Re: a question regarding resumes

[Sol.Lederman@eng.sun.com (Sol Lederman)]

Randy and others,

Presenting a candidate with a situation sounds like the way to go in my
opinion. I'm very good at figuring things out and at getting the sysadmin
parts of my job done but I'm also very aware that questions that poke at
my memory without a context to process them in are very irritating to me
and don't reveal that I can do much more than I can recall from memory.

Also, I may not have the deepest understanding of how, say, NIS works but I've
been very successful at setting up yp masters, slaves and clients and at
troubleshooting name service problems. I believe that the people who know 
the internals may not be the best at resolving problems and vice versa.

Also, much of my troubleshooting success comes from pattern matching. If
something breaks in my environment I can usually find a like piece somewhere
else in my lab or organization that currently works fine and compare the two
scenarios until I find differences. Then I can pinpoint the problem. This
style of troubleshooting is natural for me but wouldn't lend itself to a
good job interview unless the hiring manager brought me into a lab and said
something like "This lab has three yp slaves. One of the three is not providing
correct information to yp clients. Go figure it out."

There can be a tremendous difference between performance and knowledge. The
way I look at myself and some other good troubleshooters is that my recall
memory is not that great so I've gotten VERY good at using intuition, pattern
matching, man pages, working examples, and good troubleshooting techniques to
allow me to think quickly on my feet and to get the job done. Plus, I'm very
focused and organized so I compensate for my memory by recording what's 
important. This has the nice side effect that it has earned me great respect
in my organization for taking users' concerns seriously, for handling them
quickly, effectively, and professionally and for communicating very clearly
what the problem and resolution is. So, a weakness can become a strength.

Yet another example where an interview might never get me a job - if the
interviewer were to ask me to, say, tell him or her the syntax of an "if" clause
in the bourne shell I'd have to try to remember where the parentheses go,
and where the semi-colon goes and where to put the "then" and then I'd 
have to remember "fi" at the end of the whole thing. Am I a lousy bourne
shell programmer? No, the syntax just doesn't always stick in my mind. But,
whenever I need to remember a structure in shell programming I've forgotten
I just do something like "grep if /etc/rc*/* | more" and use one of the
working bourne shell examples that lives in any SystemV machine and go from
there. With this general approach I've taught myself C, html programming,
expect, even enough perl, cgi and web forms to write very useful web-based 
programs that are very much appreciated in my organization. Am I an expert 
in any of these? No. Can I get the job done reasonably quickly? Most definitely.

One other thing to consider with candidates for sysadmin jobs. Look at the
whole person. I've seen lots of sys admins who VERY bright, who could fix
problems tons faster than I could but they were either VERY disorganized,
or very unprofessional or not pleasant to work with or who were not very
committed to getting the job done well. I'm not convinced that knowledge
is the best criteria for hiring technical people.

That's my 20 cents.

Sol


> From sage-members-owner@usenix.ORG Thu Jul 24 10:08:25 1997
> Date: Thu, 24 Jul 1997 11:41:43 -0500 (CDT)
> From: "R.  Wyatt" <falcon@comanche.wildstar.net>
> To: zwicky <zwicky@pterodactyl.neu.sgi.com>
> cc: Bill Bogstad <bogstad@pobox.com>, Ron Hall <thorn@cc.mcgill.ca>,
>         Norman Macaraeg <macarnor@lsil.com>, sage-members@usenix.org
> Subject: Re: a question regarding resumes 
> MIME-Version: 1.0
> 
>   The only problem is that sometimes an applicant rehearses.  I would
> expect to be asked questions relating to nfs/dns, but a recruiter threw me
> off the other day, she asked if I knew vi.  
>   Sometimes a more reliable indicator would be to present the candidate
> with a situation whether it be artificial or not, and watch what the
> candidate does.  I recently left a job where the systems administrator
> could not write a simple bash script.  My question is should I concentrate
> on the interviews more ?  By no means do I take them lightly, but I still
> don't have a lot of success.
>  The one thing I don't do is say I have skills when I don't,  and I can't
> help the feeling this has cost me some jobs.
> 
> Randy
> 
> 
> 
>