[ale] [OT]The coolest method of parting weed and chaff

[Trey Darley]

I don't know if this will directly apply to all of you, so forgive me if you read it and think, "Why the hell did he forward this to to the list?"
It summarizes an interviewing technique that I'd like to see in wider practice. Even if it would never apply to you in a million years, you ought to pass it along to colleagues who are responsible for hiring

Cheers!
--Trey
P.S. If you care, this came across the sage-members list. For more information, see www.sage.org
++-------------------------------------------------------------------------++
Trey Darley - Atlanta
<http://www.well.com/~treyka/index.html>
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"Svensson," I say, "kindly remember this most banal of truisms: the most incredible comedies are written by life."
"My life is more like a railway timetable."
"Just wait till time intervenes. The alchemy of time transforms everything into comedy. Everything..."
[J. Skvorecky, The Engineer of Human Souls]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2003 17:16:05 -0400 (EDT)
From: chris at telerama.com
To: ale at ale.org
To: Mark D. Roth <roth at feep.net>
Cc: sage-members at usenix.org
Subject: Re: [SAGE] Where to Advertise Job Openings?

> So my question is, what forums do any of you use to advertise open
> positions?  Are there any web sites or magazines that you've had
> success with in the past?  Any suggestions on other forums that might
> help us reach the right audience?  Or, do you think the economic
> climate isn't bad enough that we'll be able to find anyone willing to
> move to a smaller city?

We have used monster.com with some luck in the past, with one little
twist.  We knew that we were going to have to potentially weed out
hundreds of potential employees, so at the bottom of our job posting
for a sysadmin, we put something like "You must send us your SSH key
to start the application process, you will be disqualified if you do
not follow these instructions."

This did a few things for us...  First, it got rid of all the people
who didn't actually READ the entire posting.  We basically
disqualified anyone who only sent in a resume.  We did not penalize
people who had the "automatically e-mail my resume" service setup, as
long as they sent us an SSH key.

I can't remember the exact numbers, but we got something like hundreds
of resume-only applicants and only a couple of dozen people who sent
in SSH keys.  We then put the applicant's keys onto a server where we
tested their knowledge by giving them several tasks.  We started with
easy stuff and worked up to more difficult tasks at the end.  We
measured how competent our applicants were by several means:

* how long it took them to perform each task
* how correct their solution to the problem was
* literally, how they worked, what they did, etc...C
  (We setup ttyrec to record everyone's shell sessions, which was
  incredible to watch.  This gave us an *amazing* sense of whether
  people actually knew what they were doing or not...)

In our case, we could pretty much assume that anyone who didn't know
how to generate an SSH shouldn't be working for us as a system
administrator.

I can imagine it isn't always quite this easy to come up with a good
"first step" that will weed out most of the people.  For sysadmins,
you ought to know how to generate an SSH key.  And if you don't know
how, you better be able to figure it out.

We were considering another similar test for coders -- something along
the lines of 'get file xyz (revision 1.2) from this CVS server and
send us the contents to start the application'...  In addition, we'd
have a newer version than 1.2, so we could tell if someone actually
knew how to get an older version or if they just ignored the version
number completely.

In the end, we ended up finding someone who is really cool and
extremely knowledgeable.  :)

Good luck!

-Chris

>
> Any and all suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
>
> --
> Mark D. Roth <roth at feep.net>
> http://www.feep.net/~roth/
>



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