A company with infamous approach "I'm your boss, I'm always right and my fault is actually your fault, your fault is your fault, your opinion is also wrong". My interview started really badly. I was interviewed by overseas person who failed to connect properly to Teams call three times, but in all occasions been pointing a finger to the issues at my end like "problematic laptop", "bad home internet connection", "wrong web-browser". Until he finally found a place with better Wifi coverage.
The questions on one hand were quite easy like "what is required to run BGP?". On the another hand, the easy questions are quite open and depending on context there might be well different answers.
I asked about more context i.e. to run BGP on a Cisco device or Linux box, what result is intended to be achieved etc. He was reluctant to provide straight answer. So my answer was " the required components are own AS number, remote AS number, neighbour IP address, router-id". And no guess I was utterly wrong. According to him, I missed paramount parameter of "network statement".
Another question was like 'how would you troubleshoot an issue when two optical gig ports see each other good lights, but don't come up'. And the dialog was literally:
Me: 'lets compare the _full_ configs of both ports'
him: 'the configs are same'. and showed output of 'show run int X'
me: 'is it really full configs?'
him: 'yes'
me: 'do ethernet capabilities match?'
him: 'yes'
me: 'are they same vendor devices, may be a switch port with server NIC'?
him: 'think of our end is Cisco and other end is different'
me: cited ethernet troubleshooting procedures based on cisco and juniper recommendations. Mentioned loop- And added that lack of certain details makes troubleshooting process kinda fruitless and most likely the SFPs are of incompatible capabilities or link modes or is failed.
him: 'you're wrong again. Optical gig ports must have autoneg enabled'
me: 'isn't it something I asked you just two minutes ago?'
him: 'no'
me: 'I asked you about matching ethernet capabilities'
him: 'I assumed you asked about speed and duplex'
me: 'I asked you about capabilities. Capabilities include speed, duplex, autoneg, flow-control etc.' I quickly put same configuration on my home lab switch and demonstrated the ports having different auto-neg actually do come up and the issue he described is not a common case.
After few mins of other questions in similar manner I felt he is very siloed to what he has on his hands and is not interested to hear anything apart of he think is the only right answer.
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