A Good Prospect Down the Drain

So I interviewed for a position in the financial district in SF. It wasn’t a “dream job” like KEI and hotornot.com, but it did seem pretty sweet, and I was excited about it. The position was for a system administrator working mostly with Unix and working with some Windows. I got the lead through a recruiter.

I interviewed there on Friday, and the interview went pretty well. He assigned me a quiz to complete at home and I really enjoyed it. It had one question where I had to run nmap against his network and use other tools to find out as much as I could about his network. I spent a good deal of time on Friday taking this quiz.

I evidently did pretty well on the quiz, because he assigned me the next task – installing Apache and Tomcat on his Ubuntu GNU/Linux server. I didn’t ace this one, but I did well enough…

He asked me to come in today for a second interview. From the sounds of things, I was very close to getting an offer. Well, I got a call yesterday from the recruiter, who told me that the CEO now didn’t want to pay the recruiter fees…after, AFTER they had already agreed to those fees.

So here I am, missing out on a job because some big-shot CEO somewhere decides that he’s going to change his mind. It wouldn’t have been so bad except for the time that I spent completing the assignments, and going to the interview. Ten hours of my time, and I can’t even be judged by my qualifications for the job.

Oh well – several months of CCNP studying, here I come! Last day here at GuardianEdge is tomorrow.