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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

by 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.

by dkopi 11y ago

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.