They are looking for people who are willing to work basically every Saturday, and Sunday night on top of the M->F 8 to 5!
2 jobs were open: a senior, and a junior position. The manager wanted me for the senior position. Both positions were a combination of AIX/Linux sys admin roles.
1 of the people, interviewing me, was leaving the company. It's just not smart to have an unhappy
employee, who has already given his notice, interviewing people.
I had 4 rounds of phone interviews. Each phone call lasted a lot longer than the stated time. So, they were interested in me!
During the 1st call, I made a point to discuss the weekend/off hour commitment. The discussion of the off hour committment lasted about 5 minutes. I was told to expect to work about 1 out of 6 to 8 weekends. I added that the most I could give is 1 out of 3 weekends, and was told that's not an issue, and that it would never be required to work that much on the weekends.
During the 4th interview, I was told how much I would like working there, and that they wanted to bring me in for lunch to visit with the team, and to offer me the job. Lastyl, the manager then brought up the off hour committment again. I reminded him of what was said during our conversation during the 1st phone call, and that I could work, at most, 1 out of 3 weekends. I was told that was not an issue, and that what he said, during the 1st phone call, still stood.
30 minutes later, the recruiter called me, and told me that they didn't want to hire me any more because I was "too junior for the position".
1) The manager was not considering me for the junior position at all.
2) The person, they ended up hiring for the senior position, had about 1/2th the AIX skills that I had, and no linux skills.
3) Their environment was growing from 400 to 1,000+ servers. All servers had to be updated on the weekends (including dev), and had to be updated at least once a quarter (a new rule going forward). The manager claimed that the team would be able to do all the work in 2, or 3 weekends, and would only require 1 person, per weekend, to do the update work. Looking back, that's a complete lie on his part.
4) The company had OSes of: HP, AIX, linux, and vio servers, + Dev, Test, pre-prod, prod, and DR for each OS. There is NO WAY they can update 20 different OS/environment combos in 2, or 3 weekends. Dev, Test, pre-prod, prod, and DR would need to be done on separate weekends. So, that's at least 5 weekends every quarter + on call. In addition, You would not want to update all the different OSes during the same change window by 1 person. In addition, because of the large number of servers that they where growing to: 1,000+, there is no way that the updates would be done by just 1 person job per OS.