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> On the other hand, surely everyone working in any kind of sysadmin role has a story of things going sideways. I want to agree with this but there are some bi

> On the other hand, surely everyone working in any kind of sysadmin role has a story of things going sideways. I want to agree with this but there are some big caveats. 1. What if you don't expect this question and thus don't trawl through memories ahead of time? It's easy to feel put-on-the-spot and have your mind go blank. 2. What if you're really talented and worked at a place with rigorous process and thus all the stuff going bad gets caught in test or QA or whatever? Nothing really goes sideways in that situation. 3. There are a lot of situations where things go bad not because you've made a mistake but because management's made a mistake. Not wanting to talk about those situations is understandable for a couple of reasons. Not talking bad about the former employer is one, so is not wanting to get all worked up about former management screwing you in a job interview. 4. You could have been on either end of the situation described by a previous HN story: http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/are-your-programmers-working-hard-or.html http://mikehadlow.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/are-your-programmer... If you're on the "lazy" team you might have been a damn-fine sysadmin with no horror stories. Or on the "hard working" team with plenty of disaster stories and a questionable level of talent. I'm not saying that having disaster stories makes you a bad sysadmin, nor am I saying that not having disaster stories makes you a good one. But I am suggesting that the correlation between disaster stories and skill level probably isn't p = 0.99 and might be more like p = 0.5 or 0.2 or maybe 0.07. Even if you find that the correlation is 0.7 (pretty decent) are you going to be interviewing enough people such that you can be sure that you don't end up with sampling error? If you need to hire 10 sysadmins and you interview 200 then perhaps you'll do a decent job of identifying the good candidates. But if you only need to hire one and you only interview 10 you don't have the law of large numbers on your side. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

pc86 13y ago
> 1. What if you don't expect this question and thus don't trawl through memories ahead of time? It's easy to feel put-on-the-spot and have your mind go blank. Well now aren't we just walking about interview skills? Interviewing poorly leads to not getting job offers, and if that's why he didn't have a better example off the top of his head, it's due to his poor interview skills that he wasn't hired. > 2. What if you're really talented and worked at a place with rigorous process and thus all the stuff going bad gets caught in test or QA or whatever? Nothing really goes sideways in that situation. I don't think these places exist. I work for a Fortune 500 with an absolute ton of process due to the sector we work in. I haven't even been here 2 years, I'm not even in sysops, and I can think of one or two things that would have made a good interview story about something "going sideways."
- msandford 13y ago
  1. Any good interview process should try and see through the interview skills and look more at the job candidate's actual skills that they're being hired for. A company's inability to do so isn't a referendum on the candidate but rather on management. Unless of course the company is hiring the candidate to be interviewed professionally. 2. I said a rigorous process, not a ton of process. There are good processes and there are not good processes. The fact that you work at a Fortune 500 company doesn't automatically make your processes good. If Fortune 500 companies were so much better at executing processes than startups surely they would also be better at executing "finding new businesses" processes and thus startups would never get off the ground. The established businesses with far more financial and human resources would immediately swoop in on any opportunities. But surprise! The world doesn't work that way. Being big doesn't mean being right.
  - jordo37 13y ago
    > 1. Any good interview process should try and see through the interview skills and look more at the job candidate's actual skills that they're being hired for. A company's inability to do so isn't a referendum on the candidate but rather on management. Unless of course the company is hiring the candidate to be interviewed professionally. This makes sense if the company is desperate to fill the role or needs tons of time. In many company's hiring is a process where false negatives (kicking someone out because of warning signs) is a better safety than a false positive (hiring someone and having them turn out to be crappy / toxic). Hiring is hard but firing people is even harder. Some companies have the bandwidth to manage people who are underperforming and raise up their general level of performance and some don't have that luxury. That being said, defining valid false negatives versus ridiculous bias IS HARD. There are things that are bad from a cultural fit perspective, but if you can only say hes a bad cultural fit and not give more details, if not to the candidate then at least to the rest of the hiring team, then you are not doing your job.

pc86 13y ago

> 1. What if you don't expect this question and thus don't trawl through memories ahead of time? It's easy to feel put-on-the-spot and have your mind go blank. Well now aren't we just walking about interview skills? Interviewing poorly leads to not getting job offers, and if that's why he didn't have a better example off the top of his head, it's due to his poor interview skills that he wasn't hired. > 2. What if you're really talented and worked at a place with rigorous process and thus all the stuff going bad gets caught in test or QA or whatever? Nothing really goes sideways in that situation. I don't think these places exist. I work for a Fortune 500 with an absolute ton of process due to the sector we work in. I haven't even been here 2 years, I'm not even in sysops, and I can think of one or two things that would have made a good interview story about something "going sideways."

msandford 13y ago
1. Any good interview process should try and see through the interview skills and look more at the job candidate's actual skills that they're being hired for. A company's inability to do so isn't a referendum on the candidate but rather on management. Unless of course the company is hiring the candidate to be interviewed professionally. 2. I said a rigorous process, not a ton of process. There are good processes and there are not good processes. The fact that you work at a Fortune 500 company doesn't automatically make your processes good. If Fortune 500 companies were so much better at executing processes than startups surely they would also be better at executing "finding new businesses" processes and thus startups would never get off the ground. The established businesses with far more financial and human resources would immediately swoop in on any opportunities. But surprise! The world doesn't work that way. Being big doesn't mean being right.
- jordo37 13y ago
  > 1. Any good interview process should try and see through the interview skills and look more at the job candidate's actual skills that they're being hired for. A company's inability to do so isn't a referendum on the candidate but rather on management. Unless of course the company is hiring the candidate to be interviewed professionally. This makes sense if the company is desperate to fill the role or needs tons of time. In many company's hiring is a process where false negatives (kicking someone out because of warning signs) is a better safety than a false positive (hiring someone and having them turn out to be crappy / toxic). Hiring is hard but firing people is even harder. Some companies have the bandwidth to manage people who are underperforming and raise up their general level of performance and some don't have that luxury. That being said, defining valid false negatives versus ridiculous bias IS HARD. There are things that are bad from a cultural fit perspective, but if you can only say hes a bad cultural fit and not give more details, if not to the candidate then at least to the rest of the hiring team, then you are not doing your job.