EDIT: Hi, Tiffany from 2019 here, I wrote this a year ago and never published it. Here is my experience interviewing at Red Hat while I was a computer engineering student at the University of Maryland in 2017. It was surreal getting to go to GHC with other Red Hatters so soon after joining, (and once again to do technical screenings in 2019). I wanted to write about my experiences not as a full-time associate at Red Hat but in the shoes of myself when I still figuring out where I wanted to work coming out of college. So without further ado…
During the 2018 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC), 22,000 attendees flooded the George Brown Convention Center in Houston Texas to network, learn and share information in celebration of women technologists. Students had the opportunity to pack their schedules with conversations, sessions, interviews, and a large list of companies to visit at the expo hall. For students at GHC, the expo hall also doubled as a career fair. Recruiters, engineers, scientists, and technologists were stationed in company booths to talk about their workplace. They screened resumes, interviewed candidates and shared their experiences. This year for the first time, I was able to attend GHC, not as a student seeking a position, but as an employee of Red Hat.
There’s no mistaking the Red Hat booth, even on the crowded expo floor. The first thing you notice is the bright Red Hat red and logo with the famous Shadowman. Best of all, smiling Red Hatters eager to tell you what life at Red Hat is like and, most importantly, learn more about you.
In my last year attending GHC as a student, I was drawn to the Red Hat booth with a number of attendees gathered around bins filled with packets of flower seeds, and booth walls decorated in Post-It notes spelling “innovation.”
I knew about Red Hat Enterprise Linux already but was more excited to hear about the day-to-day life of a Red Hatter when the recruiter approached me. It hadn't been as easy conversing with people at other booths, often the booths would be too crowded to stand and talk to anyone from the company, or the recruiters would be faced inward with conversations between each other.
At the time I had been interviewing for software engineering roles at other companies, but I wasn't quite sure if software engineering was what I wanted to do. It was definitely the most common path coming from university, where most graduating students I knew were aiming to become a software engineer. I also knew coming out of a few internships that no reasonable starting salary would pay enough for me to agree to work for a company where I would not be happy.
So I told the recruiter I had been seeking out alternatives to software engineering work to get insight into what I would enjoy most. “Great," was the recruiters’ ecstatic reply. She proceeded to ask if I had an interest in consulting after looking at my resume which stated an interest in full-time opportunities. Funny enough, consulting was an alternative to software engineering I was considering at the time. I knew that I had a knack for technology and sharing what I knew in order to solve problems. Next thing I know she's texting another recruiter to schedule an interview slot to learn more about the position. Luckily they had a single slot left for me on the last day of the conference.
At Red Hat we do many things differently, interviewing at GHC was one of those things. I came into the interview thinking I could predict the flow, I would talk about my resume and my experiences before asking my prepared questions related to culture, process, and organization.
Instead, we had a conversational interview with an introduction to the company, and questions that dove into my interests and passions related to technology. Red Hat cares not only about how much you know, but also about your talents and your passions. We believe that associates at Red Hat should be at the intersection of all three, enabling talent and passion with the necessary domain knowledge to succeed. The interview was around 25 minutes, not enough time to make a decision or compare prospects yet, but enough to pique my interest.
Friday after GHC Red Hat sent me a HackerRank invite. HackerRanks are timed (typically anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours) quizzes measuring technical aptitude used to screen candidates. A good score may move you forward, a bad one may end the process. Some comprise generic questions that can be practiced through Leetcode.com or studied through in the book Cracking The Coding Interview.
Red Hat’s HackerRank quiz was one of many that had been sent to me from my time interviewing during the hiring season. In typical Red Hat fashion, I was blown away by how different the coding challenge was compared to other HankerRanks. It was actually fun. At the end of the challenge was a bonus challenge that involved completing a task after SSH-ing into a VM with RHEL installed.
More than two weeks later, after completing the HackerRank submission, Red Hat invited me onsite to the headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina. Due to a busy semester, I decided that this would be the last visit I would do to a company before making a decision on what offer to accept. As part of the visit to Raleigh, Red Hat hosted a casual networking dinner the night before the interviews so that candidates could meet people from the consulting organization. This was another chance to find out what consulting at Red Hat was like and to see Red Hatters interact with one another.
I learned that fellow Red Hatters cared about making a difference and that part of Red Hat's culture is to embrace "open collaboration." Being an open organization means that ideas can come from anywhere. Red Hat thrives on the ideas of others, and individuals have the willingness to adopt feedback and new ideas. After the final visit to Raleigh, I returned to classes eagerly awaiting the final decision. Red Hat was my choice during the flood of opportunities that came with that hiring season.
