A collection of sysadmin test questions and answers for interviews/exams
github.com
github.com
This has been one of my interview questions for years. Take a minute to speak your answer aloud. Do it now, I'll wait.
It requires walking through several layers and subsystems. Really a great question for exposing how the candidate models a complex system. The best part, as an interviewer, is seeing how deep the candidate goes down the potentially infinite rabbit hole.
The most entertaining answer I've received started with the electrical contact in your ENTER key sending the key code through USB. He briefly digressed into the pinout of PS/2 vs USB, and continued in that fashion.
That's easy.
Bash checks all the directories as listed in my $PATH, doesn't find it and then prints "api.example.com: command not found" on the screen.
If you want me to tell you how a bluetooth keyboard works you're going to need to pay more than a sysadmin's salary.
There are some poorly paid electrical engineers in the world. There are overpaid under educated sysadmins in the world as well.
This question can truly be incredibly interesting.
But I didn't come up with it in a quick Web search and thought maybe I had dreamed it.
I could see myself getting started on a big tangent, and the Interviewer listening politely, then responding with "you're over thinking it; a new line is inserted and the cursor moves to the next line."
> Really a great question for exposing how the candidate models a complex system.
The question could do that, if the interviewer is sufficiently interactive and asks the candidate to explore or explain, but I have yet to experience it. Every single time I've answered the question, the interviewer just sits and listens.
Am I really exposing how I model anything when I'm giving what's now a pretty rote answer, colored by years of reading postings about it?
Then there are the process questions, which always seem missing. How do you prioritize work? How do you balance projects and toil? How do you manage working on the same set of services with multiple team members on multiple platforms? How do you handle incidents? What is your typical postmortem like? What do you do when a customer asks you to do something? When a manager does? How do you manage your automated tasks? Give me an example of implementing auto-healing. Give me two examples of how you have migrated or upgraded a running service. Multiple customers have reported that the production site is down; what do you do?
Then there's more modern stuff which should be standard by now, like talking about using Docker, job schedulers, CI/CD, monitoring, configuration management, inventory management, secret management, deployment, HP/HA, distributed computing, etc. Even using the cloud should be standard now, as virtually every company that isn't using it wants to.
Not only is it immediately useful, it's actually educational. That's nice. I'd say it's well done, even if some people are saying that the questions are too junior. It's well-organized, well-structured, and well-written.
https://gitprint.com/trimstray/test-your-sysadmin-skills/blo...
Most sysadmins/SRE's i have met (especially on *nix), are very capable in their craft.
Sorry ARCH people, you're not one of them.
(I'd think twice about admitting to knowing of Kali at most interviews too, I guess...)
(Note, they do admit: "The answers are only examples and do not exhaust the whole topic.")