Closer...

You see in my first phone interview we never ended up discussing the actual position. We talked about what I like to do, programming and system administration, but not much about the actual position. The interview packet had a job title Technical Operations Engeneer, so I just told them what I knew, that I was supposed to be working on my friend's team.

I was asked to write regular expressions for progressively complex data validation situations on a white board. When I got to validating a time/date field I said, "Look it could take me several days to write a working set of regular expressions for this, and I wouldn't do it. There are at least two libraries in CPAN written specifically to do this validation better than I could ever do, with C optimized code. If I found my employee trying to write such a thing, I would have serious questions about his decision making abilities." It was a a bit of a bold move, and I wasn't quite sure how it would come off, but it's really how I felt and I've never been very good at keeping my mouth shut.

Some of the other interviewers asked for hypothetical solutions to hypothetical problems. I found it very frustrating as I have a need to know everything about a system before making a change to it. My years of experience have taught me that some small change can have a big effect on the system you were unaware of. So I was kind of defensive about those sort of questions, System Administrators don't like to speculate, we like to engineer.

I was asked how to reconfigure a Cisco interface from memory, and got stumped in another "hypothetical" trouble shooting situation. "A guy's internet connection stops working." I had all the right troubleshooting steps up to the point that I couldn't figure out what the problem was:
Your coworker moved his network drop to the wrong VLAN...
Bah, I fired that guy so long ago for just that sort of thing. My networking room was locked for a reason. This is where hypothetical problem solving sucks for me, I have a well defined map of how things work, where everything is, what it does, and apply a problem to that specific domain. The cause of the problem could not have happened in the environment I was solving for...

So the experience was a bit frazzling, I wasn't sure how well I did and I didn't hear anything back for over a week and I started to worry. I called the HR guy working on my case, and he hadn't gotten any feedback. I started calling every day to get (lack of) progress reports. Finally today, I got a call from the decision maker, and he asked me some more challenging questions.

He disclosed to me that my other interviews went quite well as did this one, and they would be putting together an offer. I will celebrate when I sign on the dotted line, but it's looking closer...