I was put forward by a recruitment agency and secured an interview. This role was a new role providing tech support to Junipers European support centre in Bromsgrove.
The location is up stairs on the first floor of an office building, not the best for logistics, so it's a good job the product is mostly small. It's an open plan office, there is a large window into the technical room/lab, suggesting a classic lack of trust between office staff and tech staff, people doing entirely different jobs should never be given line of sight through which to pass biased judgement on each other.
I got there early and was directed into a meeting room (which was larger than the tech/service room) and made to wait while my interviewer finished fighting with his mouse cursor, this was definitely a "hey i'm the boss, i'll see you when i'm ready", I understand why people do this, but it doesn't work on me.
Interview itself was not technical, it was very sales biased, pleasant enough, but they were looking for the ability to talk a lot about nothing important (something we engineers don't really do). No blame here, as my interviewer was clearly someone of a sales background and not used to interviewing engineers.
I may be totally wrong, but this struck me as the sort of place where office staff have the technical staff running around lifting furniture, cleaning floors, emptying bins and making the tea, then wading in on technical matters they know nothing about and complain that your not doing what you're supposed to be doing.
I'm not prepared to risk going back into that sort of environment, not again, i'm too old for that nonsense.
All evidence suggests that Juniper USA are a great company and if I lived in the US I would drop them a CV in a heartbeat, i'm just not convinced about the UK operation.
I declined an offer for a 2nd interview (which I'm told would have been a conference call with US).