I'm in a similar boat -- my educational background is hardware engineering, but, I've been a Linux nerd/SRE for the last 20 years. I found a great position that would be perfectly in line with what I'm doing now -- specifically managing teams of SRE's for a startup in NYC that would allow me to work remotely, but, during their "technical" interview, I was asked to "humanize" a number using any language that I chose.
Knowing that ruby has a humanize gem (and python's humanize module doesn't get as granular as they wanted their example to be), I mentioned this to the interviewer, saying, "Hey -- why would I want my development team to spend an hour re-inventing the wheel when it can already be done with a code import?" -- while showing him the gem, and providing a sample code.
Suffice to say, he wasn't interested in that, he wanted to see how I'd implement something like that...
...so, I provided my code...which was as clunky as it could be in 30 minutes -- and then was almost certain that I lost this specific position because I didn't interpret my numbers from right to left vs left to right.
Seriously -- if you've booked a hotel room in the US, there's a 50% chance you've booked it on infrastructure that I've designed and implemented from the ground up. I've led teams of 20+ SRE's around the world in a 40 billion dollar company. My references speak for themselves. The reality is that they're going to still be looking for a SRE manager position in three months, and I won't be looking anymore because I would have found something that I'm interested in (and isn't me doing a containerization of a Windows-based ERP system in 96 hours).
On the other hand, imagine if you asked a programmer to write some novel code and they said "sorry, I can't. There was no Ruby gem or SO answer for this so I don't know how"
Knowing that ruby has a humanize gem (and python's humanize module doesn't get as granular as they wanted their example to be), I mentioned this to the interviewer, saying, "Hey -- why would I want my development team to spend an hour re-inventing the wheel when it can already be done with a code import?" -- while showing him the gem, and providing a sample code.
Suffice to say, he wasn't interested in that, he wanted to see how I'd implement something like that...
...so, I provided my code...which was as clunky as it could be in 30 minutes -- and then was almost certain that I lost this specific position because I didn't interpret my numbers from right to left vs left to right.
Seriously -- if you've booked a hotel room in the US, there's a 50% chance you've booked it on infrastructure that I've designed and implemented from the ground up. I've led teams of 20+ SRE's around the world in a 40 billion dollar company. My references speak for themselves. The reality is that they're going to still be looking for a SRE manager position in three months, and I won't be looking anymore because I would have found something that I'm interested in (and isn't me doing a containerization of a Windows-based ERP system in 96 hours).