[svlug] interview questions
Alvin Oga
alvin at mail.Linux-Consulting.com
Wed Oct 4 22:45:14 PDT 2006
hi ya sargun
> Sargun Dhillon wrote:
>
> Nice. Do you have a good page with retired interview questions?
everybody's interview questions are meant for different purposes
- to hire you or to prevent you from being hired
-- endless list ...
- there's no such thing as retired questions ..
- in my book, most of these questions has "one correct"
( best fit ) answer
stuff i like to ask or to be asked :
- if you had all the $$$ in the world, what would you be doing ?
- wrong answer is doing anything else instead of the
job you're seeking
- if the company is beind in its deliveries to major
customers, what do you do
<fun or serious .. depends on your point of view>
fire the deadbeats, including managers and use their salary
to pay the ones willing to work to get the delivieries done
</fun>
- i see you went to berkeley/mit/stanford/yale/cmu/..
- who taught CS1, CS101, CS202, blah-blah class
- i see you list a vegetable soup of letters
- write a simple program in each of those languages
( hello world, count from 1 to 100 in odd numbers, .. )
- i see you know redhat, debian, suse, slack, solaris, hp, aix, ...
- what's the comand for:
- install a package
- test for dependency
- list of contents of the pkg
- which pkg has which binary
- update or upgrade the whole box
- name 10 good and 10 bad things about each: rpm, debian, tgz
- where do you get the sources from
( apache/MTA/php/perl/ssh/kernel/bash/libraries/.. )
- i see you do screw driver work ( can install/build PCs )
- which cd's install on which motherboards
- which cd's fail to install on which motherboards
- how many systems you shipped that comes back for RMA
( more than 1% is too much )
- i see you do admin work ..
- how do you maintain 10 different distro ( simultaneously )
- how do you maintain 5 or 50 or 500 "identical" distro/systems
- how much time do you need to maintain those boxes
- how many machines can 1 admin maintain
assuming the dont deal with windoze users and
doesnt need to install/debug/deploy it
- what is the most common hardware failures and why
- what is the most common "people" failures and why
- how to do make sure ( 99.99% ) that the www or mail
never goes down ( up 99.99% of the time ) over a year period
- dumb question ... ( no right answer ?? )
- how to stop spam
- how to stop virus
- i see you do tcp/ip
- what is the purpose of the bytes in the headers
- i see you do appliances and embedded systems
- what is the boot sequence
( what comes first, what does it do, what addresses is used )
- what is the MBR ( in its gory detail )
- what does lilo/grub/etc do .. ( in detail )
( not how to use it and not what is in the config file )
- what files, directories need to be writable
- how do you make a standalone bootable image to run in memory
( compact flash, usb stick, cdrom, .. )
- i see you can do hardware
- how do you boost power from a 7805 to 5v @ 20A
- how do you regulate a linear power supply to 0.01% accuracy
- what is the address of com1, lpt1, .. and the decoder circuit
- where do you buy resistors, capacitors, ICs, .. etc..
- which simulators, schematic editors ..
.. blah .. blah .. lots o fun ..
c ya
alvin
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