Interview with 2 different groups at Apple, and one manager from the third group. Everything went well.
10:00 Phil (apple.com) Manager/Not, what is “senior” Describing the three groups apple.com: small group, doing a bit of everything. On-call often, but less drama. Static site, more dynamic-ness coming soon. Quiet. About 250 servers. Documentation Role of apple.com Exposure to load balancers
10:30 Gary (mobileme) mobileme: 1500 mail servers (guido’s team), 2000 everything else servers (Phil’s team). New effort, web2.0 “application-like”. Mail, contacts, calendar, to phone. Integration, qa, staging. About 50% effort on new projects.
11:00 Don (apple.com) Apple.com
11:30 Jim (apple.com) New to apple.com team. Documentation/training/info sharing (e.g. new filer)
12:00 Lunch, Ed, Phil, Jim
1:00 Ed (itunes)
1:30 Mary (itunes) Manager/IC role, what I want to do Env. is growing/scaling challenges General knowledge (wide) vs. specialized (deep), bit of each. Crosstraining, subject areas (e.g. AltaVista training plan) Project vs. services focus (e.g. sfly/reactive)
2:00 Ed, Hung (itunes) Storage, what i’ve been exposed to http 301? 500? How do cookies work? (e.g. authentication problem across old/new domain name) Cool threads? (no experience) Threading in general? (e.g. global variables vs. passed reference) Automation (described mmcopy) Camaraderie, strong relationships, sharing knowledge Confidence, contribution Projects vs. services. Vision & resources. (e.g. sfly)
2:30 Bin, Alan (itunes) How do you start ilom? start /SP/SystemInfo/Console? Describe how jumpstart works (I was vague on this) Difference between inode and vnode? (described inode, and said I didn’t know what vnode was) Apple.com: people, excitement, scaling, lots of subject areas. Sfly morale issue: what could I have done differently? (informal/social networking could have been worked more aggressively)
3:00 Louis, Sean, Louis (itunes) why leaving? Strengths? (Perl, automation, nagios) Mgr vs. tech HW/hands on ok? Documentation? (described sfly wiki, hierarchy) How to deal with different mounts on different servers (automount, fstab sync, cnames for filers by function?)
3:30 Mark, Jess (itunes) Nagios Sendmail, qmail, postfix SAN Sun Spam/AV (chat about spam assassin, barracuda, postfix, rdns, SPF) Mysql
4:00 Nizam (itunes) Feeling for the groups? (Leaning toward itunes) Asked what the big challenges for this team will be for the next year? (Nizam: growth in size, scaling the architecture)
4:30 Dan (recruiter) Benefits How Apple handles multiple offers