The audience for this story is Polytechnic University students. My goal is not to show the way to a specific solution. It’s up to you to decide where you want to go, but I will give you food for thought while touching on some very serious questions.
I believe it was in 2012. After wearing out the seat of my pants sitting at the desk of one company for three years, the devil pushed me into conflict with my superiors. I left for a US outsource company that had a contract with the UK antivirus developer Symantec, then to nowhere because the contract was transferred to India.
I was going to a job interview at the Polytechnic University knowing that I didn’t have any chance. I don’t want to promote myself in the wrong way, but I am not a perfect citizen. I didn’t do Army service for health reasons but most importantly, I don’t have a degree nor do I have the desire to get one. The role consisted of maintaining the computer systems in two auditoriums. (I had never been there and in fact I never got to see what was inside these classrooms.) They told me I would need to get there before the first class and set everything up, as students tend to break things, and I would need to revert devices to the default settings.
The interview was at the Vedineev Research Institute in Gzhdatskaya street. I was given a security badge and after passing through a turnstile we went to the left on the first floor, then up the stairs to the office. Her first question was: “Could I record our discussion because I am working on a diploma in psychology?” I knew that a word is not a sparrow: once it flies away, you can’t catch it, so you need to be responsible for your words. You can not record everything about a person; even on video it’s impossible to get the whole picture of the individual, so the audio recording didn’t concern me. I gave my permission. The recorder however was only the second most annoying thing. The first was her seated posture. Only a few days later I found out she was a harpist, and I might have seen her in the city where she played her Celtic Harp as a street musician. Now she is a teacher in Luxemburg. My mates laughed at me: “Was it the first time a woman did this for you?” Her weary glances out the window allayed any suspicions I had of any non-professional interest.
I don’t understand human resources managers. Don’t you realize that an interviewee might prepare their responses in advance? If you want to know about me – I can choose to take any side in discussions, not only those with which I agree. So it was easy to go through the first interview, and I was invited to the second a few days later. It was about IT, and with a university teacher. We talked a lot about Linux and Unix OS. Even today, ten years later, I can say these are hard topics for me, and it was a surprise that I passed the interview; I’m guessing that was because the teacher didn’t have enough qualifications. There were questions about soft skills, like communication and patience, for example: “What are you going to do if some student tries to steal a mouse from the classroom?” I replied that I wouldn’t take it back by force, that I would just tell the dean and that was the right answer.
I sat in Dean Zegzhda’s office a few days later. The harpist HR manager sat nearby with her backpack on her knees this time. I imagined two possibilities – either she didn’t trust her coworkers, or she had another recorder inside. I told them the reasons I left my previous jobs had to do with world crises and problems inside Russia, all of which were connected to actions by the United States knowing these would coincide with the dean’s point of view. Another issue was that the university had IBM Blade servers, and I really wanted to gain the experience of maintaining them. This experience would give me skills for future employment, and it would be interesting and enjoyable for me. But the dean said I would never get to work with this kind of hardware and added that nobody would care about my wishes, nor help me in acquiring new knowledge; that I would need to solve everything myself. Even today I cannot figure out why he chose this approach to recruiting. It’s weird even for Russian companies. So when I left the office I felt that this job could blow up in my face. It was a sunny summer day, on which Border Guards Day is celebrated. I decided to distract myself by thinking about something else and so called to congratulate my friend who served in the Border Guards department of the FSB.
A few days later I was in another interview for a company that produced simulators for amusement parks. I thought about the dean the whole time. The university HR manager called me repeatedly before and after this interview at 10 minute intervals, but I didn’t take her calls. Afterwards I called her back and she told me the salary was $1500 per month (good for then in Russia) and there were free lectures, on the one hand, but I would never get to use the new hardware plus the very blunt university teacher’s phrase, “I often see sysadmins attending my lectures.”. Where are they now? Even today, although I can’t recall it verbatim, I still remember the sense of her reply: “It’s good that you know how to make a decision.”. I turned them down.
A few months later I saw they were looking for admins again, then half a year later, then in a year, and so on but at half the original salary. I even sent my resume again – if they had been willing to let me work with those servers, I would have been happy to work for them. But I was just trolling them, of course.
Ten years later, summer 2021:. I had a plan to attempt 4-6 interviews per month. It was not my idea (I really appreciate that remarkable IT specialist who suggested I it.) to use interviews as an education platform for myself). I got a lot of information from preparing for them. I didn’t check all the online information about the companies I was going to visit – it would have required an enormous amount of time to read about them all because there were hundreds of vacancies. The address for the next interview I received 12 hours before the appointment was in Gzhdatskaya Street, the same as ten years before. I guessed it might have been in the same building, but it was another company with another name, and it specialized in building hydroelectric power stations. It didn’t appear to have any connection with the university.
After again being issued with a security badge, I went up the stairs, but this time to the right side of the building. The position called for an engineer who could maintain network security, and transition foreign software to domestic under a government protocol. That’s everything I managed to glean from the interview. The head of the IT Department showed me the server room and the engineer’s personal office. I was surprised to see all wires in the hallway were exposed and easily accessible to sabotage. The server room had a flimsy door like I have in my home washroom. There wasn’t any security system, only a woman at the building’s front door. I perfectly remember the dean’s phrase: “The sysadmin before you wrote on social media that he never worked with such educated and clever users, more clever than he.” Every summer they had a quest, which I called “hack a server and win a gift (Macbook Air), or throw a stone at a bank’s windows and escape, and you will be hired.” The object was to hack the system of the company at which I was being interviewed.
The day after the interview the following appeared: “Saint-Petersburg company NeoBit comes under the sanctions of the US Treasury Department due to a hacking attack on the US bank system”.
So, I posted this story on CyberForum.ru one month after the interview. It was no surprise for me when they called and offered me a job, except in another position.
