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I haven't gotten a tattoo yet but I turned in my notice with the state agency that I've been working for since 2005. Yesterday I went through a painful hour long orientation conference call with Computer Sciences Corporation http://www.csc.com/. This company is hyooge in my field with 90k employees worldwide.



I'll be working remote for Sun Microsystems. I was recruited for PPM development and told them from the start that I didn't know UNIX. They were fine with it. Or so they said.

I manage IT Governance.
HHSC (where I work'd) uses a sox compliant application called PPM to stay clean.
This app is where I have lived for 3 years.
I applied for a job to work at Sun.
I want this job bad.

I made it through the first rounds of interviews and then scheduled my technical interview. Sun being Sun, of course use PPM on UNIX. No big deal, right? I should have this baby in the bag. RONG. There were 6 sections and here's my score:
UNIX OS 0/6 = 0%
Oracle DB Concepts 6/9 = 67%
PPM Server Admin 7.75/10 = 78%
PPM Development 8.5/10 = 85%
Support & Troubleshooting 1/1 = 100%
The interviewer said that no one has ever asked for the score before. Before me, that is. If I take a test, even if its movie trivia, I want to know my score. Also she said no one has ever submitted a procedure in their answer before either. She said she was impressed. I bet she wasn't.

Sample Unix questions were "what does ssh mean?" I said I didn't know. Its secure shell - instead of telnet which isn't secure. "What command would you use to find an owner of a file", I said I didn't know. Obviously from my score, I said that to every single meep question so I'll quit repeating it.

That was painful for both of us. Again, I told them from the beginning I had 0 knowledge of Unix. They said they wanted candidates who were strong developers in PPM. Now we enter the database section and I'm starting to panic. Even though I know this meep pretty well, I have tanked so far. I start pinging my DBA friend like mad. Question one "What is a deadlock". I said I didn't know what it was but it sounded bad. She laughed, that's good right [oh god]? When I asked the DBA...

[16:19] HeatherKeithRP: whats a deadlock - on oracle database
[16:19] randy68: it's when Heather meep blocks Randy trying to flirt with Megan
[16:20] HeatherKeithRP: syntax for adding row to a table
[16:20] HeatherKeithRP: insert into
[16:20] randy68: insert Randy into Megan's Thoughts where Heather=Nice
[16:20] randy68: no rows found*
[16:21] HeatherKeithRP: my technical interview is hinging on your libido

Next, name some database objects - nailed it. What's the difference between a procedure and a trigger, I think that's where I got partial points because she said she disagreed when I said it was basically the same thing as a procedure except a procedure is externally or manually called. whatevs. Next question 'does a procedure return a value?' nope. shwing! "What syntax do you use to insert a record into a table" ..uh, that's ...you shouldn't really do that, should you? She said sometimes they have to. Yikes. Then there was some obscure question about troubleshooting some blasted log that ONLY THEY USE on the oracle concurrent program thing which was a big goose egg. I said I don't know for the next one, because when I asked my DBA friend, he was too busy laughing to answer...

[16:31] HeatherKeithRP: how do you find the process_id of the ppm process in unix
[16:31] randy68: hahaha
[16:31] HeatherKeithRP: come on!
[16:31] HeatherKeithRP: hurry
[16:31] HeatherKeithRP: i'm stalling

So that's another gong. She explained all about ps command. Then my buddy got serious and started answering questions faster than a pack of dogs on a 3 legged cat. This is the PPM Server Admin section (wtf) and goes a little sumpin like this:

[16:34] HeatherKeithRP: what ppm command do you run to see if server is running
[16:35] randy68: kStatus.sh
[16:35] HeatherKeithRP: you meeping rock

Start server, stop server, kStart.sh kStop.sh she said "good, good! you can also use kStop.sh -now to make it stop right now". At this point my budding is asking if the chick who's interviewing me is cute and telling me this should be his job since he knows the meep COLD. Next it was 'tell me what the following scripts are for - kconfig.sh, kRunCacheManager.sh, kUpdateHtml.sh and that meeps gravy, man. I was the meep on these - on my own. But those 3 commands are the extent of my unix knowledge.

Next section is PPM Development and this is my bailiwick mother-truckers. I kicked meep (don't scroll up for my score). Support and Troubleshooting, meep. I've been in IT since the internet it was living in Al Gore's garage. The final section was WRITTEN FFS. She had to review my answers and give me a score later.

Here's the written part gag:

On Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 5:08 PM, Karyn @sun.com wrote: Hi Heather, Please answer questions #1 - 3 by email and answer #4 - 5 over the phone. 1. Write an UPDATE statement to update the PPM users table so that email address with '@abc.com' is updated with '@xyz.com'. Do this only for enabled user accounts.

CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE user_email IS

CURSOR c_email_suffix IS
SELECT ku.user_id, kc.user_id
FROM kcrt_contacts kc, knta_users ku
WHERE ku.user_id = kc.user_id
AND ku.enabled_flag = 'Y;

l_count := 0;
l_count_updates number := 0;

BEGIN
SELECT count(user_id)
into l_count
FROM knta_users
where email_address is NOT null;

dbms_output.put_line('The number of users to update: ' || l_count);

FOR cur_email_suffix IN c_email_suffix LOOP
update knta_users
set email_address = replace (email_address, substr(email_address, INSTR(email_address, '@')), '@xyz.com')
where user_id IN (select user_id
FROM knta_users_v
WHERE enabled_flag = 'Y');

l_count_updates := l_count_updates + SQL%ROWCOUNT;

IF l_count <> l_count_updates THEN
ROLLBACK;
ELSE
COMMIT;
END IF;

END user_email;

THE REMAINING WRITTEN ANSWERS AND PHONE ANSWER QUESTIONS WERE OMITTED FOR EXTREME GAYNESS.

After that debacle (and my desperate flailing displayed in answer #1, above) I knew I'd blown it.

Then I got the offer.

I've been knackered with conference calls with the Sun team (pictured here in an offsite mtg)


and they're all excited to have me on board.

The blond is my new boss and she ended our last call with this little nugget, "I'd like you to not let on that you are not ..er.. an expert in UNIX". So I start on October 1st and will need to learn a new operating system by then.