Slashdot Mirror
How to Hire a Linux Administrator
Skapare writes "Hiring a good system administrator can be difficult. Hiring one while converting to Linux may take someone with special skills. Tom Adelstein is exploring just what is needed, and what should be avoided, in an article at Linux Journal about Linux System Administrators. I say hire more than just one."
Don't forget to look for personality.
Too many geeks spend so much time in front of the computer they forget how to deal with people.
I'd rather hire a less-technical person with good person skills then a more-technical person who cannot hold a converation. Since the Linux admin is basically a internal support person for the business, a good personality, decent communication skills, and the ability to turn a low-level human concepts to create a technical solution are always very important. The ability to chat over a coffee or beer is essential in any workplace.
Many technical skills can be learned very quickly. Personality is learned in a lifetime.
Not a big fan of several of the answers. The first batch of questions has some things that are quite wrong (virtual memory is implemented by time-sharing?!?) and there's no comments correcting them. At least the one that starts with "ls -ltra" has comments, although the main page doesn't make that clear.
One problem with providing answers to interview questions is that it's almost useless. If the interviewer knows the correct answers, then they don't need it. If the interviewer doesn't, then the questions must be crafted to only have one correct answer (eg, "What does UDP stand for?"), and such questions are often teh suck. Otherwise (still discussing the case when the interviewer doesn't know the problem domain) you end up with situations like the windows/unix filesharing question, in which the interviewer expects to hear NFS while many respondants would reply SAMBA. Open-ended questions, such as "what does [technology] do" are the worst in this scenario. So I don't think that providing answers helps.
Beware also of "opinion" questions, such as "what is the main advantage of symlinks over copies". The question on your site says that permissions are shared, while I think that the main advantage is that modifications are shared. Somebody coming from an embedded systems background may well have good reason to say that the main advantage is disk space.
I guess my point is, it's perilous to interview for Linux folk if you don't know enough Linux to deal with a variety of correct answers.
As elitist as it may sound, in my experience (as a Linux Admin for an ERP consulting firm, sometimes I'm asked to provide training for the client firm's tech staff) this is actually true. The reason may be that a Windows admin has spent so much time with the GUI that memorizing/using the command line may seem like a daunting task. I'd say it's not a matter of competence, but rather a matter of attitude.