I applied to a Software Engineer position that I now suspect was meant to be hidden for an PERM candidate since it contained so little information and wasn't posted on their careers page. The recruiter during the first interview was nice enough but seemed new to the job. She couldn't really provide me with details about the interviewing process or even the position itself like: languages, tools, frameworks, etc.
I spoke with the VP of Engineering for the 2nd interview (when I finally got a look at a job description) who said he was going to be doing a "breadth" or "amazon like" interview. He asked me about 30 questions that were all over the place, things like: OSI networking layers, the difference between routing and switching, Javascript and SQL statements. He wanted me to answer the code questions using the MS teams chat window which was pretty clunky. He wanted to know my favorite network sniffing program and detailed steps on how I would help a client who can't get their device working and who also seems to have no tools, troubleshooting guides, or technical knowledge whatsoever.
When I asked for some sense of how much of the position was troubleshooting with customers on site vs. developing software, he balked at the question and said it wasn't possible to provide an estimate. Doesn't he know what his own employees are doing?
I tried to be congenial though the VP seemed agitated from the very beginning and became more frustrated when there were questions I couldn't answer. 90% of them were probably answerable with a quick web search, but have your CS textbooks memorized if you interview here, I suppose. Anyway, a few days after the trivia session I was sent an email with one body line, "Thank you for your interest in this role. We have decided to not move forward with hiring for this role at this time."
Very strange overall. If true, probably a good idea that they want to take a step back and actually define what they're hiring for first. I'm guessing the company might need to do a little more specialization in their job roles... perhaps make a division of labor so one person doesn't have to know everything. Are they hiring network engineers, customer support techs, or software engineers? Wouldn't it would be better to have your software engineers write tools to help your customers (or your support employees) rather than sending them on site?
