Tuesday, January 27, 2009

No Interview Means Good News?

"There’s no bad news or good news. There’s only news"
- Master Ogway, Kungfu Panda :)

Some people might think interview in CCIE lab is difficult. Some people think the opposite. And I'm one of second group. I can say this out loud because I did the 2-day CCIE lab, with interview after the first day and troubleshooting section to explain what I did, how did I find the problem, which debug command I used, two times.

For those who are in doubt about their English, think like this: I believe all CCIE proctors are aware that not everyone is native speaker. So even they decide to conduct a real interview in the lab, I guess they don't expect the candidates to have a perfect English. What matters is the ability to communicate the keywords. And with one-to-one interview that I had back there in 2001, I could use the white board drawing to put more explanation.
More drawing, less talk.

For me, it looks easier then explaining the answer in detail in writing. And again, I have done it that way. My CCIE in Routing and Switching track is the witness.

If you think writing the answer is easier, well, it depends. I know many engineers out there who don't like to write documents, who don't like to write long emails. And yet they still exist. Just as some guys I know who like to talk and explain in white board, but not writing it in detail.

Good luck, anyway.

3 comments:

Ivan Pepelnjak said...

And you forgot to mention that there are great engineers that can't write two sequential sentences that would make sense to anyone but them :)

Himawan Nugroho said...

Hi Ivan, yup I'm with you 100%. Thanks for passing by, I'm a big fan of your books. MPLS and VPN Architectures is like the second bible to me, after Halabi's Internet Routing Architecture. Sorry to put yours as second, but BGP VPNv4 came up after BGP IPv4 anyway :)

RiSing SuN---> said...

Well few of my friend go to take lab...now no interview instead a short written test with 4-5 question and one of my friend even got 96% in lab but he donot remember the header of some and the payoff is too much...he failed.....not a single story a couple of friends told the same. I think this is prettey uneffiecient way to filter out ppl. The interview was logical and perfect to filter dumps.Cisco should consider this....