Despite the source (just kidding, Bill!) I'm going to have to support
this line of questioning.
HPC (and general IT), consists of systems with many different layers,
and it takes the correct personality type with the good analytical
skills to be able to trouble shoot things effectively. I really don't
care about questioning an interviewee about technical minutiae in an
interview. Most of that can be easily googled these days. The real
value/skill is in coming up with a plan of attack: knowing where to
start troubleshooting, what to google, how to correctly interpret those
google results, and then now to apply what you find online to fix your
problem.
If a sys admin position involves shell prorgramming/scripting, knowing
the details of a specific programming language or processor are
secondary, but thinking like a programmer is skill not everyone has or
can develop.Just last week a wrote a Lua script without knowing a thing
about Lua. I looked at the example scripts, and then googled to fill in
the blanks. I think most SysAdmins do stuff like that on a regular basis.
If a position involves writing optimized code, I wouldn't apply this
logic - getting really good performance can require knowing the minutiae
of a specific language, but most HPC sys admins don't do that level of
programming.
I also look for people who have hobbies that involve understanding how
things go together and work: working on bicycles or cars, electronics,
etc. If you can understand how other things go together or work,
computers, are not that big of a jump.
Prentice
On 06/13/2018 02:37 PM, Bill Abbott wrote:
One of my standard interview questions is to say ok, you start on
Monday and you're placed in charge of a web/db server, tell me what
you do your first week.
What I want to hear is security, backups, log checking, monitoring,
performance, functionality, etc., but most of all I want to know how
they think and if they can come up with a coherent plan.
Another version is "A user says the cluster is slow. What do you do?"
Bill
On 06/13/2018 02:27 PM, Andrew Latham wrote:
Such a broad topic. I would assume things like DHCP, TFTP,
Networking, PXE and IPMI which come to mind. Troubleshooting tools,
configuration management, version control, monitoring, issue tracking
and many other processes are at play. I would love to hear any
interview questions which could cover this array of topics sanely.
Suggested question: Tell me the best hardware horror story?
On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 12:08 PM Jonathan Engwall
<engwalljonathanther...@gmail.com
<mailto:engwalljonathanther...@gmail.com>> wrote:
John Hearne wrote:
> Stuart Midgley works for DUG? They are currently
> recruiting for an HPC manager in London... Interesting...
Recruitment at DUG wants to call me about Low Level HPC. I have at
least until 6pm.
I am excited but also terrified. My background is C and now
JavaScript, mostly online course work and telnet MUDs.
Any suggestions are very much needed.
What must a "low level HPC" know on day 1???
Jonathan Engwall
engwalljonathanther...@gmail.com
<mailto:engwalljonathanther...@gmail.com>
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