Not only coders are hard to recruit • Hacker News Board

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#71

Post by xiphias » Thu, Nov 17, 2016, 7:51 PM UTC

johnny_snq wrote: post #59

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.

Now this looks like a real interview task, not installing apache (which I as a non-sysadmon could do easily as well)

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#72

Post by languagewars » Fri, Nov 18, 2016, 12:57 AM UTC

globalgobble wrote: post #18

languagewars wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I strongly disagree. We should not test edge cases and specific scenarios. We are trying to test the candidate and his abilities in daily tasks. If I say I use vi instead of "commands" I will probably solve most of the "text" editing tasks faster than an admin that only knows how to get around using commands. I can come up with tons of scenarios when where you do not really know the internals you can get stuck easily…

Hmm, it seems like you are looking at how you should triage an applicant if they let you test them very painfully. I am interested in games I can play where mastery also serves as a potential initial triage and could lead to interesting discussions.

Just as I like project euler gamified as a fake ideal programming project, I would like a systems game where the point is optimizing for the worst case with minimal tools.

Add an IDE, a choice of editors, all kinds of softskills requirements that are more significant to an employer than these base primary skills. Now, I wonder why I am working for free as I am no longer just practicing our core/universal skills in an idealized/timeless environment. The better place to do that form of showing off work realistic skills is in OSS projects.

Re: Not only coders are hard to recruit

#73

Post by lisivka » Fri, Nov 18, 2016, 2:29 PM UTC

johnny_snq wrote: post #68

lisivka wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about copy-pasting of solution.

Ok. Maybe I misunderstood you. If you are thinking of having the tests leak and people just finding solutions on Google I'm just thinking of dynamically generating the problem. How about 3 characters missing from the config file for apache at random. You have to understand what is required and then try to fix it. Does this solve your case?

I had similar idea to your and found no solution to problem of copy-pasting. Good problem sets are hard to create but their solutions are easy to copy. Moreover, this is the good practice to try to solve solution locally, then copy-paste solution to target server.

I hope, you will find a solution for that.