Can’t just be me, can it? Currently 0 for 3 on interviews because I can’t seem to get past the technical interview/test. Usually because of some crazy complicated algorithm question that’s never been relevant to anything I’ve ever had to do on the job in all my years coding.

Also, while I’m ranting: screw the usual non-answer when given feedback.

  • bob_wiley@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    When I was interviewing people for sys admin jobs I would ask total softballs. People with any real skills at all would laugh and say, “that’s it,” at the end.

    You’d be amazed at how many people those softball questions would knock out. I would even give them a laptop with full internet access. If someone can quickly find and implement and answer, cool, they have those resources in real life. Most couldn’t even do that, some wouldn’t even try.

    When I say softball questions it was stuff like…

    1. Restart service X in Windows
    2. Open a text file in Linux, change some text, save it.
    3. Find the uptime on sever X
    4. Use ssh/rdp to connect to server X/Y with the provided credentials.
    5. Look at the last 10 lines of the messages log in Linux.

    Open internet, with unlimited time, people failed this more often than not… not even getting close. It was really bad.

    • dylanTheDeveloper@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is why googling is a skill, even if I don’t know then some 15 year old kid from Bangladesh has a YouTube tutorial on it

      • bob_wiley@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Half the questions I asked were on a single page that came up first is a semi-decent search. Some people found that page and breezed through it. Others found that page, looked at it, didn’t recognize it has the answers and went back to keep looking. Some failed so badly they never even found anything close to the answer.

        The most impressive one was a kid who never used Linux before. He looked up how to edit a file, then modified the file with vi, having never used it before, and he did it pretty quickly too. People like that pass in my book.