I received an invitation to chat via LinkedIn, and the discussion went well. We then scheduled phone interviews.

I was told very clearly that there were two flavors of COE: those with systems experience, and those with a lot of Java development background. I am extremely strong in the former, and not very strong in the latter, although I've written C, Perl, Ruby, and Shell scripts.

My first four interviews went great. In fact, I got the feeling I was actually suggesting better ways of doing things for some of the interviewers. Maybe not, but I was at the very least easily up to the task, and then some.

Then came the last interview. First, the interviewer was more than 20 minutes late, with no explanation or message that he was running behind.

This interviewer kept going on about Java development. I had been crystal clear with the recruiter and all the previous interviewers that Java development was not my forte. I am an outstanding Systems Engineer, experienced in almost all operating systems. Again, that was understood, and all the previous folks said, 'Hey, of course. We are looking for Systems Engineers, and we have others who are on the Dev side of things. We work together.' Perfect!

But this interviewer kept asking about Java. I repeatedly and politely said, 'I am not a Java developer. I can read the code, follow it along, and do some instrumentation, but I am not the person you want to develop an enterprise solution.' Yet, he kept pressing the issue.

But here's where things went south, I think...

He asked me about a couple of things regarding shell scripting. It went like this:

Q: Let's say you have a variable named X and you assign the value 5 to it. How do you show that result in your script? A: echo $X

Q: OK, now let's say you have a variable Y, and you assign it the value of X. How do you show it? A: echo $Y (which he said was wrong).

I said, "Hmm, if it's good for X, then it's good for Y." I politely explained this and my understanding, and why Y would also equal 5 (Y = $X).

Then he said, 'I mean, if you assign the 'letter' X to the variable Y, then how do you show it?'

Seriously? In any case, the answer is the same – do you assign X, or $X? Pretty simple stuff, and I surely hoped that this was not in question.

About five minutes after that, I received the automatic 'Sorry, we have nothing that matches your skills' email.

I must say I was very surprised and somewhat saddened, as I had spent a lot of time researching Cloudera and had a great time in all the previous interviews. I just don't know why this last one went so far south so fast. Maybe the interviewer was having a bad day? You never know what someone else is going through.

But the result was the automatic blow-off email just minutes later, and I suppose that's what bothered me most.

It still sounds like a great place to work, and I don't have any hard feelings. Things happen for a reason, and maybe there will be another opportunity.

If you assign the value of X to variable Y, how do you show the results? (The real question was in assigning the "letter" X to Y.)