[Courses] Running A Business- Starting a Company

[Kai MacTane]

At 9/2/02 04:34 PM , L J Laubenheimer wrote:

>But when they hand the questions to HR, anything but a specific textbook 
>answer is tossed, and you are assumed to be a resume fluffer.

These questions were being asked by the sysadmins, not HR. And we'd have 
understood "man tar" just fine. For that matter, I think we got at least 
one person who answered the "how to change the default runlevel" question 
with "You know, I have to do that so seldom, I think I'd have to look it 
up. Or I might grep around in the /etc or /etc/rc directory..."

Which is (and was) just fine. It separated that person from the two or 
three who said, "A runevel? Ummm, I don't know."

For that matter, as far as "specific textbook answers" -- we didn't come up 
with answers. Just *questions*. There were dozens of good ways to answer 
any given one.

There were also certain problem-solving ones, where we'd describe the 
symptoms of a problem, and ask them how they'd deal with it. The sky was 
the limit with those -- answers could range from an immediate, "Oh, that's 
caused by such-and-so; you fix it by doing this" to "Hmmm... I try this. 
[We tell the candidate what the result is] Okay, then I try this..." and so 
on. Several folks suggested googling on error message strings for certain 
cases; this was generally considered to be a pretty good response (at least 
where appropriate).

                                                 --Kai MacTane
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"Playing dead and sweet submission,
  Cracks the whip deadpan on cue."
                                                 --Siouxsie and the
                                                   Banshees,
                                                  "Peek-a-boo"