The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Rackspace Technology in Feb 2012
Interview
I applied to RackSpace through an ad on their website, the next day I received an email from a recruiter in San Antonio asking to setup a phone screen interview. The next day I was screened on basic Linux questions including ports, layouts of the system, some basic MySQL commands and a short scenario (basically just to weed out people who don't know what they say they do.)
The next day I received an email from the recruiter telling me that they would love to setup a break fix interview with one of their current systems admins. The interview consisted of me sshing into a machine, running screen, and the interviewer asking me to accomplish tasks (naturally that didn't work) - then having me walk through step by step and fix the issues at hand and explain why I was handling them in that fashion. The break fix was fairly in-depth and varied from basic Linux commands to MySQL connectivity issues. Over all the interview was extremely knowledgeable and extremely friendly. The break-fix was an excellent test of skills and the thought process of the candidate.
About 3 days later I was called again by my recruiter and asked if I would like to come down to San Antonio for an in-person interview. Despite being one of the craziest and longest days of my life, the interview at RackSpace was amazing and very in depth. It consisted of 3 rounds of two interviewers. The questions ranged from hypothetical issues to Linux commands, to ethics and personality.
Advice to people interviewing? Be yourself, be honest with what you don't know and DO NOT forget your interviewers names! The people at RackSpace are awesome and extremely knowledgeable. Good luck!
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Bob cannot access the MySQL database, please give him access to database test.
I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Rackspace Technology (San Antonio, TX) in Feb 2012
Interview
The interview was given by two gentleman, who apparently were last second substitutions, who were both very nice and obviously intelligent. They were wearing blue jeans and t-shirts and were so informal and relaxed that it was almost off-putting. The interview was almost exclusively a personality assessment with some questions about basic linux ideas thrown in.
I am giving the interview a difficulty ranking of "difficult" strictly because I thought I killed the interview(I was extremely excited for the chance to work at such a well reputed company), but I didnt get the job.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
"What are your favorite command to use at the linux command line"
I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Rackspace Technology (San Antonio, TX) in Dec 2011
Interview
I applied online then received an email from my recruiter to schedule a phone interview. I had about 5 interviews total :
- Initial screening : Personality, background and basic Linux questions (ports, regexp, commands), the recruiter was clearly reading from a paper to match the answers! The interviewer was very friendly and told me that I passed to round 2 right after we were done.
- Technical break-fix interview : Slightly more in-depth interview with people who will be on my shift, I was given ssh access to a VM in a somewhat broken state that I had to fix and perform a number of admin tasks on. The interview lasted about an hour and was with two rackers. They also had some personality type questions for me.
- Last round : They flew me down to San Antonio to have 3 sets of interviews, 1 hour each, in one day. I also met with the two rackers who interviewed me last time! During the in-house interview, sometimes, we would get distracted by the music and dancing of other coworkers. Some of them were in the middle of a paper rolls battle behind their cubes, it was very amusing to watch!
The hole process was quite engaging and I had a good time and met some very awesome and friendly people. I could see they were happy to be at work!
Two weeks after the last interview, I received an offer from my recruiter.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Can you write the code to generate the Fibonacci sequence?