Glad you asked that. As i saw in the treads mentioned by you, the common problem is that the tests are more about theory, and less about practice. Which is true. Sometimes, in interviews, you are asked about algorithms that you studied in college and never used before. It's very difficult to score high in this tests.

We propose to eliminate this gap by having real job, day to day, scenarios like: install apache, mysql, php, clone site, install database etc.

These are recurring task in the daily activities of a sysadmin.

What do you say?

As an ex-sysadmin turned coder, "sysadmins aren't paid to install apache" could be as true as statement as "programmers aren't paid to write code". The meat of the value of a good sysadmin is problem solving, learning, and communication abilities (perhaps a "duh" but the same qualities I look for in a programmer.) While there's certainly something to be said for a senior experienced sysadmin being expected to have an insane knowledge of their systems, at least for more entry roles, I've seen many of the same problems in sysop interviews as dev interviews, and having a hackerrank section for it may only exacerbate that. I'm simply not convinced that no matter what you guys ask from a programmatic angle you can solve the deep problems of interviewing that these soft skills are much harder to poll for, resulting in an uneven reliance on less effective signaling of tangential talent through e.g. hackerrank score.

Anecdotally, this sort of "filtering" would have precluded both my own hiring early on in my career (so I'm naturally sensitive to this), and that of probably two of the three best junior sysadmins I've had the pleasure to working with having come out of entirely non-technical fields, while allowed in both of the "disaster cases" that come to my mind.

Don't let this ramble be a "it's impossible stop trying;" but perhaps a "more of the same won't solve the problems we can already see endemic across our field", as the great-grandfather post brought up. I simply worry that the availability of "traditional hackerrank brute-force-evaluation" will simply result in more people leaning on it than trying to think more critically about their interview process.

Those are pretty baseline things that get automated away pretty quickly. More useful to me (as both a practicing devops type and a manager in that capacity) would be tests gauging ability to write bash scripts to do various things, or simulated problems that need to be diagnosed/fixed using command line tools (e.g., strace, netstat, etc.).

Indeed, those are pretty basic tasks. We will have 3 levels of difficulty and the examples mentioned are in the easiest category. In a early phase of a recruitment process, an experienced sysadmin would solve in less than 3 minutes and this is helping screening process when you have a huge number of applicants. But for latest stages of recruitment process, we will have more advanced scenarios for the tests.

Definitely your suggestions are great and we will discuss having tests in this area.

Cheers!

> an experienced sysadmin would solve in less than 3 minutes

Why do you think so? And, I'm hopping you don't rely on timing on this level.

An experienced sysadmin would have little experience with basic tasks, since he solves them around once or twice per job. And you never know the environments they tried it before, that may be completely different from what you are presenting them right now.

I'd say "installing X" is a test for encyclopedic knowledge, and a very unreliable test for expertize. That's the kind of test that gave bad names to IT certification at the early 2000's.

What scenarios would you suggest to have?

No idea, but the certificates that focused on those things became enduring jokes.

I don't think I would enjoy HackerRank as an interview, but as a user I do enjoy being able to practice computer science problems.

Just wrote an answer above which i think is good for your concerns. What'do you think?

(Speaking as a coder here, although I've also done sysadmin through most of my 20 years of working in the industry).

This would be quite nice. Going through the job searching process at the moment, the "aptitude tests" etc that I've seen are very good at blowing cobwebs off my obscure analytical skills, which I rarely if ever use, yet fail completely at getting any gauge of my ability to get every day stuff done in a clean, smell-free way.

As a result I'm now doing kata training on Coderwars and am getting more used to this style of testing. It's actually good fun, and I think it'll help increasing my ability to just spit out code. In real life scenarios though, most of the time is spent analysing a problem or process flow.

You just mentioned some of reasons why we are making this product. If you have more ideas, please share with us. Thanks

I think if that's the approach SysAdminsArena is taking, it's quite good. More advanced problems could be replication, caching, etc.

That's the approach and we are glad that you support it. Great topics for more advanced problems.