5 ms·

Meh, I ask it on a couple technologies now and again but only for broad tech. It does two things for me. One is that for some of my positions, I need a candid

Meh, I ask it on a couple technologies now and again but only for broad tech. It does two things for me. One is that for some of my positions, I need a candidate to be good at some but not all things my team does, like windows, linux or net ops. So it helps me focus my questions on what the candidate feels comfortable with. It's not a trick. The other thing that you can often see with it is how much a person doesn't know that they don't know. I don't often get someone telling me that they are a 9/10 in linux but generally when they do, they can't set an ip from the CLI, or use top. I do want to see people who understand what they know and what they don't. I realize the question is pretty arbitrary so it's one data point in a set but it can be useful to understand how someone sees their own competency.

rdtsc 11y ago
> I do want to see people who understand what they know and what they don't Ok that's fair, I can see that point. I usually just probe by asking details about the projects they've done etc. Also found there is sometimes an inverse corellation between those who rate themselves high and their abilities and vice verse rate themselves low and their abilities (there is a name for this phenomenon, but I don't recall it). The idea is those who really know a lot, also know how much they don't know. If someone asked me "how well you know the Linux kernel", I would say not at all. Because I had to read the source to some parts of it, had to tune it for realtime charactestics and have seen the depth of the rabbit hole so to speak, and realized I don't know anything compared to how much there is to know about it.
- jethro_tell 11y ago
  Yes so the ranking is arbitrary but I know that you've made it to the top of the rabbit hole and looked down it once. Some people are at the edge of the forest and don't even know there is a rabbit hole. That's what the question is for. > I usually just probe by asking details about the projects they've done etc. I do this too, but that tells you if the person has a matching view of their abilities with their actual skills.
dkopi 11y ago
When you ask them to configure something, do you let them sit in front of a laptop with man pages, google and stack exchange? Or do you expect them to memorize all your most used command line tools? Do you expect them to remember the parameters to ifconfig, or do you ask them to craft a script/command line to print only the MTU for each interface? When you ask them about top, do you expect them to remember what top is? or do you allow them to google for top, and ask them to craft a command line (or shell script) that finds which user is using the most memory on the system?
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  Genesis10, recruiting on behalf of Bloomberg, did that shit to me several years ago. The interviewer decided to gauge my knowledge of Unix/Linux and POSIX programming by essentially quizzing me on POSIX manpages over the phone.
- jethro_tell 11y ago
  I don't really ask people to configure things. I ask if you understand how DHCP works, and how TCP works, how top works (ie info is in proc . . . I volunteer laptop at the start of interviews but most people never use it. I try to stray away from asking for a list of facts. Often I will ask a question about making a big change and I want to know how they go about it, is there error checking, is the a list of failures that can be worked later, if it's big scale are things run in parallel, are parallel processes run in a way that would max out the boxes resources? I don't need all of those because everyone answers those questions differently but I want to know how you think and assume you can look up arguments later. Or that I can teach you how to use a man page depending on the level of hire. A huge majority of our stack is proprietary so you won't know how to use it anyway. So if you know how to think and you know how to learn then you should be fine.

rdtsc 11y ago

> I do want to see people who understand what they know and what they don't Ok that's fair, I can see that point. I usually just probe by asking details about the projects they've done etc. Also found there is sometimes an inverse corellation between those who rate themselves high and their abilities and vice verse rate themselves low and their abilities (there is a name for this phenomenon, but I don't recall it). The idea is those who really know a lot, also know how much they don't know. If someone asked me "how well you know the Linux kernel", I would say not at all. Because I had to read the source to some parts of it, had to tune it for realtime charactestics and have seen the depth of the rabbit hole so to speak, and realized I don't know anything compared to how much there is to know about it.

jethro_tell 11y ago
Yes so the ranking is arbitrary but I know that you've made it to the top of the rabbit hole and looked down it once. Some people are at the edge of the forest and don't even know there is a rabbit hole. That's what the question is for. > I usually just probe by asking details about the projects they've done etc. I do this too, but that tells you if the person has a matching view of their abilities with their actual skills.

dkopi 11y ago

When you ask them to configure something, do you let them sit in front of a laptop with man pages, google and stack exchange? Or do you expect them to memorize all your most used command line tools? Do you expect them to remember the parameters to ifconfig, or do you ask them to craft a script/command line to print only the MTU for each interface? When you ask them about top, do you expect them to remember what top is? or do you allow them to google for top, and ask them to craft a command line (or shell script) that finds which user is using the most memory on the system?

vonmoltke 11y ago
Genesis10, recruiting on behalf of Bloomberg, did that shit to me several years ago. The interviewer decided to gauge my knowledge of Unix/Linux and POSIX programming by essentially quizzing me on POSIX manpages over the phone.
jethro_tell 11y ago
I don't really ask people to configure things. I ask if you understand how DHCP works, and how TCP works, how top works (ie info is in proc . . . I volunteer laptop at the start of interviews but most people never use it. I try to stray away from asking for a list of facts. Often I will ask a question about making a big change and I want to know how they go about it, is there error checking, is the a list of failures that can be worked later, if it's big scale are things run in parallel, are parallel processes run in a way that would max out the boxes resources? I don't need all of those because everyone answers those questions differently but I want to know how you think and assume you can look up arguments later. Or that I can teach you how to use a man page depending on the level of hire. A huge majority of our stack is proprietary so you won't know how to use it anyway. So if you know how to think and you know how to learn then you should be fine.