On 5/17/07, Lennart Sorensen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I agree entirely. They are dumb questions. They are just as bad as computer courses that expect you to memorize the order of function calls to certain system calls so you can write perfect source code on a written test. And will penalize you for missing a ';' somewhere. It doesn't show if you know what you are doing or not. Being able to fix it when the compiler tells you it isn't right is at least as important.
I was interview by Google some months ago, for an admin position. They kept asking me some anal questions for kill parameters and signals and what does traceroute show when that X specific network problem exists and stuff like that. I knew most of them but some where quite obscure and although I consider myself an experienced system administrator, I didn't know them by heart, since I didn't ofter use them. After the interview, I finally got it. Yes, we admins can find any solution to probably any problem by Googling it. However, think about it. How does a google admin solve an infrastructure problem preventing google from working in the first place? Yes, experience counts, but sometimes you really need to know exactly how stuff works inside, even if it is just boring theory, even if you never use it. Most of the times our job is infrastructure maintenance, so our dependance to resources should be as low as possible. Yes, man pages are always available. However, what do you do when the damn knoppix cd has bad sectors EXACTLY on the man page you are looking for? When I fell in love with linux, one of the first thing I did was to read every single man page. Although I certainly can't remember the details, I have at least a vague knowledge of what lies inside the /usr/bin treasure chest. And that gives me confidence. That said, although there is room for improvement, I like LPI's current question approach. Regards - Giannis Stoilis _______________________________________________ lpi-examdev mailing list [email protected] http://list.lpi.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lpi-examdev
