interviews

101 Most Common Interview Questions with Pass or Fail Answers

Following the recent post “10 Favorite Job Interview Questions for Linux System Administrators“, here is a more generic, but a much more comprehensive resource – “101 Most Common Interview Questions with Pass or Fail Answers“. It’s not as technical, but it provides a good summary of common interview questions, from the generic ones like “Why do you want to leave your current company”, through brainteasers like “How many gas stations are there in the United States?”, to stress and communication ones like “What did you do when you had a boss you didn’t get along with?”. The good thing is that you’ll find not only the questions, but also the suggestions on how to answer them.

Altogether, it’s a great resource to go through before your next interview. Most of these questions are very common, no matter which position you are applying to.

10 Favorite Job Interview Questions for Linux System Administrators

As someone who interviews a lot of people (mostly for the web development positions though, not system administration), I’m always looking for more ideas on what to ask the candidates. Today I came across “10 Favorite Job Interview Questions for Linux System Administrators“, which has a few of bits that I liked.

First of all, this GitHub repository is super awesomeness. It also links to a few other resources with more questions and ideas. Not only for sysadmin interviews.

Then, this one is funny, yet somewhat challenging:

2. Name and describe a different Linux/Unix command for each letter of the alphabet. But also, describe how a common flush toilet works.

It also checks that you know the alphabet.

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.

This one caught me by surprise. My immediate thought was “tac some_file“, but that’s obviously not enough. tac only prints the lines in reverse order. Which is not the same as reversing the file. Perl to the rescue, but I wonder what’s the most elegant way to do it without the scripting language.

As always, interview questions are not only useful for the interviews. They are a good measure of your own knowledge gaps and habit pitfalls. This time was no exception.

The Slashdot Interview With Larry Wall

Slashdot runs the interview with Larry Wall, the creator of Perl programming language. There is a wide variety of questions. Some are technical – about Perl 6, comparison to other programming languages (Python, PHP), Perl in the browser, etc. Some are more generic – what kind of tools Larry uses, and what are his thoughts on English being lingua franca of the computer world. The answers are often funny, yet very insightful.

10 Years of Git: An Interview with Git Creator Linus Torvalds

Linux.com reminds us that git is celebrating its 10th birthday this year. An interview with git creator Linus Torvalds sheds some light on to how and why it happened, and how long it took.

You can actually see how it all took shape in the git source code repository, except for the very first day or so. It took about a day to get to be “self-hosting” so that I could start committing things into git using git itself, so the first day or so is hidden, but everything else is there. The work was clearly mostly during the day, but there’s a few midnight entries and a couple of 2 a.m. ones. The most interesting part is how quickly it took shape ; the very first commit in the git tree is not a lot of code, but it already did the basics – enough to commit itself. The trick wasn’t really so much the coding but coming up with how it organizes the data.

So I’d like to stress that while it really came together in just about ten days or so (at which point I did my first *kernel* commit using git), it wasn’t like it was some kind of mad dash of coding. The actual amount of that early code is actually fairly small, it all depended on getting the basic ideas right.

Very impressive!

And, of course: HAPPY BIRTHDAY GIT! The world is a much better place with you.

What happens when you type google.com into your browser and press enter?

An attempt to answer the age old interview question “What happens when you type google.com into your browser and press enter?“

And, yes, I do use this question in the interviews too.