Contacted via LinkedIn by one of their HR people. Spoke to him on the phone, he specifically said there is no Java knowledge necessary and If I'm good with Linux and Puppet, I will be O.K. and possibly they will offer me a different position If this one will be too senior.
Very friendly and welcoming face to face interview. Two guys asking me questions about previous experience in this field followed by few technical questions (I don't think they actually knew anything about me until the interview, but this could be simply because of the high load of candidates?).
Interviewing many people myself, I don't entirely agree so few questions actually gave them an idea about my overall Linux knowledge. I would rather do 50+ questions paper test then explain with my words some definitions etc.
Two important things - they will NOT tell you If you answered wrong and you may feel very positive after the interview, but the chance of getting an offer is still very small, they want all the answers answered perfectly.
Other questions I have been asked (in random order):
- What is the difference between static and dynamic calling in Linux?
- What is the tree structure in Puppet for?
- How to troubleshoot problem with POP3 server - when thousands of machines are contacting the POP3 server, sometimes it does not authenticate and drops the connection. (capture packet dump, analyze in Wireshark/ethereal, find out there is no ACK packet coming back -> reason is database that is doing authentication is in maintenance mode sometimes and not authenticating. Interviewer said there is nothing in the POP3 server's logs which I highly doubt and did not mention the authentication type).
- What is the Unix command to list all open files? (lsof)
- What is the Unix command to list all open connections? What are the parameters? (netstat -alo)
- How to overcome a problem to Puppetize computers in different departments? In the other words - how to configure different computers differently with one Puppet manifest (this can be done based on the computer's hostname)
HR person did not tell me what was the result of my interview even though the guys told me he will be in touch soon - I had to contact him myself after 6 days. This is something I really don't quite understand, especially in big companies with their own HR departments. It takes 2 seconds to send an e-mail "We decided not to hire you, sorry".
Again, hiring and rejecting many people myself (I'm no HR whatsoever!) I was always letting ALL of them know within 24 hours which I think is the only professional way.
Good luck, they are still the best Sydney company out there!