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ponzicar
Mar 17, 2008

Remulak posted:

Aha, did you fall for it and leave, leaving him as the only applicant?

Oldest trick in the book.

Nope, although I never heard back from them. But if that dude wanted to go that hard for a short term entry level desktop support position, he probably needed it more than I did.

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GreenNight
Feb 19, 2006
Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

Trigger warning

https://imgur.com/gallery/tXj9LZa

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Guy Axlerod posted:

I was walking out of an interview and saw the next guy waiting. He was wearing a fedora. I said to myself if he was the competition I had this job. I got the job.

I was sitting in a lobby with this 400lb dude, waiting for an interview one time. I got there way early, he went before me. He wasn't gone long, and I thought he was crying when he left.

He was really just sweating his loving rear end off. You had to walk up two flights of stairs into a mezzanine where they were doing the interviews at. Towards the end of my interview, they said "You're going to be doing quite a bit of walking around the building here, I don't think the guy before you would have been able to do it. He could barely make it up the stairs."

TITTIEKISSER69
Mar 19, 2005

SAVE THE BEES
PLANT MORE TREES
CLEAN THE SEAS
KISS TITTIESS




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoXJ0ki94fI

Paladine_PSoT
Jan 2, 2010

If you have a problem Yo, I'll solve it


Good lord that bitcoin farm

angry armadillo
Jul 26, 2010

Bob Morales posted:

I was sitting in a lobby with this 400lb dude, waiting for an interview one time. I got there way early, he went before me. He wasn't gone long, and I thought he was crying when he left.

He was really just sweating his loving rear end off. You had to walk up two flights of stairs into a mezzanine where they were doing the interviews at. Towards the end of my interview, they said "You're going to be doing quite a bit of walking around the building here, I don't think the guy before you would have been able to do it. He could barely make it up the stairs."

I interviewed a bunch of people once and I used a room way at the back of site - had a guy who claimed he would be 'the best IT person I would speak to today' - which, judging by his technical test, probably was. But he barely made it to the interview room and was a rather bad fit based on comment like that so he got binned.


Our practice is to interview people then give them a basic 20 questions or so just to gauge what people know (varying from name some office packages to tell us what DNS stands for and what it does etc, my boss used to include 'what are the FISMO roles' before he got told to take it out heh.) -we tend to just leave them in the interview room and make a coffee whilst they work through it. My boss told me one of the candidates for my job got caught cheating by trying to google the answers on his phone at which point they sent him away... whoops.

Renegret
May 26, 2007

THANK YOU FOR CALLING HELP DOG, INC.

YOUR POSITION IN THE QUEUE IS *pbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbt*


Cat Army Sworn Enemy
It's only cheating if you get caught :colbert:



Otherwise you're just utilizing all the tools at your disposal.

Kyrosiris
May 24, 2006

You try to be happy when everyone is summoning you everywhere to "be their friend".



Renegret posted:

It's only cheating if you get caught :colbert:



Otherwise you're just utilizing all the tools at your disposal.

Honestly if I wasn't told not to, that would've been my first instinct too.

If I was told not to, my answer would probably be "I don't immediately know, but I would Google this in a normal scenario". :v:

ssb
Feb 16, 2006

WOULD YOU ACCOMPANY ME ON A BRISK WALK? I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK WITH YOU!!



#41 is an uncalled for attack against me personally.

Renegret
May 26, 2007

THANK YOU FOR CALLING HELP DOG, INC.

YOUR POSITION IN THE QUEUE IS *pbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbt*


Cat Army Sworn Enemy

Kyrosiris posted:

Honestly if I wasn't told not to, that would've been my first instinct too.

If I was told not to, my answer would probably be "I don't immediately know, but I would Google this in a normal scenario". :v:

A few years back, I was taking a short proficiency test at work to determine my eligibility to receive a training (They wanted to make sure you had a certain baseline knowledge so it wasn't too advanced for you....I don't loving know I don't make the rules). My VP walked in on me cheating in exactly the same way, and I fed him the same line about about using all the tools at your disposal. He laughs and says, don't worry your secret is safe with me. I ended up getting selected for the training so....I guess he was telling the truth? I dunno my VP is a pretty cool dude when he's not busy being a VP.

It's one of my many soap boxes I love to bitch about. I have a memory so lovely it's almost comical. Sometimes I'll fix something at work and need to give it 10 minutes to make sure it's stable, then I forget about it until hours later when I'm cleaning my 50 chrome tabs and come across the graphs that I forgot to check again. I've sat down and memorized the list of common ports easily over a dozen times between school, interviews, certification tests, etc. And yet, I can only rattle off like 5 of them from memory at best. But why do I need to? If I need something that's not 22, 80, or 443 then I just look it up. Who cares if I can regurgitate poo poo from memory? I thought this would get better after I graduated college and entered the "real world" but nope. I've been out of school for over 10 years and I'm still cheating on tests because I struggle with rote memorization.

Honestly I think I found the perfect job for me. If it's not a big red angry alarm on an board in front of me, I don't need to care about it. And if a documented process that's easy to find doesn't exist, then I just make some poo poo up and do what feels right.

Renegret fucked around with this message at 14:40 on Dec 4, 2020

ssb
Feb 16, 2006

WOULD YOU ACCOMPANY ME ON A BRISK WALK? I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK WITH YOU!!


We avoid the issue with people needing to google things by not giving a test like that during the interview and our questions that we ask are more designed around hearing thought processes that shows that there's an understanding of everything and how systems work together.

I don't give two shits if someone remembers specifically what DNS stands for, even if it is trivial.
I do want to hear what process and things they would take into account when designing a platform for a new enterprise application that we need to host.
I do want to hear what sort of communication and change control as well as a pseudocode-type technical process they'd use to deploy a critical patch off-schedule (think heartbleed)
I do want to hear how they're going to handle and angry application admin showing up at their desk

People can always look up specifics when they need it. We always include one basic weed-out question but it's always really easy and has multiple correct answers (along the lines of "you find yourself on a linux system, how do you determine specifically what OS it is?") just to show a basic familiarity, but what acronyms stand for or being able to recite exact syntax for LVM commands or whatever, I guess it's a bonus but man pages and documentation exist for a reason.

Arquinsiel
Jun 1, 2006

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady

Kyrosiris posted:

Honestly if I wasn't told not to, that would've been my first instinct too.

If I was told not to, my answer would probably be "I don't immediately know, but I would Google this in a normal scenario". :v:
I was asked to subnet something in an interview a few years back and I replied with something like "I've learned this a half dozen times for exams but normally I just google a calculator and let it do the work". The guy makes a note and thinks a second and says "you know, I'd have to google a calculator to check it anyway". He was a good boss.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

shortspecialbus posted:

I don't give two shits if someone remembers specifically what DNS stands for, even if it is trivial.

I want people that know what DNS stands for, what the record types are, how it works, what a registrar is...

Otherwise you are in my position where you have a moron in the other room trying to fix a lapsed domain registration and he's barely treading water. He doesn't even know how to troubleshoot something like this other than 'site is down'

If it's important for your job, you should know it without having to look it up.

ssb
Feb 16, 2006

WOULD YOU ACCOMPANY ME ON A BRISK WALK? I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK WITH YOU!!


Bob Morales posted:

I want people that know what DNS stands for, what the record types are, how it works, what a registrar is...

Otherwise you are in my position where you have a moron in the other room trying to fix a lapsed domain registration and he's barely treading water. He doesn't even know how to troubleshoot something like this other than 'site is down'

If it's important for your job, you should know it without having to look it up.

The record types and how it works and what a registrar is, that's important information and if the job involved a lot of DNS work there would probably be some sort of question related to that, but the specifics of what the acronym stands for is still irrelevant if you know the rest. It's one of those things that someone who has been working with DNS for 20 years could just brain fart and not be able to answer.

Edit: A question along the lines of "Explain at a high level how DNS works and the difference between an A record and a CNAME", maybe a bit less hand-holdy, is a good question that will weed out incapable people. The acronym expansion isn't important and is too likely to be brain farted by someone under interview stress. If they answer the explanation question properly but accidentally say "Domain Name Service" are they done for?

Edit 2: lol I accidentally put the correct expansion for it when trying to put the wrong one. I'm firing myself.

ssb fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Dec 4, 2020

Renegret
May 26, 2007

THANK YOU FOR CALLING HELP DOG, INC.

YOUR POSITION IN THE QUEUE IS *pbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbt*


Cat Army Sworn Enemy

Arquinsiel posted:

I was asked to subnet something in an interview a few years back and I replied with something like "I've learned this a half dozen times for exams but normally I just google a calculator and let it do the work". The guy makes a note and thinks a second and says "you know, I'd have to google a calculator to check it anyway". He was a good boss.

lmao

And yet Cisco doesn't allow "info dumps" anymore so no more writing out an entire subnet table when you sit down before you start the exam. I just can't find myself caring enough to retain how to do it when nobody does it by hand in the real world.

I made a mistake on a subnet question in an interview once and the interviewer didn't even notice because he was more out of practice than I was at it. Then it ended up, the mistake was made because he copied the question wrong and the subnet he was asking for wasn't even possible. Yeah maybe I should've caught that, but just let me look at a table I can find on google in 30 seconds. That table is useless if you don't understand what subnetting is.


Bob Morales posted:

I want people that know what DNS stands for, what the record types are, how it works, what a registrar is...

Otherwise you are in my position where you have a moron in the other room trying to fix a lapsed domain registration and he's barely treading water. He doesn't even know how to troubleshoot something like this other than 'site is down'

If it's important for your job, you should know it without having to look it up.

I agree that everyone should have a baseline. My issue is the expectation of rote memorization for minutiae. If you don't know what a record type is, no amount of googling will help you answer that question unless you're given a half hour to educate yourself, and even then you'll be completely unable to put that into practice.

I was that kid who used to smuggle in formulas on their TI-83 in math class. Just the formula, I'd have no problem applying it correctly, just couldn't remember the insane nonsense formulas I needed for the high level math/physics classes. And I never saw a problem with this, because understanding how to apply said formula is a more important skill than being able to repeat it from memory.

Renegret fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Dec 4, 2020

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

shortspecialbus posted:

The record types and how it works and what a registrar is, that's important information and if the job involved a lot of DNS work there would probably be some sort of question related to that, but the specifics of what the acronym stands for is still irrelevant if you know the rest. It's one of those things that someone who has been working with DNS for 20 years could just brain fart and not be able to answer.

Edit: A question along the lines of "Explain at a high level how DNS works and the difference between an A record and a CNAME", maybe a bit less hand-holdy, is a good question that will weed out incapable people. The acronym expansion isn't important and is too likely to be brain farted by someone under interview stress. If they answer the explanation question properly but accidentally say "Domain Name Service" are they done for?

Edit 2: lol I accidentally put the correct expansion for it when trying to put the wrong one. I'm firing myself.

If they know it's for domain names that's fine. If the S is services or system or server I don't know or care.

Arquinsiel
Jun 1, 2006

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady

Bob Morales posted:

If they know it's for domain names that's fine. If the S is services or system or server I don't know or care.
Now you understand the point.

Darchangel
Feb 12, 2009

Tell him about the blower!


Paladine_PSoT posted:

Good lord that bitcoin farm


Good. gently caress those assholes.

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

Interesting fact:

They have found that the internet has actively changed the structure of younger brains, because kids who grow up with the internet don't have the ability to memorize the same way older people do. Their/your/our brains are more optimized for understanding things contextually when fed the information from googling the answer

Arquinsiel
Jun 1, 2006

"There is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first."

God Bless Margaret Thatcher
God Bless England
RIP My Iron Lady
I've seen that happen with myself TBH. I used to know the D&D 3.X rules by heart. Anything in the three core books I could tell you with a few second's thought. Now I'm lucky if I can remember how basic combat works in a much simpler game.

AlexDeGruven
Jun 29, 2007

Watch me pull my dongle out of this tiny box


In my interview, I admitted clearly that Google is my second brain.

It's not necessarily having all the answers on-hand all the time, because that's impossible and anyone telling you that they do is lying to you and/or themselves.

I think the key, at least for me, is admitting when you don't know or aren't sure of something and are willing to look it up to confirm/shore up your knowledge.

My favorite interview, even though I wasn't actually in on it, was the guy who said he had more than 25 years Linux experience. Not Unix, mind you. Specifically Linux, and even clarified it.

He also pronounced Nagios "nagaglios".

Schadenboner
Aug 15, 2011

by Shine

AlexDeGruven posted:

In my interview, I admitted clearly that Google is my second brain.

It's not necessarily having all the answers on-hand all the time, because that's impossible and anyone telling you that they do is lying to you and/or themselves.

I think the key, at least for me, is admitting when you don't know or aren't sure of something and are willing to look it up to confirm/shore up your knowledge.

My favorite interview, even though I wasn't actually in on it, was the guy who said he had more than 25 years Linux experience. Not Unix, mind you. Specifically Linux, and even clarified it.

He also pronounced Nagios "nagaglios".

I usually pronounce it "Nah gonna check 50 bandwidth usage crits, fix your loving thresholds"?

:shrug:

ssb
Feb 16, 2006

WOULD YOU ACCOMPANY ME ON A BRISK WALK? I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK WITH YOU!!


AlexDeGruven posted:

My favorite interview, even though I wasn't actually in on it, was the guy who said he had more than 25 years Linux experience. Not Unix, mind you. Specifically Linux, and even clarified it.

He also pronounced Nagios "nagaglios".

It's not out of the question. I'm ~40 and I first started using Slackware on a spare 486 in 1996 which is 24 years. If it was a recent interview and they started in '93 or so it's possible and not really THAT uncommon.

Edit: I started professional linux admin work at a small ISP in 1998 so I'm pretty close to being able to say 25 years professionally.

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

shortspecialbus posted:

It's not out of the question. I'm ~40 and I first started using Slackware on a spare 486 in 1996 which is 24 years. If it was a recent interview and they started in '93 or so it's possible and not really THAT uncommon.

Edit: I started professional linux admin work at a small ISP in 1998 so I'm pretty close to being able to say 25 years professionally.

Yeah, linux came out in 94, off the top of my head, so 25 years is certainly doable, I've been playing with it for around that long. I know I booted my first slackware kernel off 2x3.25" floppies @720k each(double density existed but the disk images were only 720k)

mattfl
Aug 27, 2004

AlexDeGruven posted:

.

I think the key, at least for me, is admitting when you don't know or aren't sure of something and are willing to look it up to confirm/shore up your knowledge.


This, never say in an interview that you don't know the answer to a question. Saying you'd google it or ask someone is always the better answer.

I haven't done too many interviews but the few I've done for a more or less entry level support tech position we've had people who just, don't give any type of answer when asked a technical question. Give me something dude, tell me your process for finding an answer for something. Even if it's sitting down at the broken thing and pushing buttons or something. I don't know is a horrible answer, I don't know but give me a few minutes to google it at least shows me you'd want to figure out how to fix it.

ssb
Feb 16, 2006

WOULD YOU ACCOMPANY ME ON A BRISK WALK? I WOULD LIKE TO SPEAK WITH YOU!!


RFC2324 posted:

Yeah, linux came out in 94, off the top of my head, so 25 years is certainly doable, I've been playing with it for around that long. I know I booted my first slackware kernel off 2x3.25" floppies @720k each(double density existed but the disk images were only 720k)

Slackware has been out since 93 I am pretty sure. Linux in general was 91 I think for the first release on the newsgroup? Yeah just checked, September 91. Debian, RedHat, and Slackware were both 1993, probably a couple other ones.

As long as this was 2017 or later, it's plausible. 2018-2019 and it's very believable.

AlexDeGruven
Jun 29, 2007

Watch me pull my dongle out of this tiny box


RFC2324 posted:

Yeah, linux came out in 94, off the top of my head, so 25 years is certainly doable, I've been playing with it for around that long. I know I booted my first slackware kernel off 2x3.25" floppies @720k each(double density existed but the disk images were only 720k)

This was several years ago, so the idea of someone doing Linux professionally 25 years ago at that time was pretty lol.

I was loving about with it in 98/99, but didn't do anything professionally with Unix systems in general until around '05/'06.

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

That's when you double down and say you were in the closed beta with Linus

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

If "linux experience" means installing one distro, then installing another, then installing another, then installing another, over and over again, until 3am drinking mt dew, I'm your man

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

RFC2324 posted:

That's when you double down and say you were in the closed beta with Linus

Or just make some poo poo up like "Actually, I wrote the first version of 3c5x9 network driver"

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

bullshit hard enough and maybe you will get hired as management

orange juche
Mar 14, 2012



Bob Morales posted:

If "linux experience" means installing one distro, then installing another, then installing another, then installing another, over and over again, until 3am drinking mt dew, I'm your man

Are we long lost brothers?

Knormal
Nov 11, 2001

I'm desktops and not networking so it's not something I deal with aside from on a client level, but it wasn't until just now I realized I didn't know what DNS stood for. But I certainly know what it does and, most importantly, who at my place to bitch at when it breaks.

Terrible Opinions
Oct 18, 2013



RFC2324 posted:

Interesting fact:

They have found that the internet has actively changed the structure of younger brains, because kids who grow up with the internet don't have the ability to memorize the same way older people do. Their/your/our brains are more optimized for understanding things contextually when fed the information from googling the answer
This is just an acceleration of what writing already does to you. Pre-literate or semi-literate societies produce people with much better memories than literate ones.

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

Terrible Opinions posted:

This is just an acceleration of what writing already does to you. Pre-literate or semi-literate societies produce people with much better memories than literate ones.

Makes perfect sense, but basing someone's hireability on their ability to memorize stuff that actively makes your brain not memorize stuff anymore is kinda poo poo, don't you think?

flatluigi
Apr 23, 2008

here come the planes

RFC2324 posted:

Interesting fact:

They have found that the internet has actively changed the structure of younger brains, because kids who grow up with the internet don't have the ability to memorize the same way older people do. Their/your/our brains are more optimized for understanding things contextually when fed the information from googling the answer

do you have a source for this at all because this feels exactly like a chain email Fun Fact

RFC2324
Jun 7, 2012

http 418

flatluigi posted:

do you have a source for this at all because this feels exactly like a chain email Fun Fact

Didn't go hunting for the actual studies involved, but here is Scientific American talking about it.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/internet-transactive-memory/

22 Eargesplitten
Oct 10, 2010



shortspecialbus posted:

If they answer the explanation question properly but accidentally say "Domain Name Service" are they done for?

Lol, gently caress, I've had it wrong all these years. I wonder if it was told to me incorrectly or if I just remembered it wrong, today I learned it's Domain Name System.

Shugojin
Sep 6, 2007

THE TAIL THAT BURNS TWICE AS BRIGHT...


to be fair having something named a Domain Name Service Server is exactly what you'd expect to see in the world

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GreenNight
Feb 19, 2006
Turning the light on the darkest places, you and I know we got to face this now. We got to face this now.

Eh just ask what does SCSI stand for if you're going to ask for useless knowledge.

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