Not a great question pool IMHO Many of these questions are biased toward a person with a very specific personal profile. Asking about a “home lab” is disqualifying of people who don’t spend weekends terminating Cat5 or reimaging old Dell servers from eBay. A lot are outdated, e.g. the difference between a “router” and a “gateway” (I’ve seen that for 15+ years and it didn’t make sense then either). Others are uselessly vague, particularly “what is redirection?” with no context.
The test ended up being an actual in terminal test with specific goals and full access to man pages and the internet. So it wasnt anything like these questions (though they were helpful to distract me the night before). It went pretty well I think!
Rote memorization does not a senior sysadmin make. While there are a great number of interesting questions in here, often we care more about how someone works, both technically and interpersonally, than their ability to remember command line switches to tar. These questions would be great spice in a complete interview recipe. I’ve done literally hundreds of sysadmin interviews across many levels, and at the end of the day I ask myself, “Can I work with this person? Can I teach this person?” If the answer is yes to each, then we move forward.
Not a great question pool IMHO Many of these questions are biased toward a person with a very specific personal profile. Asking about a “home lab” is disqualifying of people who don’t spend weekends terminating Cat5 or reimaging old Dell servers from eBay. A lot are outdated, e.g. the difference between a “router” and a “gateway” (I’ve seen that for 15+ years and it didn’t make sense then either). Others are uselessly vague, particularly “what is redirection?” with no context.
The test ended up being an actual in terminal test with specific goals and full access to man pages and the internet. So it wasnt anything like these questions (though they were helpful to distract me the night before). It went pretty well I think!
I feel like I’ve put too many tags, but there isnt a catchall tag for systems administrations like there is for programming.
I have a linux / bsd sys admin interview on tuesday morning, so I’m looking up questions.
Good luck.
It’s an interesting set of questions. A few of them feel a bit unrelated to sysadmin skills though, or are oriented around a very particular mindset.
For instance “Have you contributed to an open source project?”
That is an awesome question and can say all kinds of things about a candidate but says NOTHING about sysadmin skills IMO.
“[MD5 is] cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use”.
I’d hope a “Guru” level Sysadmin would know this.
Rote memorization does not a senior sysadmin make. While there are a great number of interesting questions in here, often we care more about how someone works, both technically and interpersonally, than their ability to remember command line switches to tar. These questions would be great spice in a complete interview recipe. I’ve done literally hundreds of sysadmin interviews across many levels, and at the end of the day I ask myself, “Can I work with this person? Can I teach this person?” If the answer is yes to each, then we move forward.