LogFAQs > #976334133

CableZL posted...

I was about 3.5 years into doing tech support. I thought I was hot shit and believed I was ready to move on to a networking job. I landed an interview to work in a network operations center at a company in north Austin, TX. I walked into the job interview pretty confident that I was going to get the job. The interview started, and he began asking me some basic technical questions.

Question 1: Have you ever heard of the OSI model?
My answer: No

Question 2: When you have a subnet mask of 255.255.255.252, how many usable IPs are there?
Me: 1

There were no more technical questions after that. I knew just from that fact that I had bombed the interview hard. After it was over, I sat in my car outside the building for about an hour and was incredibly angry at myself. It was a soul crushing experience. It was at this point I realized that, while I had been doing very well at my ISP tech support job, I had been spinning my wheels and was not setting myself up for the future.

Looking back at it now, I needed that to happen. If I hadn't done that interview, I probably would have continued doing tech support for a lot longer than I did.

So what? Interviewers really like asking about that stuff. Ask yourself this, those hard tech questions in that interview, you would have used that stuff all the time if you were hired there?