[Beowulf] Working for DUG, new thead

[Prentice Bisbal]

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 
>> <engwalljonathanthereal at gmail.com 
>> <mailto:engwalljonathanthereal at 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
>>     engwalljonathanthereal at gmail.com
>>     <mailto:engwalljonathanthereal at gmail.com>
>>
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>>
>> -- 
>> - Andrew "lathama" Latham -
>>
>>
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