How Do You Interview A Network Engineer?

vrmlguy asks: "Back in July, we learned how to interview programers, and in August we learned how to interview sysadmins. Obviously, we still need to hire some network engineers, but what questions should we ask? The previous articles had a couple of generic gems which I intend to put to good use, but the only position-specific question that I can come up with is "Please explain the differences between RIP and OSPF." Any other ideas for a guy whose idea of using a sniffer is to fire up tcpdump?"

Comments

background, breadth

[green pizza]

Has the person worked with enough types of networking gear to understand the history, future, and direction so that he can make informed decisions as new products become available? Having only worked with ethernet is a bad sign.

Has he worked with powerful software tools, both commercial and opensource? (HP Openview, CA Unicenter, etc).

What is his experience with router equipment? Experience with at least one other large scale platform other than Cisco is a huge plus.

What's the best way to learn old networking stuff?

[cymen]

In a similar vain what is the best way to learn older networking stuff like token ring? I recently had a friend ask me if I could help her public school with their ailing token ring network. But because I have no experience with tokent ring I couldn't help her.

Obviously I'm going to buy a couple of old token ring cards to play with but are there any good sites for background information, etc? I don't expect to become a networking guru but learning more about not so common network equipment would be interesting...

Ask them to draw pictures, ask some dumb questions

[indaba]

I'm a network engineer and I live with a whiteboard marker in my hand.

So , ask them to draw you some pictures. Like:

OSI model

Operation of at least 2 IGP's , ie OSPF, RIP, EIGRP

Route redistribution

Spanning tree

Multicasting

Split horizon

etc .. you get the idea

Ask a few dumb questions :

what's ARP ?

difference between a router and a switchname me a layer 4 IP protocol

what does NAT do ?

who's Jon Postel ?

who's Vint Cerf ?

what's the IETF ?

whats an RFC ?

etc .. you get the idea

Finally, if you have the time, give them 2 routers and switch
Get him/her to configure :

PPP, and CHAP

RIP, or OSPF or EIGRP

IPX

a simple access-list

basic router authentication

etc .. you get the idea

Also, certifications DO help you weed out the rubbish.

Darren Kruse CCNP CCDP
WAN/LAN Networking Consultant
Email : darren_kruse@hotmail.com
www.geocities.com/darren_kruse

ps, I'm alway's looking for work :-)
here at eBay !

interview questions

[DNS-and-BIND]

I advocate preparing a bunch of trick questions in advance. The answers you expect don't have to be particularly accurate, indeed they can be downright wrong. What's important is not to test the basic skills of the interviewee, but to fellate the ego of the interviewer by demonstrating superior knowledge of inane trivia like obscure, special-purpose cisco patches.

At least, that's what I've come out of interviews thinking.