about vsphere 7. he just persisted in expressing his incredulity that i had not used that one version.
I think the same thing happened with this multi strat. I think he saw someone that might know things he did not know and that might show him up. I think he felt threatened by my experience and curiosity to learn. It is why he was so keen to point out i was wrong with how clients authenticate against AD, so that he could score points over me, when in fact it turns out he was wrong when i confirmed it by looking it up on the Microsoft site after the interview. You thought you had caught me out, but you did not. Yes you got me on Alt-F1 but who remembers every random short cut, when you can google it in 5 seconds.
I wonder if he looked it up afterwards as well and discovered he was wrong and discovered i was right and the thought of calling me back in again would have been too much of a humiliation or too much for his ego to take. probably best to play it safe and hire bog standard admins who just know one or two things and who will always defer to your superior knowledge.
I am a tech worker in London and a large part of that has been as a generously paid contractor, so i dont want any sympathy, but on a basic human level, its is sometimes tiring dealing with idiots like these. there are far too many people sitting in very well paid jobs in hedge funds, asset managers and private equity firms putting too much energy in to protecting their positions and salaries as opposed to trying to find the best candidates.
Nine inch nails are playing a show in London but its almost sold out and the only remaining seats are in the nosebleeds, so i am going to pass. This clip below is from their Lights in the Sky over North America, tour in 2008. I saw them in Knoxville Tenessee that year and it was amazing.
Linkedin is good for finding new jobs, but its also good if you get interviewed by a firm and then turned down by them and then you can see who they eventually hired and who they thought was better than you.
I interviewed with a hedge fund in summer 2024, and it was a shit interview. the infrastructure manager focused for far too long on why i had not used Vsphere 7, despite having used version 3,3.5,4,5,6.5 and 8 in my previous roles. he seemed incredulous that a firm i worked at would upgrade from Vsphere 6.5 to 8. what was even stranger is that the hedge fund he worked at had never run any Vsphere before and had gone with Hyper-V which is complete trash.
They had seemingly discovered a decade and half too late that Hyper-V was trash and were in the process of migrating to vsphere which he claimed he was having some issues. firstly, why would you give a shit about vsphere 7 when you are migrating to vsphere in summer 2024 when vsphere 8 had long been released????.
secondly, vmware have a very good tool called vmware convertor which makes migrating virtual machines and physical machines to vsphere very easy. I used it a lot. why are you having trouble using a standard utility that you can train a chimpanzee to use?.
he also seemed utterly disinterested in anything i said about AWS or terraform or ansible or Git, which was strange because the job spec did state they wanted someone who was familiar with cloud technology and infrastructure as a code.
he ended the interview asking me if i preferred cloud or on-prem infrastructure. i said the latter half knowing it would be the kiss of death and not the answer he was looking for, and as expected they did not call me back.
looking through linkedin, i saw that they hired a new windows platform engineer in October. this guy might be amazing, but he has chosen to not mention anything about cloud tech or infrastructure as code or ansible or anything new and modern. its just windows OS engineering shit. keep it mate.
I am in a job at the moment i find quite frustrating with colleagues that are unhelpful and difficult, and yet i still do occasionally get to troubleshoot and configure load balancers in AWS and configure route tables and security groups and work with RDS instances and AWS backup and i even use Citrix cloud which i hate, but at least it sounds modern.
am glad i did not get the role at the hedge fund. hope you guys got to finish your vsphere 7 migration in 2025. this might be news but it goes out of support in 8 months so keep working on that old shit.
the commodities trading firm that interviewed me at the beginning of December have still not found anyone because the same role has been advertised again by the same agency by the same agent. I recall in my interview I had a 25 minute informal chat on the phone, with little detailed technical questions, and they decided they did not want to hire me. I suspect the same has happened to other candidates over the last couple months as well.
I looked up the hiring manager on linkedin and he has spent the last 25 years doing Active Directory and specializing only in identity and access management and Entra ID. no virtualization, no AWS, no Windows, no linux, no SQL, no terraform, no kubernetes, no firewalls, no networking.
i suspect they want a specific type of candidate. one that is not too curious to learn. one that is content to just repeat what they know in a very narrow field.
i am no exceptional technically. i am exceptional in my willingness to constantly put myself in a positions to be judged and be messed around by idiots and company men who are time wasters, in the hope they i will eventually land a good new role where i can learn and work with interesting people. in the meantime i have to walk through the jungle of idiots to get to where i want to go.
I applied for a job at an AI firm last week. not OpenAI but the other big one that is not owned by google. it sounded amazing on the job description. they were not overly specific on a particular tech and emphasized and willingness to learn and collaborate and contribute. they are paying silly money and will be able to attract top talent from any hedge fund or big tech firm.
call me in. i would just be happy to take the interview and talk to them. i dont care about being rejected.
