globalgobble

Dude. I have worked with UNIX like systems most of my prof. career. I have migrated to the "dark'side just recently (3 y ago). They are both just tools to get the job done.

Brilliant answer :-). I totally agree with you. But this is the problem..you cannot implement such a thing to a tool like sysadminarena.

Actually I believe being a sysops/devops or whatever you want to call it is one of the "most" challenging jobs in the IT industry. You get zillions of technologies you have to administer and maintain but it's impossible to master all of them. What makes a good admin is the ability to learn,adapt,ask for a help and knowing where to look for an answer. It's easy to look up the parameters if you know the fundamentals.

Interviewing for me as a devops person is one of the most frustrating experiences. You are often asked questions that are specific to the environment of a company you are interviewing with. It's unbelievable how many times I've been asked about parameters of tar, du etc. It's totally stupid. And imagine interviewing with a company that uses only a specific subset of technologies and they heavily emphasize on that.

Sorry I have to disagree here as well. I do not think the time or number of commands or typos should be measured. I do not think you can do any quantification here. I believe a lot of sysadmins (talking about unix) do w;uptime;inspect syslog as soon as they connect to the system. Most of the time it's just not necessary to do this but for a lot of sysadmins it's a habit that actually saved their asses several times.

Does it make sense for a sysadmin to know a numeric notation for chmod ? Probably. Would I ask that on an interview ? Nope If you need to ask why then you have probably never worked in a heterogeneous environment.

I strongly disagree. We should not test edge cases and specific scenarios. We are trying to test the candidate and his abilities in daily tasks. If I say I use vi instead of "commands" I will probably solve most of the "text" editing tasks faster than an admin that only knows how to get around using commands.

I can come up with tons of scenarios when where you do not really know the internals you can get stuck easily. Like if I do chmod -x on the chmod binary. Does it prove anything if the candidate is not able to solve such task ?

Please allow me my honesty but that's a stupid way of thinking about candidates and the roles. Or I do not get it. So you are basically going to judge the candidate based on what criteria ? If they use vi instead of cat to append to a file ? So decide what is the best way of solving the problem ? Or you give +1pt for using tail instead of opening the whole file in VI ? Are you aware of the fact that there are many types of systems and products that sysadmins use ? They do not behave the same. It makes no sense to use "top" on Solaris even the number for "uptime" reported by Solaris are different. What about Windows sysadmins ? What about stuff like Veritas ? What about docker ?

I am not sure you can do this I believe sysadmin/sre/devops person wears too many hats. What are you going to test ?

I am so shocked you call this poorly. Well I am sure americans are used seeing incredibly big numbers but for me this is hardly something I would call a poorly results.

Gosh...the entire company has more money than some countries.