So my employer's in the market to hire a second Unix sysadmin (that is, in addition to me). We had one already… but, um, it didn't work out.
So this means I've got the dubious honor of interviewing people unquestionably my elders, but seldom my betters (when it comes to the job for which they're interviewing, that is). Put it this way: if you're looking for a position as a sysadmin, and the best thing I can say about you after the interview is that you know how to use find(1) (for the non-techies: like Apple's Sherlock or Windows “Find File or Directory”, but on a command line and more flexible both about what to search for and about performing batch operations on the files found), you're really barking up the wrong tree.
Out of seven candidates so far, I've seen one that I'd hire. Now, ordinarily, I wouldn't be shocked about this. I'm being pretty demanding in the knowledge department, and it is a fairly specialized position. But what gives here? Aren't we in some fucking employment shortage? Aren't there supposed to be heaps of qualified people wandering around jobless? From what I've spied with my little eye, most of the people out of work FUCKING DESERVE TO BE! They're trying to do jobs for which they are grossly unqualified!
For instance, one guy (who was in the Navy doing sonar ops around the time I was in the first grade) sent us a four page resume full of bullet points like this:
- Wrote a Unix shell script for e-mailing personalized correspondence and status reports. The application would receive input from a file or a MySQL database, send an e-mail using mutt as a mail handler, and then update the database for all e-mail traffic.
Um, okay. So you read the documentation for and performed the most basic operations with DBD::mysql and Mail::Sender. Congratulations. Show's you've got enough programming clue to be a sysadmin. But, um, as an achievement? On a resume? Give me a break. All that speaks to is ignorance of what does and doesn't belong on a resume. Except that if you take all that shit off the resume… he hasn't ever really done anything with computers at all (though he's got a pretty good background for going back to school for an MBA and then being a CPA). He's a jack of a few trades, and a master of none. Sorry dude. You're old enough to be my father, but you're not going to get hired because you're not as qualified for this job as I was in highschool. Truth hurts.
More than a few have also failed the OS-bigot acid test. This is very simple, and the only interview question I ask that has a Right answer. “What's the best OS?” It's a trick question, but a completely obvious one if you've got half a clue: “It depends entirely on the situation.” Look, I don't like the fact that MS SQL Server is the best tool for the job for certain things at work, but it really is (Oracle is too expensive, Sybase is too slow, MySQL's too not-a-database, Postgres is too un-optimized… and those last two get the “internal maintenance cost” to boot). So if I ask you that, and you say, “Linux, of course!” thinking that you're going to get on the good side of “another” Linux geek (incidentally, I prefer NetBSD)… all I did was hand you the loaded gun–you're the twit who pointed it at your foot and pulled the trigger.
So far, we've got one real candidate, one who I'm not totally comfortable with technically but could accept who gets vetoed by the manager over on the development side because he wouldn't be able to keep is head above the water in our (fairly disorganized) environment (lousy reason to get passed over, but it's really in everyone's best interest that he not work here), one who I'd mostly be okay with, but who I'm not sure has the kind of incentive to take responsibility for a problem and fix it completely that we need, and four others not worth considering. And two more later this week I haven't even seen a resume on yet.
Wonderful. I really like these multiple choice questions with only one answer.
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