Okay, there is no part one here on foo.ca, but a month ago when the first contact happened, there was really nothing to say of any importance; even at this point there’s nothing much that can be said. Not because there is anything secret happening, but simply because it’s pretty typical job interview stuff.

I was nervous that I was in over my head after the first interview screening where I admitted to not remembering how to compute subnets. I used to know what the /17 meant when written as 192.168.1.0/17 (ie, that the netmask is 255.255.128.0 and there are 32766 address) I mean, everybody does this sort of thing in their head all the time, right?

I got paranoid that this was going to be a much more networking-centered interview in part two, so I found the Cisco books that I had packed up during our move. I ran through those, figured out what the annoying number after the slash meant and re-learned subnetting one evening. I wasn’t going to be caught out again by geek trivia, but then I realized how silly an idea that was when today’s interview began. I hit about fifty percent of the questions right off the top, but I missed a number of stupid ones where I started outguessing myself and got distracted.

What’s do the variables $* and $@ do in bash, for example, where I was pretty sure initially that they held all command arguments and said so… I then proceeded to waffle. For some reason I convinced myself that $0 was that variable. No wonder the interviewer sounded like he was smiling.

What are the variable types in perl, how can you visually identify them in code?

What is the difference between a single-quote, a quote, and a back-tick in the shell?

What is the difference between hard links and symlinks? Where might you find a hard link commonly used?

What do you do if postfix displays an error about use when you try to start it?

Where are the common ports listed?

How can you check the exit status of a process?

What does the sticky bit do on a directory?

How do you view the routing table?

To judge many of the questions I was asked in the first and second interviews, they would appear to come from some Unix Recruiter Manual of some sort, as I’m seeing some eerily familiar questions at HollenbackNet. If I was really trying, I’d have gone looking for these trick questions, but I figure that if they’re really looking for someone like me, then it would work best to appear to be myself, and not some super interview subject. I’m a huge fan of reference material and code reuse, but I don’t tend to care about the tiny little bits of trivia; I can’t think of the last time I needed to use a sticky bit, or the last time I actually used the $? variable in bash.

I don’t imagine that anyone but the most geeky and those fresh out of Operating Systems Class in university would really get many more of these questions… I could have used my laptop and Google in order to answer Google’s questions, but I chose to take only pen and paper into this phone interview. I think it went well enough, but I wouldn’t hold my breath that I’d offered another interview, let alone an onsite interview at my Google campus of choice in Ireland.

Why Ireland? Well, outside of thinking it would be nice to work in another country for a while, I do know that they have pretty liberal immigration laws which could make it relatively easy for a non-college-grad like myself to move to another country with a work visa. It’s much easier for me to move to Ireland than to the USA without the college degree. The USA has classifications that I could fit into but it’s expensive, difficult, and takes quite some time (6-12 months) and so most employers won’t bother.

Why Google? Well, they found me, and I’ve had 3 or 4 Google recruiters try to set up interviews with me, so I figured I should at least humour them once and see what the process was like. Honestly, I have no idea if I’d even take the job that they’re hiring for if it were offered, as I’m rather happy with my current contract. I guess it’s just an honour to be nominated.