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Show HN: SadServers – Test your Linux troubleshooting skills

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Re: Show HN: SadServers – Test your Linux troubleshooting skills

#41

Post by joenot443 »

lbotos wrote: post #24
deeblering4 wrote: post #6

> It's also my not-so-secret hope that a sophisticated enough version of SadServers could be used by tech companies (or for companies that carry on job interviews on their behalf) to automate or facilitate the Linux troubleshooting interview section. Yup, that's what I was afraid of.

Why are you afraid of this? My org has run a hands-on technical exam with a stack of linux admin basics (I won't enumerate them here because people do their research) but they are based on real problems we've had and the feedback is overwhelmingly "this was one of the best technical interviews I've ever had." We ask the engineer who is proctoring the interview to think about the following question: Would you want to…

If you give the person you're interviewing access to the same tools they'd have in a regular day on the job (Google, manpages, etc.), I'd say that's a fair and probably relatively enjoyable interview.

Rejecting someone because they can't recall the correct netstat syntax doesn't seem like good hiring practice, but I assume in good faith that's not what you meant :)

Re: Show HN: SadServers – Test your Linux troubleshooting skills

#42

Post by deeblering4 »

lbotos wrote: post #24
deeblering4 wrote: post #6

> It's also my not-so-secret hope that a sophisticated enough version of SadServers could be used by tech companies (or for companies that carry on job interviews on their behalf) to automate or facilitate the Linux troubleshooting interview section. Yup, that's what I was afraid of.

Why are you afraid of this? My org has run a hands-on technical exam with a stack of linux admin basics (I won't enumerate them here because people do their research) but they are based on real problems we've had and the feedback is overwhelmingly "this was one of the best technical interviews I've ever had." We ask the engineer who is proctoring the interview to think about the following question: Would you want to…

> Why are you afraid of this?

> My org has run a hands-on technical exam with a stack of linux admin basics ... they are based on real problems we've had and the feedback is overwhelmingly "this was one of the best technical interviews I've ever had."

You essentially answered your own question.

Putting thought into the interview process and working with candidates through real problems is valuable. I cannot say the same for outsourcing or "automating" this portion of an interview using 3rd party SaaS.

Re: Show HN: SadServers – Test your Linux troubleshooting skills

#43

Post by deathanatos »

lbotos wrote: post #24
deeblering4 wrote: post #6

> It's also my not-so-secret hope that a sophisticated enough version of SadServers could be used by tech companies (or for companies that carry on job interviews on their behalf) to automate or facilitate the Linux troubleshooting interview section. Yup, that's what I was afraid of.

Why are you afraid of this? My org has run a hands-on technical exam with a stack of linux admin basics (I won't enumerate them here because people do their research) but they are based on real problems we've had and the feedback is overwhelmingly "this was one of the best technical interviews I've ever had." We ask the engineer who is proctoring the interview to think about the following question: Would you want to…

Yeah, we did this at a previous employer.

One example, is we had them ssh, download & extract a tarball (the Linux source, but the content doesn't matter). Sometimes, they'd gunzip to stdout. The reaction tells you a lot "lol whoopsie" followed by a quick fix: person knows what they're doing. "uh… what is going on? did I break it?" followed with general cluelessness… maybe not.

That did occasionally break tmux, though.

Part of it was "what are the specs of this thing you're SSH'd into?" and we had one candidate who was adamant the numbers must be wrong: 2 GiB is too little RAM, no machine is that small! Yeah we didn't spin up 128 GiB VM for your interview…

Re: Show HN: SadServers – Test your Linux troubleshooting skills

#44

Post by rednerrus »

lbotos wrote: post #24
deeblering4 wrote: post #6

> It's also my not-so-secret hope that a sophisticated enough version of SadServers could be used by tech companies (or for companies that carry on job interviews on their behalf) to automate or facilitate the Linux troubleshooting interview section. Yup, that's what I was afraid of.

Why are you afraid of this? My org has run a hands-on technical exam with a stack of linux admin basics (I won't enumerate them here because people do their research) but they are based on real problems we've had and the feedback is overwhelmingly "this was one of the best technical interviews I've ever had." We ask the engineer who is proctoring the interview to think about the following question: Would you want to…

We do this in our org as well. 30 minutes of troubleshooting linux issues is a good way to evaluate a candidates experience. We run it as a team exercise with the candidate so that we also get the added bonus of how do they work in a team setting, how do they communicate, etc.

Re: Show HN: SadServers – Test your Linux troubleshooting skills

#45

Post by deathanatos »

mathverse wrote: post #32
lbotos wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you afraid of this? My org has run a hands-on technical exam with a stack of linux admin basics (I won't enumerate them here because people do their research) but they are based on real problems we've had and the feedback is overwhelmingly "this was one of the best technical interviews I've ever had." We ask the engineer who is proctoring the interview to think about the following question: Would you want to…

People in higher up positions like yourself will rarely be subjected to testing with tools like this. You are basically trying to remove the human from equation and industrialize the whole process.

No, I'm trying to make sure the person who is interviewing for a job where they will deal with computers on a daily basis appears to have seen a computer at some prior point in their life.

I wouldn't feel the need to do this if so many candidates didn't fail rudimentary tests. A SWE candidate MUST be able to write the function min(), in the language and tooling of their choice. But in an interview, a sizable fraction cannot. (The actual bar is far higher than min(), ofc., but min() ought to be trivial.)

Re: Show HN: SadServers – Test your Linux troubleshooting skills

#46

Post by edmcnulty101 »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #30

My only feedback is that this is unrealistic because today developers wouldn’t try to debug something, they’d just destroy the instance, push a commit and hope it fixed something infra related then recreate it. Why would you need to understand how something works? Just use containers. /s

If its dumb and it works it's not dumb.

Re: Show HN: SadServers – Test your Linux troubleshooting skills

#47

Post by rednerrus »

mathverse wrote: post #32
lbotos wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you afraid of this? My org has run a hands-on technical exam with a stack of linux admin basics (I won't enumerate them here because people do their research) but they are based on real problems we've had and the feedback is overwhelmingly "this was one of the best technical interviews I've ever had." We ask the engineer who is proctoring the interview to think about the following question: Would you want to…

People in higher up positions like yourself will rarely be subjected to testing with tools like this. You are basically trying to remove the human from equation and industrialize the whole process.

What we're trying to do is respect peoples' time. We can get more about someone's technical understanding in 30 minutes of hands on exercises than we can in a full day of panel interviews. It's better for us as we have a much better understanding of where you're at Linux wise and it's better for you because you only need to come to two hours of interviews, total. Seems like a win win to me.

Re: Show HN: SadServers – Test your Linux troubleshooting skills

#49

Post by lbotos »

joenot443 wrote: post #41
lbotos wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you afraid of this? My org has run a hands-on technical exam with a stack of linux admin basics (I won't enumerate them here because people do their research) but they are based on real problems we've had and the feedback is overwhelmingly "this was one of the best technical interviews I've ever had." We ask the engineer who is proctoring the interview to think about the following question: Would you want to…

If you give the person you're interviewing access to the same tools they'd have in a regular day on the job (Google, manpages, etc.), I'd say that's a fair and probably relatively enjoyable interview. Rejecting someone because they can't recall the correct netstat syntax doesn't seem like good hiring practice, but I assume in good faith that's not what you meant :)

Exactly, all man pages and google is fair. We want to see how they think not rote memorization.

Re: Show HN: SadServers – Test your Linux troubleshooting skills

#50

Post by bravetraveler »

bm-rf wrote: post #16

I'm assuming you're spinning up an EC2 instance for each lab. What do you think about using pre-built docker images for each challenge instead? that way they can spin up in just a couple of seconds. Might also be cheaper?

Not a bad idea but something to consider; this limits the options for kernel level things quite considerably
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