omgdresser

I was about to make a comment similar to this, but this is articulated so much better than what I was able to get out.

I'm in agreement, after the hardware deploy, you're pretty much left with what you would have in a cloud environment: a bunch of VMs (or in this case OS instances) that need care and feeding, and only rarely, much rarely than many would think, do you have to replace a disk, or recable because requirements changed.

I'm biased because I went through the process and was rejected, but I agree. There was more focus on asinine 'behaviorial' questions than the real reason you're talking to someone: are you (relatively) sane, and more importantly are you capable, can you do the job? Everything else is secondary, in my opinion.

I went through all of the insane interviews except the CEO interview for the production engineer position and was rejected. I brought quite a bit of high-level operational experience from a few different places, including some pretty high-traffic video sites, HPC and a lucrative e-commerce site.

The reason for my rejection? I had an ongoing side project and development/consulting gig which had been paying the bills for a few years which they thought I 'misrepresented'. I guess they assumed I was still working there (I was and would continue to do consulting and development on my own time), but the biggest LOL of the whole shitty process was their reasoning: "We are very risk-averse in our hiring." No shit.

I guess they weren't risk-averse enough in their operations though, so I'm glad I didn't get through. It sounds like it would have been an uphill battle all the way to make changes to keep things sane.

And having to crowdsource your move from cloud to your own hardware? Listen to your people, they already had good ideas, all of which were documented in your open issue tracker.