Interview Notes

  • 19/12/2024
  • 3-minute read

A couple of weeks ago I had an interview with that company that I really wanted to work for. I won’t say who it was. I’ll just say that it would have been an ideal position for me. In order to prepare, I wrote a list of talking points that I anticipated could be discussed during the interview and I had them ready. Since this was an online interview, I had the privilege to have this with me. If this were a face to face interview, I would have just memorized them beforehand to the best of my ability. Since I suspect that I didn’t get the job, you might wonder if this exercise worth doing, I think think it is. It helped me to focus on what I wanted to say and not go off on weird tangents (like I sometimes do).

Here’s my list. No, I didn’t ask every single thing on this list to the interviewer; I kept it simple and narrowed it down to 3 questions.

  1. What are the current goals for the IT department?
    1. Is there an IT roadmap?
    2. What the goals that you see the for department?
    3. Are there are immediate needs from the IT department (security, SSO, etc.)
    4. How many people are in the department currently?
    5. Is there a specific budget for IT needs?
  2. Understand the current IT workflow.
    1. How do IT requests get created?
    2. Is there a IT response SLA?
    3. How do employees get training on new software and procedures?
  3. Take inventory of the current state of the IT department.
    1. Is everything organized?
    2. Is there proper documentation on hardware, software, and networking?
  4. Address automation.
    1. Is automation (ansible, etc.) being used or does that need to be implemented?
    2. If it is being used, is the process documented?
  5. Address security.
    1. What is being done to address IT security?
    2. Are there any specific security needs that you have (credit card processing, etc.)
    3. Are there any major security flaws that must be addressed?
  6. Address any lack of understanding on my part.
    1. If technologies are being used that I am not immediately familiar with, what are there and what do I need to do to bring myself up to speed? (more of a question for myself after the interview)
    2. What options are there for training or at least self-training time?

As you can guess, this job was for a System Administrator / DevOps / IT Manager role. I read the job description a fiew times before writing this list. Having worked in that field for a long time, I know what cracks tend to be around and what might need to be shored up. My goal isn’t just to look good to the interviewer, it’s also to interview them. Is this the kind of place that I would feel comfortable working in? My hope is that being invested in the interview shows that I would ne invested in their company. I don’t want another stopping stone job in my career, I want a place to grow.

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