HR Takes a Technical Interview!

I got a call from an HR at Akamai. The interview was supposed to be to know my "skills and experiences". The HR called me and started with an expected question: "How is this position related to your experience and skill-set?"

Right after I finished answering this, she asked me the "difference between virtual and pure virtual functions". Even though I am pretty good at all these, I paused for a while trying to figure out why the lady was asking me this question. After I answered, she went on to ask networking questions!

She started asking me Linux commands (How dumber can this get?). For example, "What is the command to find network latency between two servers?" I answered a few, but not all.

No, this is not a system admin job! With just a simple Google search, I was able to know all the answers after the interview. I wonder if I don't know even a single command (hypothetically), but was an excellent programmer, would it have made a positive or a negative difference to the company.

Dear Managers at Akamai, invest some of your resources for hiring. It is these people who will be working with you. Whether the engineer knows the commands or not does not make any difference; all that matters is if he has technical knowledge, can code, and has a good track record!

I haven't heard back from the HR cum C++ coder cum networking engineer yet. At this point, I don't even want a job from them who don't give a damn about recruiting new engineers.

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