I was engaged by Rackspace HR as follow up from previous recruitment process which took about 3 months before.
Interview was in two stages:
1. About 1.5h general/technical interview with Manager and Senior System admin. Both were very friendly and well prepared. Questions were well structured and with clear objectives.
According to feedback from HR, both were impressed with my answers, experience and knowledge and liked me.
2. 1h "technical" interview with two Lead Technicians (one level above Senior Sysadmins).
Both were friendly and relaxed and completely not prepared. It seemed it was last minute arrangement. As well, both were in rushing for next meeting.
There was no structure nor plan to the interview. I have to admit that I failed to answer 1st question that was pretty basic (what can cause Apache taking up 100% CPU). I am really ashamed, but it was after 1.5h pretty fast paced and exhausting interview, with just about 5min break. It was just one of those moments when due to stress mind plays tricks :-(
Sadly, it appeared that my interviewers were not prepared for such situation and had no other questions prepared. From that point interview was just random. We moved to MySQL (my initiative), but since there were no particular questions, my answers where "it depends, in such case you would consider A, in other case B, etc..." and so on.
Feedback from HR was that they were not able to asses my technical knowledge.
Please note that 3 moths before I went through whole technical assessment process, where Rackspace failed to find the question I wasn't able to answer correctly (with exception of Linux clustering that I have no experience with).
Note to Rackspace HR
Arranging job interview is not the thing that can be done last minute!
Actually, for my previous interview HR failed to secure attendance of all needed participants, leaving others surprised and embarrassed.
For this one, it was clear that "technical" guys had no enough notice to prepare and were rushing to next meeting. As well, "technical" part should be 1st one, when candidate is still fresh and rested.
