Tough interview questions.

Fri Aug 13 12:55:19 PDT 2004

On Fri, 13 Aug 2004, Michael T. Halligan wrote:

> I have to interview somebody I don't want to hire in about 1/2 hour..
> Management wants him because he's their cronie.  What are people's favorite
> "give them a tough time" interview questions?

talking one's way in is easy...
doing a live demo is lot lot harder if one doesn't know as well
as one should 

they should have written/summary FAQs and HOWTOs for their area of
expertise vs they having to google for answers

c ya
alvin

- if for a sysadmin job
  power off the machine to remove(corrupt) /boot or /etc/fstab or /dev
	- ask um to boot the machine in 5 minutes
	( lots of hands on fix it problems )

  - more time .. more questions
	- fav dns options to turn on or off
	- fav web options to turn on or off
	- fav mail options to turn on or off

	- how long to restore a new PC from bare metal
	- how to do hotswap/load balance of the whole server ... 

	- one has 100 production servers of various flavors,
	how does one upgrade them to the current patch levels

	- list of hardening processes
	- masks for subnetting for 8,16,64 hosts 
	- egress and ingress fw rules
	- disallowed ip# ... ( 1.* 2.*, 3.*, ... not just 192.168.* )

	- thousands of um

	- i just got asked to build/ship  LOM ( lights out Management )
	and told um up front, we haven't ship systems like that,
	and we do not stock LOM pci cards and motherboards suitable for it
		- but it should be fairly ez

- if for shell app
  - put a typo into the (perl) script ... the modules that calls
  other modules ..

	- do "hello world" in each of the languages listed on 
	their programming skills

- if for c/c++
  - more code examples

- how to write code for xx problem vs yy problem (more then 1 solution )
	- keyboard buffer examples
	- screen examples
	- "employee address" examples
	- sorting examples
	- search algorithms
	- snipping and rotating triangles/circles
	- SRC/DST coding changes in the tcp stack

c ya
alvin