[Courses] Running A Business- Starting a Company

[Conor Daly]

On Sat, Aug 31, 2002 at 06:55:56PM -0700 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
L J Laubenheimer thought:
> Kai MacTane wrote:
> 
> > 
> > After getting in a few people whose résumés looked good, but who seemed 
> > in interviews to be hiding a basic lack of understanding of Unix, we 
> > decided to come up with a set of questions to ask incoming interviewees. 
> 
> 
> I hate trivia tests... I can't keep certain detail stuff in my head.
 
But you'd be able to explain the concept instead wouldn't you?

> > They started off pretty easy, things any Unix sysadmin should be able to 
> > answer -- "What are the standard Unix runlevels, and what do they mean? 
> > How do you change the default runlevel on a system?", or " -- 
> 
> 
> I would have blown your test at the first question, and I've worked with unix 
> for 8 years, and done sysadmin for 2+.
> 
> Why?  Several reasons: 1) different unix variants have slightly different run 
> level numbering (I've been bitten by this). 2) I don't remember numbers - but 
> what they do (and only those that are the most often used).  I would remember 
> S, but not 0-5 (or 1-6).  Two, changing the runlevels on a system is also 
> variant specific, and can be a pain in the butt if you are starting at the 
> wrong level.  "man init" is where I'd start, to refresh my sucky memory (and 
> BSD is different).

If _I_ had been asking the questions and you had answered the first with
the paragraph above, I'd have been inclined to chuck the rest of the test,
chat about systems and hire you on the basis of the rest of your post!  A
good sysadmin should hedge such a question in any case.  Someone who says
"3 = text only networked, 5 = XDM" has either learned it out of a book or
is not very experienced yet and hasn't seen a debian system yet...
 
> Asking a sysadmin to list all of the options for the tar command, or things 
> like that, shuts out people who don't (or in my case can't) memorize trivia, 
> some of whom are perfectly good sysadmins.
 
tar --help?

> Whenever someone asks me "what command do I type to do X", I will answer, but 
> tell them to look up the specifics and usage

That looks like a perfect test score to me!  Anyone worth their salt will
be quite happy to emphasise that (s)he would, nearly as a matter of
course, need to look up the specifics of a command (or even which command)
but would know _exactly_ where to look...

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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