Technical Questions asked at interviews?

memyselfandi · 19 Aug 2007 at 00:22

I've had technical interviews before now. Don't be afraid to say you don't know something as it will look better than coming out with some rubbish which is completely wrong (and actually could cause more issues if you did it). For example I once had a technical interview for a job and they asked me about AIX clustering ... which I had never done so didn't know much about ... but I had done it with HPUX so was able to talk about concepts but not individual commands ... seemed to work as I was offered the job

If its a non-junior post then you should at least know the concepts for things that are likely to crop up even if you don't know all the details.

Pray though you don't get a BOFH like me setting the questions. I used to set them for my old boss and he had to reign me back at times for being to evil. The favourite was to give problems we were still stuck on or had just taken the OS vendor several weeks to fix, (requirment of a special patch from the OS vendor for extra credit

).

I wish some of the people I am currently working with had had a better technical interview ... they are not good and I don't like getting called at 5am on a Saturday when they can't fix an issue (mutterrantmutter) :rolleyes:

Subliminal Aura · 19 Aug 2007 at 02:20

memyselfandi said:
Pray though you don't get a BOFH like me setting the questions. I used to set them for my old boss and he had to reign me back at times for being to evil. The favourite was to give problems we were still stuck on or had just taken the OS vendor several weeks to fix, (requirment of a special patch from the OS vendor for extra credit ).

Yup this is why a mate of mine had the audacity to ask to be PAID when going for an interview. (why solve other companies problems during an interview

Unbelievable but true... he took his standard hourly rate as he was well known in the industry.

Toryglen-boy · 19 Aug 2007 at 02:28

i have found for a good paying IT role, there is almost always some kind of test!!i once had to build a 4 server Citrix farm as part of an interview !!

just be yourself, and it will all come good

m4cc45 · 19 Aug 2007 at 07:51

Subliminal Aura said:
Good you sound confident ... not sure about your clustering skills tough... examples of applications that you have clustered would be nice...

Have you ever been mad enough to try and cluster Windows XP ! Sounds mad ? yes ? Sounds impossible - maybe - Your thoughts as to how you would do it
(even though its a stupid general question that will tax the internals of how xp works and how would try to get them working over a cluster)

But really you must have had some indication from your agent as to what the company is gearing towards, focus on this above others.

Well I know they are going to be moving to more terminal service based environments (I've had one interview there) or Citrx - Citrix I've used but never really built from the ground up as with Terminal Services we're most of the way through doing a new environment for that so I'm okay with that.

The main clustering tools we use are the boring Microsoft ones - mainly due to trying to do everything the 'official Microsoft way'. As to applications we have clustered the main one is IIS (we have to have the website up all the time due to e-commerce) and Exchange (as previous reason really).

As for Windows XP I do know it's possible - I'm not sure why you'd want to do it though unless you had some massive high availability program that only ran on Windows XP.

For me to cluster I always keep the hardware the same. I'm sure you can use the Windows 2003 Cluster Admin Pak on XP as well so I'm assuming you'd do it as you would in Windows 2003 and I imagine theres a crazy 'fiddle' you do to get it to work. Must look into it now you have me intrigued!

@Toryglen-boy
I hope you got the job mate. If not then I would certainly have charged them! Saying that though I would prefer someone to chuck something infront of me with the problem and let me get on with it. I think this demonstrates someones skill more than the ability to reply to some question they found on hardest-it-questions-in-the-world.com!

M.

m4cc45 · 19 Aug 2007 at 07:58

memyselfandi said:
I've had technical interviews before now. Don't be afraid to say you don't know something as it will look better than coming out with some rubbish which is completely wrong (and actually could cause more issues if you did it). For example I once had a technical interview for a job and they asked me about AIX clustering ... which I had never done so didn't know much about ... but I had done it with HPUX so was able to talk about concepts but not individual commands ... seemed to work as I was offered the job

If its a non-junior post then you should at least know the concepts for things that are likely to crop up even if you don't know all the details.

Pray though you don't get a BOFH like me setting the questions. I used to set them for my old boss and he had to reign me back at times for being to evil. The favourite was to give problems we were still stuck on or had just taken the OS vendor several weeks to fix, (requirment of a special patch from the OS vendor for extra credit ).

I wish some of the people I am currently working with had had a better technical interview ... they are not good and I don't like getting called at 5am on a Saturday when they can't fix an issue (mutterrantmutter)

Aye I know the feeling on that I was always the first one to respond to a call whether it be something completley stupid (anything from a desktop problem such as Word not working) to Exchange has died. And yes I'm hoping that I don't get you (please tell me you don't work in the Gloucester region - lol)

I know a few guys who had a really tough technical grilling and got the job - it's just that they knew the blurb but it was so linear that if the problem fell out of that scope then they were ****** ! And they also never learned anything - they had there area and that was it!

M.