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

[Isaac Levy]

Wordemup All,

On Jun 22, 2005, at 12:15 PM, alex at pilosoft.com wrote:

> 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 know Marc AOK, and I'd personally work with him anytime :)  (just as 
long as I had a gun around for myself to keep things fair, [it's a long 
story]).

>
> 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.

Good to know.  I've been thrown a loop several times over the years by 
pop-quizzes I felt were pretty bizarre and obscure, but they really 
were just that- the folks on the other side really wanted to see how 
I'd handle the questions, and must not have expected me to know the 
exact answer to all of it- (seeing as I usually got about half of the 
questions wrong, but got the job/contract...)

>
> 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.

Yeah!  I'm interested in the C/C++ questions!  This is really cool 
stuff to wrap one's head around- seeing as it seems to quickly cover a 
lot of important basics...

Thanks for posting these Alex- I hope you have different ones for next 
week, (when I'd guess about 40 NYC*BUG people start applying to 
Pilosoft ;)

Rocket-
.ike