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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

#71

Post by Multicomp »

lbotos wrote: post #49
joenot443 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

I love this point. Joke: are are you hiring?

I'm quite happy to try to demonstrate how I think, but I hate hate hate leet code because A) it's not relevant to showing how one thinks and B) I've read so much dunking on it on HN that I'm now stopping interviews when they pull out the hackerrank or live code to say 'without using the library, reverse this linked list'.

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

#72

Post by fduran »

jodrellblank wrote: post #64
fduran wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I've been looking at WASM, for ex https://github.com/snaplet/postgres-wasm/tree/main/packages/... , it would certainly simplify everything to "download a fat file".

Have you seen https://copy.sh/v86/ ? It doesn't run as fast as jslinux but is BSD Licensed, on Github, and supports resuming the VM from a snapshot. https://github.com/copy/v86

Didn't know about this, thanks!

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

#73

Post by grepLeigh »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #68
grepLeigh wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If most developers can't debug a VM, then anyone who can will be able to charge a premium. If you have a proficiency in ops, remember that the next time you negotiate a compensation package. [Edited my compensation numbers to avoid down votes - yikes]

I feel like you definitely have to target particular companies and more specifically specific titles and skills to offer to do so. My guess is trying to sell high end services as a "principal software engineer" isn't going to be enough to justify that cash comp to a lot of people hiring.

I wouldn't think of it as trying to sell yourself as a "principal software engineer" on an open market.

I'd make a list of the companies where hiring/scaling the ops team will make or break the business's value delivery, and filter by companies aware of this.

You can knock this out at the recruiting step, just by asking about open developer headcount vs. open SRE ops headcount. Ask which direction that ratio seems to be going, and if there's anyone you can talk to whose job it is to change that ratio (director or VP mandate).

The referral network from working at a hyperscaler co in ops is a great way to break into the space.

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

#74

Post by fduran »

grepLeigh wrote: post #58

Very cool! This reminds me of the ops challenge @ Slack. I'm not sure if they still do this, but the SRE/platform infra interview used to involve a VM running a malfunctioning LAMP stack. You'd get SSH access to the VM, then submit a diagnostic report of what was broken (and how you fixed it). Reminded me of how Red Hat used to run their certification test (RHCE). I probably still have the live CDs for my RHCE laying…

Oh that reminds me, I loved the original Stripe CTF, it's been 10 years already! https://twitter.com/fduran/status/240321390698442753

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

#75

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

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

#76

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#77

Post by pvg »

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.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work.

[...] Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#78

Post by KaiserPro »

DeathArrow wrote: post #55

>Practice for your next SRE/DevOps interview. Are SREs and DevOps tasked with administration of operating systems?

> Are SREs and DevOps tasked with administration of operating systems?

yes, eventually.

you can dress it up in all the fancy terms that you like. but devops and SREs are sysadmins with better PR.

its critical that SREs understand _how_ to debug a system, so that they can work out how to put in fixes, and or design better systems.

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

#79

Post by sorongopowa »

Volundr wrote: post #69
deathanatos wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, thou…

I never cease to be amazed at how few people really realize just how little hardware is often required for getting real work done. You'd be surprised just how much that 2GB vm with a couple cores can handle!

I started with a single 1xx MHz core and 16MB of RAM. And I'm sure some with even less, lol.

Supporting your point: Hardware is awesome if you use it wisely.

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

#80

Post by jabroni_salad »

DeathArrow wrote: post #55

>Practice for your next SRE/DevOps interview. Are SREs and DevOps tasked with administration of operating systems?

depends on what layer the issue is happening at. I know everyone thinks the OS has been abstracted away but my ticket queue says otherwise. "yaml engineering" is just a control surface, I still need to pop the hood often.
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