On June 7 I went to Rio de Janeiro to take a test on the next day regarding a public contest where I was disputing one of 36 vacancies for a Junior Systems Analyst - Infrastructure position at Petrobras.

The test started at 9:00 A.M. and ended at 1:00 P.M and took place at Estácio de Sá university - Campus Uruguaiana at Presidente Vargas Avenue that is located downtown. I stayed at a hotel called Planalto. It is located near the place where I did the test.

Petrobras is one of the major companies of the world. As of May 19, Petrobras became the world's sixth-largest company by market value. Its market value was $295.6 billion. Microsoft for example has a market value of $274.0 billion. You can see more details reading this new at Bloomberg site: Petrobras Tops Microsoft, Is Sixth-Biggest Company.

Petrobras's field of operation has a high demand because its principal product is petroleum. Yesterday the oil barrel achieved the highest price in history as can be read in Oil sets record above $140 a barrel on supply concerns.

Getting back to the public contest. Petrobras's test is in my humble opinion one of the hardest ones in Brazil in my area of specialization. Maybe it is the hardest one. :-) This was the second time that I participated in such public contests.

An organizing institution is responsible for the test creation and collection of the registration tax. The organizing institution responsible for the first test I did in 2007 was CESPE and this time the organizing institution was CESGRANRIO. I had to pay R$ 40,00 Brazilian Reais that is approximately $ 25,00 for the registration tax. I'm considering $1 dollar = R$ 1.60 as of the date of this post.

The test was comprised of 70 questions in the multiple choice form. From these 20 questions were about basic knowledge (BK) (10 Portuguese questions and 10 English questions). The other 50 questions were about specific knowledge (SK) related to system analysis - infrastructure.

The content that should be studied is described in the following table:

Computer Network and Distributed Systems	Computer Network Architectures
	Topologies
	Connection and Transmission devices
	QOS
	ISO OSI model
	TCP/IP Architecture and Protocols
	TCP/IP Application layer: DNS, FTP, NFS, TELNET, SMTP, HTTP, LDAP, DHCP, IPSEC, SSH, SNMP and NAT
	Basic notions about IPv6
	Storage concepts (NAS and SAN)
UNIX Environment	Installation and support to TCP/IP, DHCP, DNS, NIS, CIFS, NFS, network printing services
	Installation and configuration of Apache server
	Integration with Windows environment
	Script languages
Microsoft Windows 2000/2003 environment	Installation and support to TCP/IP, DHCP, DNS
	Active Directory, IIS, Terminal Service
	File services and network printing
	Integration with Unix environment
	Script languages
Information Security	Physical and logical security
	Firewall and proxies
	Cryptography
	VPN
	Malicious software (Virus, Spywares, Rootkit, etc)
	Intrusion detection systems
Computer Architecture and High Performance Computing HPC	RISC and CISC architectures
	Processor organization
	Memory organization
	Concurrency concepts, parallelism and distributed computing
	Flynn taxonomy
	Distributed systems architecture: SMP and MPP
	Basic concepts about agglomerate computing (Cluster) and grid computing (Grids)
	Load balancing
	Performance profiling
Project Management	Basic concepts
	Resources allocation
	Chronogram;
	Analytical structure
Operating Systems	OS structure
	Processor management
	Memory management
	File systems
	Input and Output
	Basic concepts about compilers
	RAID
Databases	Data independency
	Relational approach
	entity-relationship approach
	Triggers and Stored Procedures
	SQL language
	High availability concepts
	Transactions management
	Locks management
	Performance management
Programming	Algorithms and data structures
	Java code debugging
	Notions about Software Engineering
	Markup languages: HTML and XML
	Notions about Java programming (JEE, Servelets, JSP and EJB)
IT Service Management	Concepts about the ITIL® library: Support and service delivery
	COBIT processes domain
Logical Reasoning	Sentential and first order logic
	Enumeration by resources
	Counting: Additive and multiplicative principles
Information Security Management	General concepts
	Information security policies
	Information classification
	Norm ISO 27001:2005

The questions were graded according to the following table:

Portuguese language		English language		Specific knowledge
Question	Points	Question	Points	Question	Points
1 to 10	1.0	11 to 20	1.0	21 to 30	1.0
				31 to 40	1.3
				41 to 50	1.6
				51 to 60	1.9
				61 to 70	2.2

Despite the difficulty I think I performed well if I take into account that this was my second try.

Today I got the final result and my final grades were:

Basic Knowledge = 15 points = 75% of BK test.

I needed 12 points = 60% of BK test.

Specific Knowledge = 41.3 points = 51.63% of SK test.

I needed 48 points = 60% of SK test.

Result = BK + SK = 15 + 41.3 = 56.3 points

48 - 41.3 = 6.7 points to pass in the specific knowledge test.

Bellow I show the grades obtained by the candidates that passed the public contest:

Specific Knowledge test grade	Classification
61.5	1
61.4	2
61.2	3
59.6	4
56.4	5
55.8	6
55.6	7
54.8	8
54.5	9
54.2	10
54.1	11
54.0	12
53.8	13
52.6	14
52.1	15
51.8	16
51.4	17
51.2	18
50.9	19
50.7	20
50.7	21
50.7	22
50.7	23
50.6	24
50.5	25
50.1	26
50.1	27
50.0	28
50.0	29
49.9	30
49.9	31
49.6	32
49.6	33
49.5	34
49.5	35
49.4	36
49.3	37
49.2	38
49.2	39
49.2	40
49.1	41
49.1	42
48.8	43
48.7	44
48.7	45
48.7	46
48.7	47
48.7	48
48.5	49
48.4	50
48.4	51
48.3	52
48.1	53
48.1	54
48.0	55
48.0	56

I almost got there. For a difference of 6.7 points I didn't pass the specific knowledge test, but I'm happy with my accomplishment. I'm a young guy and for sure if it is God's will I'll get there in the future. I'll keep studying. That's really necessary!

There are lots of public contests happening every year and not only related to Petrobras.

Some interesting facts about this public contest:

There were 5866 candidates disputing 36 vacancies for this specific role within Petrobras.

Candidate/vacancy relation = 163

Only 56 candidates were approved = 0.96% of candidates. Practically 1%.

Total collected with the registration tax money = R$ 40,00 * 5866 = R$ 234.540,00 =
$ 146.587,00.

Just to close this post - you may ask: Why someone would dispute a so wanted vacancy? The answer is easy: Petrobras pays a worthy salary, for example for this specific position (Junior System Analyst) the salary value is R$4.798,64 = $ 2998.75. Here in Brazil this is a good value for someone who is beginning his career. Besides that the company has many advantages (salary bonus, paid courses, health plan, etc) if compared with others. Generally who gets a job through a public contest will end their career in the company they took a test for. It is a permanent job.

As you see only the ones that study hard get a job at such companies and such companies have the best committed employees.

On Monday, June 23rd, I went to Botafogo in Rio de Janeiro to take part in a job interview scheduled for 4:00 P.M. I arrived there 3:10 P.M. so that I could have some time to relax a little bit.

The girl that conducted the interview was Roberta Furtado de Vasconcelos. She is a psychologist working for the human department at Oi. Oi is one of the biggest telecommunications players here in Brazil.

The job interview was fair and I was asked about some of the technologies that the job requires such as object oriented programming, Unix OS, the level of proficiency regarding the English language, etc.

We talked for about 45 minutes and one of the questions that I think was difficult to answer is: How much are you willing to earn? Wouldn't it be better if the company specified how much it wants to pay? It is complicated to answer such a question given the fact that you don't know how much the company is willing to pay for that specific position. I had already looked a salary table in a famous local IT magazine site called INFO online. It helped while answering this question.

Roberta said that the job interview process is composed of two interviews. The next one is going to take place soon if I happen to pass to the second round, that is, the first interview was just one more filter.

Let's see what happens next. If it happens I'll post here some notes about the second part of the interview process.

The crescent demand for enterprise management software has as key factor big companies, which need to manage millions of records trying with that: find a better way of working with so great amount of information available in their huge databases and get to the target of their business.

Between the most used software for enterprise management are the ones that lie in one of the following main categories:

• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Supply Chain Management (SCM)
• Balanced Scorecard or Scoreboard (BSC)

ERP

Resources planning in a company (ERP) include or try to include all the company’s data and processes in a unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple software and hardware components to achieve integration. A key ingredient for most ERP system is the use of a unified database to store the data from the various modules of the system.

CRM

Customer relationship management uses software products developed to help the companies in the construction and keeping of a good relationship with their clients. This is done through the storage of information of each client in an efficient and intelligent way. CRM is a general term that encompasses concepts used by the companies to manage their clients and includes capture, storage and analysis of data, suppliers, partners and internal processes information.

SCM

Supply chain management is the process of planning, implementing and controlling the operations of the supply chain to the highest efficiency degree possible. SCM includes all the transport logistics and storage of raw material and ready products from the origin to the destiny consumption market.

BSC

Balanced scorecard or scoreboard is a concept used to measure if the activities of a company are yielding expected results in terms of the strategic vision. Its focus isn’t only the financial result but also human questions. It helps in the provisioning of a more comprehensive vision of an organization what in its turn helps the companies to act according to the best way possible in a long term basis.

How is it used?

All these software work integrated.

The chairman, VP, CFO, CEO, CIO, CTO, etc., simply sat down in front of their computer and request a report. The systems then combine the data stored in unified databases, which have all the company’s historical data using technologies such as OLAP and OLTP. Business intelligence (BI), artificial intelligence (AI), data mining, etc, are concepts extensively applied to do the junction of enterprise data.

It has all to do with relevant data and how to better combine them through (SQL queries) to extract useful information. Information = processed data = money! :-)

My computer engineering final project verses about LINQ (Language Integrated Query), that is, the integration of the query language (SQL) into the programming language (specifically C#). It's a good starting point for those that wanna learn the principles of working with queries to extract useful information from databases.

What to expect from the future?

The good part of it is that this market is growing in a fast pace. This way, a lot of job opportunities are emerging.

I particularly have interest in this field: databases, computer networks, BI, HPC, etc. My area of specialization will be for sure system analysis with focus on software engineering and infrastructure.

I expect to work in this field in a near future. It’s really interesting and challenging because there are always details that can be improved, optimized.

Information management (IM) is the key to the proper organization of a company. If a company organizes its data, its income will grow. It’s a proved fact.

Just as a note: one alarming factor that can arise is the security related to all the information of a company what creates the field of information security.

A new area that is attracting attention nowadays is parallel computing, most precisely, high performance computing, which is other very important factor when dealing with huge sets of data as is the case of enterprise management software.

Parallel processing will be the focus on the next years because it is necessary for the next step toward fastest software processing. Long live the dual-quad (many) core processors.