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I hope that these questions were from the author's memory and not worded exactly as typed. Because the questions used for first round filtering of interview ca

I hope that these questions were from the author's memory and not worded exactly as typed. Because the questions used for first round filtering of interview candidates should be clear cut and not open to interpretation. Namely, question 14 is odd, What Signal does a child send to a parent when it is finished. The child doesn't send signals in this event, the kernel sends signals to the parent when the child's state changes, and one of those states is the child exiting. Although, the default action of SIGCHLD is ignore, and can a signal that is ignored be considered to be sent at all?

aaronblohowiak 13y ago
>can a signal that is ignored be considered to be sent at all? Yes, because wether or not it is trapped is up to the application..
- tankenmate 13y ago
  a) not all signals can be caught, blocked or ignored c.f. SIGKILL, SIGSTOP b) in acutality when it comes to the kernel code if a process/thread/task has a signal ignored (the blocked semantics are slightly different) it is not actually delivered x.ref. prepare_signal() in kernel/signal.c in Linux.
- thwarted 13y ago
  Yes, and the application asserts if it is ignored by telling the kernel, so the kernel can fast path the ignored signals.
johnpmayer 13y ago
I'm sure if you just said SIGCHLD you demonstrated the knowledge they were looking for. If you gave your extended answer, they would probably be additionally impressed.
- aroman 13y ago
  Yeah, honestly even asking for clarification which shows that you really understand the concepts at play is probably as good or even better than providing the intended answer.
- mturmon 13y ago
  I got the feeling that the uptime question was also inviting an extended answer, because the load figures (last minute, last 5 minutes, last 15 minutes) in uptime seem obvious, but are actually computed as exponentially-filtered averages (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5892104/how-were-the-weightings-in-the-linux-load-computation-chosen http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5892104/how-were-the-weig...). In an interview situation, it would show above-average depth-of-knowledge to mention this.
- thwarted 13y ago
  It really depends on who is administering the first pass questionnaire and how they have been prepared. When I was doing hiring, a dedicated recruiting team was tasked with doing this first round, which we called "prescreen questions". I spent a lot of time briefing the people talking to candidates for my team on how to interpret the answers, and I encouraged them to keep detailed notes so we could audit what candidates were saying and needed to adjust something. I personally reviewed every prescreen result to make sure we didn't pass on someone who could provide more than the straight forward answer. However, we found that prescreens were most effective when the answers were straight forward and there was only one way to interpret the question (that is, for prescreens, non-essay answers are preferred).
nintendo1889 13y ago
Usually the child just tells their parent "Mom/dad, I'm done". Heh

aaronblohowiak 13y ago

>can a signal that is ignored be considered to be sent at all? Yes, because wether or not it is trapped is up to the application..

tankenmate 13y ago
a) not all signals can be caught, blocked or ignored c.f. SIGKILL, SIGSTOP b) in acutality when it comes to the kernel code if a process/thread/task has a signal ignored (the blocked semantics are slightly different) it is not actually delivered x.ref. prepare_signal() in kernel/signal.c in Linux.
thwarted 13y ago
Yes, and the application asserts if it is ignored by telling the kernel, so the kernel can fast path the ignored signals.

johnpmayer 13y ago

I'm sure if you just said SIGCHLD you demonstrated the knowledge they were looking for. If you gave your extended answer, they would probably be additionally impressed.

aroman 13y ago
Yeah, honestly even asking for clarification which shows that you really understand the concepts at play is probably as good or even better than providing the intended answer.
mturmon 13y ago
I got the feeling that the uptime question was also inviting an extended answer, because the load figures (last minute, last 5 minutes, last 15 minutes) in uptime seem obvious, but are actually computed as exponentially-filtered averages (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5892104/how-were-the-weightings-in-the-linux-load-computation-chosen http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5892104/how-were-the-weig...). In an interview situation, it would show above-average depth-of-knowledge to mention this.
thwarted 13y ago
It really depends on who is administering the first pass questionnaire and how they have been prepared. When I was doing hiring, a dedicated recruiting team was tasked with doing this first round, which we called "prescreen questions". I spent a lot of time briefing the people talking to candidates for my team on how to interpret the answers, and I encouraged them to keep detailed notes so we could audit what candidates were saying and needed to adjust something. I personally reviewed every prescreen result to make sure we didn't pass on someone who could provide more than the straight forward answer. However, we found that prescreens were most effective when the answers were straight forward and there was only one way to interpret the question (that is, for prescreens, non-essay answers are preferred).

nintendo1889 13y ago

Usually the child just tells their parent "Mom/dad, I'm done". Heh