11–20 of 73 posts
There's been a lot of criticism of hackerrank.[1][2] Are you doing anything to make sure your service gets more respect? [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12825953 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667174&source=techsto...
I don't think I would enjoy HackerRank as an interview, but as a user I do enjoy being able to practice computer science problems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are going to give real life scenarios based on the various roles you are testing with.(basicly a ssh login to the test machine) And we plan to asses the candidates way of solving the problems based on what commands and what process it uses to identify and solve the problem.
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…
The only suggestion I would make is that a good tool is present and working then I don't expect a penalty. I expect tools to not be present accordance with standard minimalist setups and to pay extreme penalties if I need to call a package manager or move to a less minimalist install to complete the task.
This is a thread where I talk about how we did this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8332104
We used to use it a lot - a trivial Java webapp running in a slightly misconfigured Tomcat with a slightly misconfigured Apache in front on a slightly misconfigured Unix box - though it's fallen by the wayside because we never quite get around to the faff of setting up a slightly broken test system for them. So having that as a service would be pretty good.
If this is what you're doing: I suggest not just keystrokes, but that they keep a log of what they're doing and thinking. Because we never expect them to fix everything wrong with the box, but we do want to know how they approach it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think I would enjoy HackerRank as an interview, but as a user I do enjoy being able to practice computer science problems.
Just wrote an answer above which i think is good for your concerns. What'do you think?
This would be quite nice. Going through the job searching process at the moment, the "aptitude tests" etc that I've seen are very good at blowing cobwebs off my obscure analytical skills, which I rarely if ever use, yet fail completely at getting any gauge of my ability to get every day stuff done in a clean, smell-free way.
As a result I'm now doing kata training on Coderwars and am getting more used to this style of testing. It's actually good fun, and I think it'll help increasing my ability to just spit out code. In real life scenarios though, most of the time is spent analysing a problem or process flow.
So this is to have a test VM they have to fix? Excellent! I heartily approve of this method for finding a sysadmin. This is a thread where I talk about how we did this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8332104 We used to use it a lot - a trivial Java webapp running in a slightly misconfigured Tomcat with a slightly misconfigured Apache in front on a slightly misconfigured Unix box - though it's fallen by the ways…
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 relevant metrics do you have?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We are going to give real life scenarios based on the various roles you are testing with.(basicly a ssh login to the test machine) And we plan to asses the candidates way of solving the problems based on what commands and what process it uses to identify and solve the problem.
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…
There's been a lot of criticism of hackerrank.[1][2] Are you doing anything to make sure your service gets more respect? [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12825953 [2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12667174&source=techsto...
Glad you asked that. As i saw in the treads mentioned by you, the common problem is that the tests are more about theory, and less about practice. Which is true. Sometimes, in interviews, you are asked about algorithms that you studied in college and never used before. It's very difficult to score high in this tests. We propose to eliminate this gap by having real job, day to day, scenarios like: install apache, mysq…
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…
I can come up with tons of scenarios when where you do not really know the internals you can get stuck easily. Like if I do chmod -x on the chmod binary. Does it prove anything if the candidate is not able to solve such task ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not sure you can do this I believe sysadmin/sre/devops person wears too many hats. What are you going to test ?
We are going to give real life scenarios based on the various roles you are testing with.(basicly a ssh login to the test machine) And we plan to asses the candidates way of solving the problems based on what commands and what process it uses to identify and solve the problem.
1.1) Sys admins generally have their own set of tools (which would be customized per company I guess)...would these be installed by default? (I'm assuming you are provisioning docker containers / candidate / test and then destroying them after use).
1.2) I've used the ones that are sent for developers and it's been a pretty terrible experience at best (it's buggy, won't accept valid code etc.). If this is the case for sysadmins, it's even more worse (but then again, I guess you can put a spin on it and claim it's for the best as they'd have to deal with unpredictiability).
2. How will different technologies be integrated to test candidates on? (for example, testing knowledge on multi node kubernetes cluster and so on).
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…