I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Unipart (Cambridge, England) in Sep 2020
Interview
Stage 1: Tech Assessment
Stage 2: Informal Phone interview
Stage 3: Formal interview in Cambridge - 1 hour 45 minutes
I was the only attendee not wearing jeans; First 10 minutes was looking over the Tech Assessment (bit late as I would have thought they would have reviewed that a couple of stages ago). 10 minutes of going through the questions I did NOT answer as they were developer questions. I had attempted a C programming question which they went to great lengths to prove that on a linux x86 system I had answered correctly but on some older unix running RISC or other it could be different.
As they attempted to ask me to remain at a whiteboard to go through another C question I halted the interview and sat down. Not being schoolboy age any longer I thought it wrong that I was being treated like one, though I held my tongue (mostly) and pointed out that I was not continuing in this way (I knew then this was not the place for me). I was then asked in depth networking questions that had so far not needed to be known by me for 23 years of being a linux sysadmin.
The interview continued with noting I was APMG certified but they did not think Agile really worked. This led on to be told the role was for Regulatory Compliance and programming - maybe I could be trained to be a coder and debug their own developers' code when it didn't work?
At 1 hour and 30 minutes I effectively ended the process when I asked the question if they had any linux servers. The response was yes, many, why do you ask? The reason was because in 1 hour 30 minutes they hadn't mentioned it or asked me about anything linux.
Quite strange for an interview for a linux engineer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
As a previous reviewer has done, I will include the question here that they were so keen on:
If a physically inaccessible computer attached to your local network segment is firewalling all IP traffic, how would you find out if it is up or not?
[Hint: this question is very precisely worded.]
They eluded to the fact that they intended the answer to be using a switch to find arp record for the device. As they had said the question is very precisely worded - they had not included the use of a switch in the question - some very small office networks just have a dumb hub that doesn't let you do this but hey, why worry about playing by your own, precisely worded rules?
Thank you for taking the time to leave a review and share your thoughts of our interview process. Unipart has an incredibly strong track record in training and developing excellent people and we want our colleagues to have long and varied careers that stretch and develop their skills. Therefore we recruit for attitude and aptitude, and believe that our robust recruitment process supports this.
However, it is not acceptable that you feel like this about your interview experience with us. If you wish to discuss in further detail, please make contact with sarah.plumb@unipart.com and we will follow up on this for you. We wish you all the best for your future.
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