I applied online on June 9, 2014. After two weeks I received an email from a recruiter asking me to evaluate myself from 0 to 10 (0 being "no experience" and 10 being "super expert") on the following list:
__TCP/IP Networking (OSI stack, DNS etc)
__Unix/Linux internals
__Unix/Linux Systems administration
__Algorithms and Data Structures
__C
__C++
__Python
__Java
__Perl
__Shell Scripting (sh, Bash, ksh, csh)
__SQL and/or Database Admin
__Scripting language of your choice (not already mentioned) _____
__People Management
__Project Management
I was really honest and evaluated myself a little low on almost all of them, except from Java, C++ and algorithms + data structures (which I thought were my strongest). However, the recruiter decided to schedule a phone interview with me. We agreed to have the interview on July 8, but something came up and I had to change it; she was really cool about it, and finally we scheduled for July 12.
Some of the questions were:
- What is the time complexity of Quicksort in the worst case scenario and in the average case?
- What is the unix system call that returns file attributes about an inode?
- Have you heard about linux 'tail' command?
- Without using a calculator, tell me how much is 2 to the power of 24?
The only one I got right was the first one =( because I read someone else's questions here, but I wouldn't remember otherwise. To be honest, if I needed to know any of that I would just Google it, but I don't remember it from 5 years ago when I studied them in the university. Also, it was a bit confusing because it was obvious that the recruiter was not a native english speaker, and neither am I, so sometimes I just didn't understand what she was saying, even after repeating 2 or 3 times. For example, on the 'tail' question I understood 'till' and of course I said I had never heard of it -.-
In my humble opinion, it seemed more like an end of semester test rather than an interview. Besides, she didn't even ask me anything on the topics I evaluated myself the highest. At the end, she obviously concluded and kindly said that this was not the job for me.
