Job Interviews Done Correctly
I was very pleased with my recent interviews with Educational Technology Services (ETS) at UC Berkeley for a Systems Administrator position. The lengthy interview process included a video conference interview about a month ago that included some lengthy questioning on specific issues and scenarios that this position has to manage. In return, I learned that this position is a newly created position and that ETS has been growing, from merging of several departments, and that they have not had to time or resources to hire someone to do systems administrator duties. Although my interviewers were unable to give me a specific job description and duties for this job, they were looking for someone to come in-house and stabilize and clean up the administration of all of their servers (12 at the moment, but they are working to consolidate some of them into fewer servers). This is definitely something that I am interested and furthermore, their critical mission of being the leaders of educational services makes this job very interesting.
So I guess I impressed them enough with my organization and thought process and they invited me to go to Berkeley for a second interview in person. As I met with various members of the staff, I got a sense of how this position would interact with basically everyone and have an influence on the entire department. Surprisingly, the current situation is that there is one person that does a bit of admin as things happen (which is never good) and that various members of the development teams do admin stuff as their team needs it. This department has grown quite quickly and even though they have been fighting this uphill struggle for systems maintenance, they have great development of technologies that is evident in all the different applications that they have built and implemented. Clearly, there are many smart and dedicated people working there.
They were very thorough in answering my questions about the state and direction of the department and from top to bottom, the department is on the same page. It is very rare to have such an in-depth look into a job and department during the interview process and I value it greatly. It shows that the department is serious about finding a candidate that will fit in and perform well with the group that is already there.
So, hopefully, they will find me equally worthy and I will stop being a bum of sorts. But regardless, it is nice to know that there are places where they want to find the right person rather than the person who knows all the answers to techno-babble.
