21–30 of 73 posts
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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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just wrote an answer above which i think is good for your concerns. What'do you think?
(Speaking as a coder here, although I've also done sysadmin through most of my 20 years of working in the industry). 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…
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…
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…
Becoming a CCIE required a passing a notoriously difficult hands-on 8 hour in-person lab examination[1]. SysAdminsArena reminds me of a remote version of the CCIE Lab Exam for sysadmins.
Fun fact: the CCIE program was established in 1992 and was originally going to be called "Cisco Top Gun"[2], but they had to choose a more serious name.
[1] https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/community/certifications/c...
[2] http://www.bradreese.com/blog/how-the-cisco-ccie-program-was...
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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…
We are aware that there are more ways to skin a cat. I think it's fair to evaluate a candidate based on wether if he can solve an issue or not and the amount of time it took. I agree it would be stupid to score based on individual commands and we didn't plan to go that low level. But we plan to count the number of commands with typos or wrong parameters. Don't you agree this would be a way to differentiate between 2…
Does it make sense for a sysadmin to know a numeric notation for chmod ? Probably. Would I ask that on an interview ? Nope If you need to ask why then you have probably never worked in a heterogeneous environment.
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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…
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.).
Definitely your suggestions are great and we will discuss having tests in this area.
Cheers!
The real difficulty in recruiting in this space is finding and engaging these people, not testing them.
If this is a Hacker Rank for sysadmins, then great. I'm sure you'll have plenty of users but we're still a long way away from solving the bigger problem.
The approach I'm working on is easier to do technically but requires some more costs.
With that said, glad to see I'm not the only one that's been frustrated with hiring devops / sysadmin / SRE roles. Google's even commented how hard hiring for SREs is for them and I think we have a huge gap between people stuck in the 90s approaching systems and those that modernized.
I generally like the idea of clearer quantification of a persons output but it should be done very delicately. As in, if you are going to measure everything someone produces, maybe that data should only be available to that person and it's up to them how they share it.
The uncertainty principle likely applies to people too. Hard to measure people without influencing them. Trick is to do it in a positive way. Managers measuring people for the purpose of firing them would be perceived, and have a negative effect on morale, than measuring people to identify opportunities for education, training or skills development.