I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Western Digital (San Jose, CA) in Nov 2024
Interview
The interview process was quick, but the interviewer in the first round was very unprofessional and arrogant. He was based in India and wanted someone who could work both IST and Pacific Time zones—essentially, 60-80 hours per week.
I have strong foundational knowledge of routing and switching, as this has been my primary focus for the past 12 years. Despite being able to answer most of the network fundamentals questions, the interviewer remarked that while I may have a good grasp of the fundamentals, they were looking for an engineer with more hands-on experience. I found this highly unprofessional; I’ve never had an interviewer make such remarks before. I possess both fundamental knowledge and hands-on experience with several vendors, including Cisco, Arista, and Palo Alto. It seemed as though this interviewer was not interested in hiring someone from the U.S.; perhaps they were looking for someone in India who could align with their time zone.
I don’t understand why a company like WD would outsource managerial roles if they require staff to work Pacific Time hours. There’s a wealth of talent here in the U.S. to meet such requirements. Based on my experience, even if I had been offered the role, I would have declined it. The working hours would clearly exceed 40 per week because syncing with a manager in India would require working off-hours daily to provide updates.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Routing and switching fundamentals, along with BGP, OSPF, and firewalls, are areas where I have strong expertise. I’m not sure what kind of hands-on knowledge the interviewer was looking for, as he didn’t ask any operational questions, such as commands on the CLI or navigating the web interface.