Re: Some help for interviewing

[Richard Welty <rwelty_(_at_)_averillpark_(_dot_)_net>]

On Mon, 8 Dec 2003 23:08:01 -0600 Justin Krejci <jus_(_at_)_krytosvirus_(_dot_)_com> wrote:

> I suppose that would be a good question but I can't imagine myself applying 
> for a sysadmin to manage some mail servers not being able to do something 
> like that. Working for an ISP puts me in a position to do things of that 
> nature almost daily.

you'd be suprised at the low level of some applicants (and some of them
are simultaneously pretty arrogant even while being idiots). i recall
one applicant for a network engineering job i interviewed some years
back. he was pretty impressed with himself, sure he'd have his Cisco
CCIE rating within 6 months. i asked him if he'd ever unboxed a
Cisco product, installed the line cards, and brought it up to an operational
state all by himself. he hemmed and hawed and then admitted that
there was another group at his work place that did that stuff, so he'd never
gone through that exercise.

i chose not to extend an offer to him. the guy i eventually hired was much
better and is still there now, long after i left that place.

the moral of this story is that i think that the job market is rife with people
applying for jobs that they're not qualified for, especially during the
current downturn, so you need some "idiot recognition" questions as part
of your mix. they'll sit there with shit eating grins on their faces and pretend
to know what you're talking about, and you want to figure that out as fast
as possible so as to limit the amount of wasted time and energy.

other good questions are things like how do you like to partition disk systems,
what procedures do you customarily follow for remote upgrades, how do you
configure and use su/sudo, and so forth and so on.

you also need to get a bead on their "information hiding" tendencies. many
sysadmins go into "job security mode" and try and make themselves
indispensible. as a manager, my preference will always be for team players.
quite frankly, i'll try to detect the "information hiders" as early as possible
and get rid of them.

richard
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Richard Welty                                         rwelty_(_at_)_averillpark_(_dot_)_net
Averill Park Networking                                         518-573-7592
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