I saw a job posting on door64.com for QA Operations Engineer. I sent a cover letter to the contact listed:

I am contacting you about the job posting entitled QA Operations Engineer on Door64.com. I have recent experience in this line of work. Specifically:

– I have 20+ years of experience in software development, integration and eating.
– I am familiar with SVN, CVS, Bitkeeper, Perforce and git.
– I have experience not only maintaining a Jenkins instance, but extending it with a custom plugin.
– I have much experience with shell, Perl, Tcl, ruby…
– I have developed large, complex process flows.
– I have experience with Amazon Web Services.
– I have experience with multiple SQL systems, including MySQL, MS SQL, and postgresql.
– I have a BA in Computer Science from Rice University.

Please consider me for your position. There is no place to post a resume on this automated form; feel free to contact me so I can send it to you.

Yes, I had 20+ years of eating software. Oops.

I was asked to send my resume to the hiring manager. The response started, “I am thrilled to see your resume for this position. You have many of the skills that we are seeking…” and “You would be working with me where we are responsible for QA, Manual/Automated Test, Build/Deploy, Continuous Integration , Managing Amazon Web Services infrastructure and other odds and ends.”

After I talked with the hiring manager on the phone, I got an email from the “EVP of Products”:

[Hiring Manager] told me that you guys had a good conversation today regarding our opening at Noesis.  I thought I would reach out to you and see if we could meet for a coffee so I could give you a little more background on what we are trying to do here at Noesis and how you might be able to help us.  Let me know if you have any availability.

Noesis was a company that helped building management get infrastructure in place to finance things like HVAC, or furniture buildout, or many other services and goods that an office might need.

We met at the Starbucks on Anderson near Mopac, and talked about what they needed. They were trying to get serious about quality, and needed somebody to oversee test direction on their full stack.

That meeting seemed to go well; the EVP was not a hands-on guy, but evidently I knew enough to pass his sniff test. The hiring manager then had me come in for a day of interviews.

None of them were technical challenges or puzzles; they were all about management and strategy. I had good conversations, and I felt pretty good.

One week later, I had not heard anything, so I sent a note asking if there had been any resolution on the position. I got back this:

This email was actually typed up when I received yours.

I am sorry to say that you were not selected for this position.   Your experience and skills will surely be put to good use somewhere, but we have decided to try out some offshore resources for automation and focus on the DevOPS in Q4/Q1.   I did get the following today, maybe you could pursue this.  It looks pretty interesting and is located in NW Austin somewhere.  I will forward the actual email so you have the full email reply address.

Thanks again for coming in.

Yep, rather than hiring a new manager, they completely changed direction. That’s a familiar story.

Besides, I wouldn’t want to work for a company where my management chain all used two spaces after a period. That’s just nuts.

More on the follow up later, though. It turned out to be quite interesting…