I ended up in London (moving from Melbourne Australia) after a similar (but not quite the same) situation with Facebook in 2008. At the time, I worked for IBM'

I ended up in London (moving from Melbourne Australia) after a similar (but not quite the same) situation with Facebook in 2008. At the time, I worked for IBM's dedicated Linux division, and before then had worked for Red Hat. Facebook wanted an SRE, and I had 10 interviews between Melbourne and Palo Alto all about SRE topics - Linux, iptables, sockets, systemtap, VLANs, DNS, python, etc. They were tough questions which I loved, and I tried my best to answer, always getting to the next round. Interviews were often at unsociable hours but I didn't mind. The final stage was to leave Australia, travel to London, and "meet the SRE team and start work". This was a cursory check to make sure I was a good fit, but they were already ordering a machine - did I want Mac or PC? - and a big monitor. The "meet the team" interview with the other "SREs" consisted of" - Why don't you have a CS degree (I have a business degree obtained in my teens) - We mainly fix badly written PHP? Do you code PHP? - Here's some maths, convert it to code (I didn't know what a particular symbol meant) Literally nothing SRE related, and nothing like the Palo Alto folk (which were actually much harder interviews) were looking for. I ended up in London in September 2008 with no job and no life in Australia to go home to. I ended up making it and I hope this person does too.