A supportive job interview story

(adapted from an old lobste.rs comment)

My favorite interview ever was a systems interview that didn’t go as planned. This was for an SRE position, and while I expected the interview to be a distributed systems discussion, the interviewer instead wanted to talk kernel internals.

I was not at all prepared for this, and admitted it up front. The interviewer said something along the lines of, “well, why don’t we see how it goes anyway?”

He then proceeded to teach me a ton about how filesystem drivers work in Linux, in the form of leading me carefully through the interview question he was “asking” me. The interviewer was incredibly encouraging throughout, and we had a good discussion about why certain design decisions worked the way they did.

I ended the interview (a) convinced I had bombed it, but (b) having had an excellent time anyway and having learned a bunch of new things. I later learned the interviewer had recommended to hire me based on how our conversation had gone, though I didn’t end up taking the job for unrelated reasons having to do with relocation.

I’ve given a number of similar interviews since, on system design or general sysadmin skills. I’ve always tried to go into these thinking about both where I could learn, and where I could teach, and how either outcome would give the candidate a chance to shine.