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Comment by tetha | Hacker News Reader

Hm, interesting. To me, team fit, curiosity and, depending on the level of seniority I'm looking for, an impression of experience are the most important things in an interview.

The latter might look like you could fake it with ChatGPT, but it'd be hard. For example, some time ago I was interviewing an admin with a bit of a monitoring focus and.. it's hard to replicate the amount of trust I gained to the guy when he was like "Oh yeah, munin was ugly AF but it worked.. well. Now we have better tech".

I guess that's consistent with the article?

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Real world experience sometimes comes across better like that than in technical Q&A.

One time in an interview they asked how I felt about systemd. At first I thought it was a technical question, but quickly realized he was just probing to see if we'd get along.

I got a job offer that night.

I think asking "controversial" tech questions like that can be a great signal, because it steers the conversation towards features of the system and discussion of tradeoffs. If the question is good, then it shouldn't matter what the answer is - the fact they HAVE an opinionated answer and arguments to back it up is the point.

Yeah, and systemd is an excellent example there.

I can totally understand the issues of unification there, and very much understand issues with poetterings perfectionist attitude to some issues. But do you know how much time I've spent on shitty, arcane, hand-crafted init-scripts?

Containers as a whole would be another great question there. I have a certain class of applications I wouldn't want to run without a container orchestration anymore after a certain scale. But on the other hand, I do have a bunch of systems I'd almost never want to run as containers for serious data.

I asked this same question in an interview to an ex Redhat employee interviewing for a Linux Admin role and their answer was that they didn't know what SystemD was.

I think overall this is a great question to sus out if someone is qualified for a role.

I always ask the systemd question to programmers. It’s fun to see how much technical knowledge or opinions people have. If you don’t know what it is, I get to see how you react to not knowing something.

It’s probably a little hard on those that don’t know. I’m not sure if they believe me when I say they aren’t expected to know.

Unfortunately, the question is quickly becoming dated. If you’re young and started with macOS and docker containers, you may never encounter it in your career. :)

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