5 ms·

Glad you asked that. As i saw in the treads mentioned by you, the common problem is that the tests are more about theory, and less about practice. Which is true

Glad you asked that. As i saw in the treads mentioned by you, the common problem is that the tests are more about theory, and less about practice. Which is true. Sometimes, in interviews, you are asked about algorithms that you studied in college and never used before. It's very difficult to score high in this tests. We propose to eliminate this gap by having real job, day to day, scenarios like: install apache, mysql, php, clone site, install database etc. These are recurring task in the daily activities of a sysadmin. What do you say?

bovermyer 10y ago
Those are pretty baseline things that get automated away pretty quickly. More useful to me (as both a practicing devops type and a manager in that capacity) would be tests gauging ability to write bash scripts to do various things, or simulated problems that need to be diagnosed/fixed using command line tools (e.g., strace, netstat, etc.).
- alexgotoi 10y ago
  Indeed, those are pretty basic tasks. We will have 3 levels of difficulty and the examples mentioned are in the easiest category. In a early phase of a recruitment process, an experienced sysadmin would solve in less than 3 minutes and this is helping screening process when you have a huge number of applicants. But for latest stages of recruitment process, we will have more advanced scenarios for the tests. Definitely your suggestions are great and we will discuss having tests in this area. Cheers!
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    > an experienced sysadmin would solve in less than 3 minutes Why do you think so? And, I'm hopping you don't rely on timing on this level. An experienced sysadmin would have little experience with basic tasks, since he solves them around once or twice per job. And you never know the environments they tried it before, that may be completely different from what you are presenting them right now. I'd say "installing X" is a test for encyclopedic knowledge, and a very unreliable test for expertize. That's the kind of test that gave bad names to IT certification at the early 2000's.
    - alexgotoi 10y ago
      What scenarios would you suggest to have?
      - marcosdumay 10y ago
        No idea, but the certificates that focused on those things became enduring jokes.
existencebox 10y ago
As an ex-sysadmin turned coder, "sysadmins aren't paid to install apache" could be as true as statement as "programmers aren't paid to write code". The meat of the value of a good sysadmin is problem solving, learning, and communication abilities (perhaps a "duh" but the same qualities I look for in a programmer.) While there's certainly something to be said for a senior experienced sysadmin being expected to have an insane knowledge of their systems, at least for more entry roles, I've seen many of the same problems in sysop interviews as dev interviews, and having a hackerrank section for it may only exacerbate that. I'm simply not convinced that no matter what you guys ask from a programmatic angle you can solve the deep problems of interviewing that these soft skills are much harder to poll for, resulting in an uneven reliance on less effective signaling of tangential talent through e.g. hackerrank score. Anecdotally, this sort of "filtering" would have precluded both my own hiring early on in my career (so I'm naturally sensitive to this), and that of probably two of the three best junior sysadmins I've had the pleasure to working with having come out of entirely non-technical fields, while allowed in both of the "disaster cases" that come to my mind. Don't let this ramble be a "it's impossible stop trying;" but perhaps a "more of the same won't solve the problems we can already see endemic across our field", as the great-grandfather post brought up. I simply worry that the availability of "traditional hackerrank brute-force-evaluation" will simply result in more people leaning on it than trying to think more critically about their interview process.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

bovermyer 10y ago

Those are pretty baseline things that get automated away pretty quickly. More useful to me (as both a practicing devops type and a manager in that capacity) would be tests gauging ability to write bash scripts to do various things, or simulated problems that need to be diagnosed/fixed using command line tools (e.g., strace, netstat, etc.).

alexgotoi 10y ago
Indeed, those are pretty basic tasks. We will have 3 levels of difficulty and the examples mentioned are in the easiest category. In a early phase of a recruitment process, an experienced sysadmin would solve in less than 3 minutes and this is helping screening process when you have a huge number of applicants. But for latest stages of recruitment process, we will have more advanced scenarios for the tests. Definitely your suggestions are great and we will discuss having tests in this area. Cheers!
- marcosdumay 10y ago
  > an experienced sysadmin would solve in less than 3 minutes Why do you think so? And, I'm hopping you don't rely on timing on this level. An experienced sysadmin would have little experience with basic tasks, since he solves them around once or twice per job. And you never know the environments they tried it before, that may be completely different from what you are presenting them right now. I'd say "installing X" is a test for encyclopedic knowledge, and a very unreliable test for expertize. That's the kind of test that gave bad names to IT certification at the early 2000's.
  - alexgotoi 10y ago
    What scenarios would you suggest to have?
    - marcosdumay 10y ago
      No idea, but the certificates that focused on those things became enduring jokes.

existencebox 10y ago

As an ex-sysadmin turned coder, "sysadmins aren't paid to install apache" could be as true as statement as "programmers aren't paid to write code". The meat of the value of a good sysadmin is problem solving, learning, and communication abilities (perhaps a "duh" but the same qualities I look for in a programmer.) While there's certainly something to be said for a senior experienced sysadmin being expected to have an insane knowledge of their systems, at least for more entry roles, I've seen many of the same problems in sysop interviews as dev interviews, and having a hackerrank section for it may only exacerbate that. I'm simply not convinced that no matter what you guys ask from a programmatic angle you can solve the deep problems of interviewing that these soft skills are much harder to poll for, resulting in an uneven reliance on less effective signaling of tangential talent through e.g. hackerrank score. Anecdotally, this sort of "filtering" would have precluded both my own hiring early on in my career (so I'm naturally sensitive to this), and that of probably two of the three best junior sysadmins I've had the pleasure to working with having come out of entirely non-technical fields, while allowed in both of the "disaster cases" that come to my mind. Don't let this ramble be a "it's impossible stop trying;" but perhaps a "more of the same won't solve the problems we can already see endemic across our field", as the great-grandfather post brought up. I simply worry that the availability of "traditional hackerrank brute-force-evaluation" will simply result in more people leaning on it than trying to think more critically about their interview process.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]