Architect Job Application: Fill & Download for Free

Depends. I’m in favor of skills-based tests rather than IQ tests. If everyone in the company is hired based on IQ score rather than skillset, it’s probably not a company that knows what it’s doing. And who makes the cut-offs? A psychologist? An HR tech? And for what? A low verbal score with off-the-charts spatial ability excludes a top architect? Test the architect on architectural skills.

For me, being a network architect or senior network engineer is a lot like playing the game Go. And a lot like the Running of the Bulls for that matter.That guy in the middle? Pretty sure he’s a network architect.The basics are pretty simple, but it’s the details and complexity and as we like to say “it’s always something”.You’re dealing with a network which is represented a several levels of detail, and you need to be keenly aware of all of them at all times. The problem may manifest as something regarding hardware, when it’s your BGP peering or your IGP or having exceeded some the size limit on state table in some intermediate router that’s really causing your problem.Ultimately, it’s about getting most of the packets from Point A to Point Z, for all combinations of A an Z. And all definitions of packet, because a packet does not a flow make - yet you can’t make flows without packets.The exposed knobs don’t really reflect the changes you need to make, and the instrumentation is shitty. And everything changes as soon as you think you have it figured out. Some new application shows up that completely blows up your traffic projections and now this new deployment of hardware and capacity is too small, or in the wrong place, or usually, both.Once you graduate into the management ranks and start to worry about Layer 8 (Finance) and Layer 9 (Politics), things get really interesting. Who do I have to play nice with to get the private peering at a place really important to me but not so important to the Other Guy? How much money am I willing to spend to save how much money - and how do I prove that to my CFO, who really doesn’t want me to spend any money? How do I find people with significant experience in a technology that just came on the market last month? Or is this another opportunity to figure it out without blowing up the network?Running a really big network is about the most exciting thing you can do. It really is, truly, “always something”

I’m Software Architect at the company I work for, and I do the “recruiter role” sometimes.To me, if you do have a GitHub account, it means you wanted to be an open source contributor in some way.If you do publish your projects, to me it means that you’re not afraid to share.Code is not the only way to contribute. You can always be helpful by reporting bugs or throwing your thoughts on issues/pull requests around.Showing your GitHub profile is always good, even if it’s almost empty.