

Airbnb SRE Challenge - ericedge
http://markbarger.tumblr.com/post/47774068723/airbnb-sre-challenge

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dekhn
These questions are pretty sysadminny. Just "how do you configure these open
source tools to set up and monitor a service". Not representative of what
Google SRE technical interviews are like. I wouldn't feel confident that
somebody who had passed just this part of the interview would be a good oncall
during an emergency.

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ericedge
Agreed that it's challenging to determine from an interview how someone will
respond to a site outage, but site reliability engineering involves more than
just being oncall--it's about the decisions you make in setting up
interoperating services and the infrastructure you put in place to allow for
straightforward scaling.

In general I'm a big fan of this sort of interviewing because the work the
person did on the server can give you great insights into what sort of systems
administrator they are--do they give you a good insight into how the system
has been altered from the default install? Do they document the "why" of any
changes they made? Were they able to craft a readable
shell/python/ruby/whatever script to cover any automated processes they had to
hack together?

I don't know what Google SRE technical interviews are like, but I can't
imagine a one-on-one giving as many useful insights for an entire team as the
artifacts left behind by someone setting up an entire server from scratch.

Not to mention the ability to weed out people who don't have the basics in
place--when someone can't even figure out how to ssh to the server, you know
pretty readily that they're probably not suited to the work.

