Theoretical vs Practical Knowledge

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 12 Dec 2001 17:50:02 -0800 (PST) 
Roy S Rapoport <rsr at inorganic.org> wrote:

> One of the most technically competent managers I ever had
> (actually, scratch that -- he was _the_ most technically competent
> manager I ever had) would start off technical interviews by saying
> something like "It's not so important that you know the answer to
> these questions -- but you need to know where you'd find the
> answers to them."  It's how I've always conducted tech interviews
> since then.

That's the entire concentration of my interviewing technique for
SysAdms.  I tell them up front that I'm going to set scenarios for
them, and then ask them to evaluate and resolve them by telling me
what they'd do with me telling them the results.  I'm also careful
to tell them that I don't expect instant right answers, and that in
fact I do expect them to NOT resolve some or several of them as what
I'm interested in is their problem solving approach and technique.
I then just make up (or remember) various things and throw them at
them.

  Okay, you've just inherited a dept's mail server which is acting
  as the smarthost for the corporate mailing lists.  You're told
  that historically it has been running just fine, but that
  currently mail is NOT being delivered in any sort of timely
  fashion.  Please get mail being delivered quickly.

    Solution to that one BTW is /var/log being on the same spindle
    as /var/spool/<MTA> and syslog being configured to fsync() after
    every write for the MTA logs, thus IO throttling the box, with
    the change in behaviour due to a recent corporate mktg campaign
    increasing mail loads enough to hit saturation.  And yes, that
    happened to me and took me most of a day to figure out...

etc etc etc

It makes interviews long unfortunately (Linda Bissum and Jim Dennis
can attest to that), especially for the good people, but it also
weeds out the pretenders quickly and thoroughly (eg those who are
not sure how to spell "NFS").
-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw at kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.