A recruiter from Sunnyvale reached out and conducted a basic tech phone screen, covering VMware questions and miscellaneous other items. They scheduled a three-hour onsite interview. This was a waste of time, as a thirty-minute phone screen with the in-office team could have been sufficient, skipping the back-and-forth one-upmanship.

Mostly, the team appears to be comprised of disenchanted IBM employees and former Cisco TAC technicians. As expected, the TAC technicians seem to consider themselves the ultimate authorities in technology. That might be true if they could venture beyond asking only network-related questions.

The meeting with the Director at the conclusion of the interview was telling. He described not wanting to have a stable of "primadonnas and arrogant engineers," as he had seen at other companies. Sorry to break it to you, but you already have that right under your nose.

You won't attract any talent when your staff are only interested in being skillset-heavy and socially inept. It is "customer support" after all.

Esoteric commands or odd scenarios are geared towards tripping a candidate up, versus actually determining the value of a skillset. Interviewers need to adopt a "whole person" approach instead of sticking to the one and only specialty a particular interviewer knows.

Nutanix has a unique product offering, so it's safe to say that most candidates coming through the door don't know the product line. How does anyone get a technical job and not know the product line for a new company? They learn.

In order to land the job, they need to display the technical aptitude so they can get that chance.