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Not only coders are hard to recruit

blog.sysadminsarena.com

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Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#51

Post by johnny_snq »

lisivka wrote: post #23
alexgotoi wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi David, thanks for your thoughts. Very useful the thread provided. And YES, this is what we are doing. Keystrokes is just one of the metrics we are about to collect and analyze. We are also thinking about number of commands wrote, how many were correct, how many wrong, also a log of the entire test. In future phases, we may take into consideration pair working or capturing a movie of the test. What other ideas of r…

So, if I will follow best practices and will prepare backup, then restore backup locally (to check that backup is OK), then will play with backup until problem will be solved (to not harm target server), then prepare runbook, and then will just execute it at target server, I will pass your test? Just two commands.

Yes. you should pass the test. This is one of the scenarios we are thinking. you get the backup location do the restore. done you passed.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#52

Post by alexgotoi »

tristor wrote: post #50

Speaking of sysadmins, a note for yours. You are currently serving blog.sysadminsarena.com over HTTPS with an HTTP to HTTPS redirect, but are not doing the same for your website. In fact, you don't have an HTTPS endpoint for your website at all. Going to your website by modifying the URL from the blog entry (because clicking your logo takes you to the front page of the blog, not the website) results in a `ERR_CONNECT…

Thank you!

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#53

Post by marcosdumay »

alexgotoi wrote: post #26
bovermyer wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are pretty baseline things that get automated away pretty quickly. More useful to me (as both a practicing devops type and a manager in that capacity) would be tests gauging ability to write bash scripts to do various things, or simulated problems that need to be diagnosed/fixed using command line tools (e.g., strace, netstat, etc.).

Indeed, those are pretty basic tasks. We will have 3 levels of difficulty and the examples mentioned are in the easiest category. In a early phase of a recruitment process, an experienced sysadmin would solve in less than 3 minutes and this is helping screening process when you have a huge number of applicants. But for latest stages of recruitment process, we will have more advanced scenarios for the tests. Definitel…

> an experienced sysadmin would solve in less than 3 minutes

Why do you think so? And, I'm hopping you don't rely on timing on this level.

An experienced sysadmin would have little experience with basic tasks, since he solves them around once or twice per job. And you never know the environments they tried it before, that may be completely different from what you are presenting them right now.

I'd say "installing X" is a test for encyclopedic knowledge, and a very unreliable test for expertize. That's the kind of test that gave bad names to IT certification at the early 2000's.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#54

Post by CmdrSprinkles »

globalgobble wrote: post #46
CmdrSprinkles wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I mostly agree with you, I can speak from experience with how we handled the first point: We were interviewing a new admin for the sysadmin/maintenance team and her answers to "how would you solve this problem?" were "Open that file and check that these variables are set and, if not, set them". One of the more jerkish people there went down the rabbit hole of "How are you going to edit that file? What if you do…

Brilliant answer :-). I totally agree with you. But this is the problem..you cannot implement such a thing to a tool like sysadminarena. Actually I believe being a sysops/devops or whatever you want to call it is one of the "most" challenging jobs in the IT industry. You get zillions of technologies you have to administer and maintain but it's impossible to master all of them. What makes a good admin is the ability t…

I would argue that basically any tech job (and probably other fields) is about knowing how to solve a problem (I really do wonder what the medical doctor equivalent of stack overflow is).

And just targeting a limited subset is kind of reasonable. Because, odds are, you will be. If you are running infrastructure for a web server you probably will have decided on a few solutions and have time to experiment with new ones on a new platform. Scientific computing? Same deal. It is the same logic by which coders should learn a range of languages and tools but will probably use a very small subset at any given job.

And I think that the semi-automated tools COULD detect stuff like that. One point for each solution presented and maybe something akin to those god awful rubrics for the more complex ones. So going with the tar approach (after twenty years, I know xzvf and czvf and can use a test file to figure out the order):

1 point for a correct answer 0.5 points for typing "man tar" or " tar" And then a subset of the remaining 0.5 for each letter and the order of operations. So something like tar xvf foo.tar.gz ./foo would get you most of the credit.

The big problem with stuff like this is that it should ONLY be used for an initial filter, but it will inevitably be used as "Only the top N people matter".

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#55

Post by alexgotoi »

arenaninja wrote: post #21
alexgotoi wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just wrote an answer above which i think is good for your concerns. What'do you think?

I think if that's the approach SysAdminsArena is taking, it's quite good. More advanced problems could be replication, caching, etc.

That's the approach and we are glad that you support it. Great topics for more advanced problems.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#56

Post by ohyoutravel »

Peroni wrote: post #39
ohyoutravel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The monthly hacker news "who is hiring" thread.

Great example. HN is the perfect place to find people right? I mean, I should know. HN who's hiring, like most online job advertising, is a crapshoot. It's a once-a-month post where you are drowning in noise. Finding a very large group of potentially relevant people for the roles you are hiring for isn't as straightforward as it sounds. Engaging said group and convincing folk from said group to come work for you is e…

I guess this is sarcasm. I was only responding implicitly to your initial question:

>>When was the last time you engaged with a company with a view to working with them because you saw an ad they happened to post in the right fora?

So, yes, hn is where I engage with a company with a view with working with them where they happen to post in the right forum. Suddenly your point is that it isn't a good place to find jobs? Maybe not, but that wasn't your original point. You're moving the goalposts.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#57

Post by alexgotoi »

marcosdumay wrote: post #53
alexgotoi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, those are pretty basic tasks. We will have 3 levels of difficulty and the examples mentioned are in the easiest category. In a early phase of a recruitment process, an experienced sysadmin would solve in less than 3 minutes and this is helping screening process when you have a huge number of applicants. But for latest stages of recruitment process, we will have more advanced scenarios for the tests. Definitel…

> an experienced sysadmin would solve in less than 3 minutes Why do you think so? And, I'm hopping you don't rely on timing on this level. An experienced sysadmin would have little experience with basic tasks, since he solves them around once or twice per job. And you never know the environments they tried it before, that may be completely different from what you are presenting them right now. I'd say "installing X"…

What scenarios would you suggest to have?

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#58

Post by alexgotoi »

devonkim wrote: post #28

Interesting problem you're addressing but I've been working on this problem from a completely different set of metrics. Fundamentally, I really don't care how a problem is fixed as long as it doesn't have bad repercussions. If a web server is "slow" users don't care why - giving freedom to admins to approach higher level problems while still measuring them is something I'm confident that can be done while I take a nu…

We are also glad that there are other people that are working on this issue. Good luck!

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#59

Post by johnny_snq »

tristor wrote: post #50

Speaking of sysadmins, a note for yours. You are currently serving blog.sysadminsarena.com over HTTPS with an HTTP to HTTPS redirect, but are not doing the same for your website. In fact, you don't have an HTTPS endpoint for your website at all. Going to your website by modifying the URL from the blog entry (because clicking your logo takes you to the front page of the blog, not the website) results in a `ERR_CONNECT…

I'll fix it tonight after work with LetsEncrypt most probably. The blog is hosted on medium.com so they provided the ssl termination. But there should be no excuse for not having https on a website in 2016.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#60

Post by marcosdumay »

languagewars wrote: post #12
globalgobble wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please allow me my honesty but that's a stupid way of thinking about candidates and the roles. Or I do not get it. So you are basically going to judge the candidate based on what criteria ? If they use vi instead of cat to append to a file ? So decide what is the best way of solving the problem ? Or you give +1pt for using tail instead of opening the whole file in VI ? Are you aware of the fact that there are many ty…

When I used to work in OS support my actions were optimized for the assumptions of a default minimal install and being able to describe actions to a person of questionable knowledge over the phone and interpret what they would most likely try to read back at me. The certifications were along those lines too.. While the exact nature of the certifications was ridiculous and would be even more ridiculous in terms of jud…

Do you work as a sysadmin? If so, how many times did you recover from a broken tty at work? (I mean, is it a number bigger than zero?)

I've been one for a short while, and get to play devops from time to time. When I see a machine so broken that it can't give me a tty, it's time for a reboot (if last command caused it - actually don't remember it ever happening), full reinstall, or trash. I won't lose any time recovering it. If there's some important log on the disks or anything, mount the disk on another machine.

Now, I've recovered a broken machine plenty of times at home. I've edited files with sed and pipes because I broke every other editor available. I have never actually edited the memory with sed, but I could if I had to. But all that is at home, where it's fun to create a crazy configuration, and totally not fun to throw things away. It's fun, but completely unproductive.

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