The interview was for the Magento product with a hiring Manager in Culver City, CA. The interviewer started out with saying that even though they had all of these programming languages, I wouldn't have to be an expert in any of them or a developer or anything, but basically most questions clients have come down to misunderstanding on what's possible or misconfiguration and then occasionally a bug to test out and escalate. I told him that was basically exactly what I had done at both of my previous support positions and gave some examples.  I explained I had looked through their help center guide and named common issues I would anticipate based on that and how to address. I said I understood it would probably involve a lot of guidance on database administration to clients and ways to check, to fix errors and for optimization. I said I anticipated setting up my own test shops and dummy data to test out things. Every time I would start to get a little bit technical, he would just re-assure me that it wasn't a requirement to be an expert in this area or that. He would casually dismiss. And he was reassuring me the entire interview that he agreed with my answers on various things. He did not probe at all. I also did mention that I would look at previous cases and resolutions to inform and build product knowledge and ideas. We talked about my career goals and if I want to be a developer? I said no, I don't want to be a developer, though I reminded him that I had built some very basic projects (trying to throw in technical skills) and I said I would like to continue to build my skills as a support engineer or go into testing products or something similar. He laughed and agreed and said he didn't want to be a developer either and he understood. Then we talked about the Magento acquisition by Adobe and I got an impression it was uncomfortable one, but we kind of laughed it off. Again, very casual and his responses were always positive to what I was saying and telling me he agreed and understood. I assumed after this I would have more rounds of technical aptitude tests or sample questions on the product or something, but instead I was given the feedback that "it was nice talking, but I didn't have "deep enough troubleshooting skills".  This was interesting because there would have been no way to assess this. I had studied on the technologies listed before the interview and wasn't asked much of anything specifically technical. He would have had no way to know this. Given that I have multiple references from former supervisors attesting to my persistent and capable troubleshooting skills, it would have been courteous and fair to at least test me on them, but that didn't happen. I assume there was something else about me that colored his thinking. And though I have no way to know if it played a part, it's notable that there are no women on the Magento Support team, FYI.

The interview had two virtual rounds. The first was a basic technical round focused on Linux, web servers, troubleshooting steps, and simple scenario-based questions. It wasn’t very deep but assessed my fundamentals and problem-solving approach. The second round was a managerial discussion with almost no technical questions, mainly covering communication, handling customer issues, teamwork, and ownership. Overall, the process evaluated both my technical base and how I deal with real-world support situations.