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

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.