An interview !

After looking for a DevOps, or SRE role for a while, I was invited to interview with the company Crown Equipment. They sent me an airplane ticket, and I was flying near a government holiday, so the roundtrip ticket was probably a bit more expensive than it had to be. To be honest it was at my insistance, being that I wanted some time to decompress after the flight. I had once flew in for an interview with another company, where my flight was delayed, and they had to cut the interview short so I asked for a night before flight.

A Suprise

Land at the Dayton. Get rental car. Pop in GPS. More than an hour away. Wait, what? Why is this place so far away. So when I finally got there, I knew something was up…This place was strange. Lots of buildings in town were empty…not deserted though. When I got to the security office to get the key to my room, and the informational packet, I was awarded with the information on why. Nearly all the property, and things, within New Bremen are owned by Crown Equipment.
New Bremem

Important things from my large informational packet, checkout is 9AM the day you are scheduled to leave. My interview was at 1PM the next day. Some interesting information about alcohol:

My room turned out to be corporate housing. Which meant it was just a well furnished house. The house was stocked with snacks, drinks, and adult beverages. I wanted a beer, in fact I wanted all the beer, but I didn’t want them to see I drank all there craft beers the night before an interview. I removed one from the fridge, but placed it back after thinking better of it. After all, there was a 9am checkout time. I drank several waters, and an orange juice in the morning. Now because my checkout time was 9 am, and it was about 11pm by the time I settled in, I chose not to sleep.

The key to my housing, allowed me YMCA access, but again I had to turn that key in at 9am. I was also given a ticket to The Bicycle Museum of America. However it opened at 11AM, and I felt like the time crunch, with my interview was to much, but I did explore the town for an hour after turning my key in promptly before 9AM to the security office. The Crown Education Center, and Crown Store, seemed particularly interesting. I sat in my rental car for the remaining, several hours waiting for the interview.

The Interview

I was on edge from not sleeping, and the first part of the interview turned rather sour, rather fast. The first part of the interview, was the HR part. It was the first time in my professional life the HR part of an interview felt aggressive. The HR person insisted on a reason for leaving, for every job I had, had previously. Rather than asking what my expenses would be to move to New Bremen, she used leading questions to determine them. Needless to say for the next part, the technical part I started off on the defensive. However, my interviewer was quite pleasant. We talked about continous integration, and pipelines, the pros of using python over bash for robustness when it comes to dev ops. He asked one technical question, which I got correct. Then he took me on a tour of the town. Upon seeing a single fast food restraunt, I asked about it, and he said “It’s there for convience, it is allowed to be there.”

The Results

I was not offered the position. I am still umemployed, but hey you could buy a book from my affiliate link, Coders At Work Highly reccomend the JWZ interview from this book.