3 ms·

i’m like this but admittedly, in some cases, you’re interviewing for roles where it’s critical you identify that candidate can think on their feet (eg devs that

• nightski 8y ago
  Usually those who optimize for thinking on their feet do so at great compromise in quality. Maybe you can afford that, but it's kind of "shooting from the hip" so to speak. It's probably not that these candidates can't think on their feet, it's just that they generally aren't willing to compromise so greatly on accuracy and quality of the answer.
• em-bee 8y ago
  in a situation like that i'd like to see both happening. start the emergency procedure, and while it's running think through if you missed anything or if there is an alternate approach. just had that happen. we had an overloaded server, and while we tried to figure out how to make the server faster, after some thinking we realized that the better long term solution was to change some of the architecture so that the server would get less load to begin with. that was definitely not what came to mind first.
• Draiken 8y ago
  That's reactive thinking and it honestly sucks. While you might encounter unexpected situations from time to time, a good ops person will be preventing problems a lot more than he firefights. If you only hire a good firefighter, he will do the only thing he knows ad infinitum. I've worked with people that were reactive and would love to be "the fixer" when, in reality, 99% of the issues he fixed were caused by his ignorance/incompetence in the first place. Specially for crucial 24/7 roles, you need people that think ahead and not reactive ones.