1. What do you love about technology?
“I
like for them to have an opportunity to share what they're passionate about,
even if it has nothing to do with the job.” - Michele Casey, Director of
Product Management, Oracle.
2. Name and describe a different Linux/Unix command for each
letter of the alphabet. But also, describe how a common flush toilet works.
“The first question helps illustrate the breadth
of their CLI chops. But just as important is describing how a toilet works; it
demonstrates their well-roundedness and/or ability to think, reason, and
hypothesize on their feet.” - Michael Jennings, Computer Systems Engineer,
Linux Server/Cluster Admin, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
3. What open source projects are you interested in?
“A really good candidate, even if they're junior
will have found the project they're interested in and be committing a bit back
or writing some documentation. They will be really plugged into what the open
source community is doing. They'll have run Apache Zookeeper, for example.
They'll have wrestled with the code and looked through the docs and actually
understand how this works. And maybe they haven't run it in production but they
understand at a high level how the pieces interact, how you can take advantage
of it, and what the benefits are.” - Joe Smith, Twitter.
4. I have this server which seems to drop off the local net
every so often, and comes back on its own. How would you debug this?
“I give them problems that I hope they don't already
know to see how they work through them. I have a list of troubleshooting
questions and guesstimate which one to use depending on the level of the
candidate.” - Marc Merlin, Senior Linux Server Admin, Google.
5. How does TLS work?
“It helps me understand how good they are with
security topics. How in-depth they go with their answer – how comfortable they
are – tells me a lot.” - Konstantin Ryabitsev, Director of Collaborative IT
Services at The Linux Foundation.
6. What do you know about SUSE, why do you want to work here,
and what's the role of open source in the market?
“Candidates can show their motivation through
concrete contributions or visibility in an open source community and an
understanding of what companies do. They will have researched SUSE before they
come and talk to us. The bare minimum is that they have installed openSUSE and
actually played around with that.” - Marie Louise van Deutekom, SUSE's Global
Human Resources Director.
7. What about this job appeals to you?
“That'll tell me how much they've thought about it. A.) You need
to make sure you understand your strong points – know yourself. B.) Know what
the job entails. And C.) make sure that when you speak you do
it sincerely and honestly and be yourself. Probably the biggest mistake that
people make is trying to put on a facade.” - Steve Westmoreland, Chief
Information Officer, The Linux Foundation.
8. Tell me a "war story" about a situation that went
wrong and what you did to help on your own initiative.
“In an interview I don't dive into
"tech" skills. Coding languages and various packages can be learned.
I am firmly of the belief that you learn a heck of a lot more about a candidate
in an interview by asking him or her to tell you "war stories.” If they
stumble on that, then you're looking at a Drone. (Next!)” - Tim Hoogasian,
Solutions Project Manager at Newstar Digital and former Technical Project
Manager at Dell.
9. Print the content of a file backwards.
“I like broad questions where each person could
give a different answer depending on their depth of knowledge. My personal
answer is 8 characters not including the filename.” - Marc Merlin, Google.
10. Nothing in particular.
“I don't have one question that everyone needs
to know. If someone doesn't know the answer to something, that's great. We'll
work through the problem and come to the answer together.” - Joe Smith,
Twitter.
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