I sent somebody close to me the response I wrote for a senior Unix administrator job in New York.
The job is supposed to be full-time and on site. I got them to consider part-time remote work until I can move, with the possibility of relocation later if it works. It is an odd arrangement, but it gets me into the conversation.
I want the move. I am really not where I want to be in my life as far as living it goes.
Professionally, the story looks better. I am the IT director at Beatport, running the systems and team behind a fast-growing music store. I can answer the technical requirements with work I have actually done.
The company asked for Unix provisioning, upgrades, troubleshooting, and repair. I could talk about Linux, BSD, AIX, Windows, Solaris, package management, Kickstart, and Cobbler. They asked for virtualization. I listed VMware Server, ESX, ESXi, Xen, Virtuozzo, KVM, and GSX, all technologies I had deployed and managed in production.
They wanted development and QA environments, performance testing, incident management, security, capacity planning, runbooks, storage, scripting, and collaboration with application teams. I had used those tools and processes in production.
In my response I described Beatport as a LAMP environment with more than 150 CentOS and Red Hat servers, plus network appliances, databases, storage, development, and staging systems. I wrote that the storage under management was more than 200 terabytes. Those are my counts today, not audited company figures.
For every requirement they posted, I wrote an answer underneath it. Some answers were a paragraph. A few were simply "Yes" or "Every day."
In the private note I wrote that I have debt, no degree, too many headaches, and a brain that works best when I can write things on paper. I was happy that the technical answers did not require any elaboration or lying.
The career was moving faster than the rest of my life. I was still trying to move.
The response is long. For every requirement they posted, I put my answer directly underneath it. Some are paragraphs. A few are simply "Yes" or "Every day."
I am not sending a formal resume yet. I want to know whether there is enough of a fit and whether the remote arrangement is real before I turn this into a normal application. What I sent instead is a direct account of the work: the systems, the scale, the tools, and the responsibilities I handle every day.
I do not know if this gets me to New York. I have made the request and given them plenty to test.