Sometimes technical interviews are “fun”, other times they are grueling and punishing. I meet all types of systems engineers during my long career in both the corporate and government space.
Yesterday was truly nice. I enjoy meeting with IT Directors, Site Reliability Engineers (SRE), and DevOps Engineers who are not out to either grill you or prove their superiority over you, but to genuinely probe your knowledge, logic, experience, and temperament to see if you will be aĀ good fit for their team (and vice-versa).
There may be “safety” in large corporations and government agencies, but there is a sense of comfort, comradery, and technical brilliance in startups. Working for a 50-person company might take me out of my traditional comfort zone, but I enjoy working alongside engineers who possess a clear sense of quality, ethics, conscience, and comradery.