[nycbug-talk] MSNBC on the decline of technology jobs

[alex at pilosoft.com]

On Wed, 22 Jun 2005, Marc Spitzer wrote:

> On 6/21/05, alex at pilosoft.com <alex at pilosoft.com> wrote:
> > On Tue, 21 Jun 2005, Isaac Levy wrote:
> > 
> > > Quantitively, I believe your sentiment is wrong- I've seen extremely
> > > talented techs get the axe, while really brain-dead XYZ-certified
> > > people retain their jobs right next to them.
> > That happens. However, the clued people will get a new job fairly
> > quickly, and XYZ-certified won't, if they get axed.
> > 
> 
> If by that you mean people who had lots of connections out side of the
> company they worked for then yes.  I was out of work for almost 2 years
> because all the people I knew professionally were working at my old
> company and there was a hiring freeze there.  Now when I did the
> monster/headhunter thing there were a lot of other qualified people who
> were also out of work.  And I came in second or so on a lot of jobs and
> there is no check assocated from the second guy/gal on the list down.  
> And you tell me Alex am I good?
I dunno mang. I don't know you that well. :)

I have a list of questions I like to ask on interviews from prospective 
employees, I should share it and you can see how well would you do.

Some of those questions are intentionally tricky. For some, nobody [with
few rare exceptions] knows the answer offhand, and I really evaluate
thought process how would someone try to solve it.

Network questions:

* How many fields in an IP header router will change while forwarding?
[ttl and crc]

* Why should you have recursive dns server separate from authoritative dns 
server [cache growth/cache poisoning]

Unix admin questions:
* Solaris: how do you change fullduplexness of an interface? [ndd 
/dev/xxx]

* What's an inode? What happens if you run out of inodes? How do you 
prevent yourself from running out? 

* What's a sticky permissions bit? What if a directory is sticky?

* When would you use tar vs cpio? [silly question - but at least it would 
show someone knows what cpio is]

* You are trying to unmount filesystem, but it tells you 'busy'. How would 
you see what processes are using it? [fuser -m or lsof]

* You screwed up boot block and server won't boot. You have the original 
OS CD. How do you boot off the CD the OS on the current hard drive? [very 
os-dependent, but in most cases boot -a will prompt you for root fs]

I can write down the questions I usually ask C/C++ people too, if there's 
any interest.