How Do You Interview A Sysadmin Candidate?

Posted by timothy on Wednesday August 1, 2001 @01:37AM from the very-very-carefully dept.

benedict writes: "The article No Shortage of Programmers? sparked a really interesting thread about how to interview programmers. Being a systems administrator, I am curious about the Slashdot community's collective wisdom on how to interview sysadmins. I have come up with a few questions of my own to prime the pump. 'What is tcpdump? What is it good for?' 'How about truss/ktrace/strace? What are they good for?' 'What's the largest number of machines you've maintained? What have you done to make it easier on yourself (e.g. what types of automation, file distribution, etc.)' 'Do you use source code control? What for?' I would also present a couple of 'hypothetical' situations from my own experience and ask how people would approach them. How about you: what kinds of questions would you ask, what situations would you describe, what kinds of answers would you look for?"

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Re:Types of question by austinBlues · 2001-08-01 02:23 · Score: 4, Interesting

People skills! Programmers can hide in their
caves and snarl when thrown their ration of caffeine and carbohydrates. Sysadmins gotta be able to smile while being asked: 1) to do the impossible, 2) Yet Another FAQ, 3) add another user, 4) restore from backup, 5) say no to some bigwig who wants the security policy violated for his/her personal whim, *) you get the idea.

Be good to your sysadmin, even if it isn't his/her day.