On Monday 25 Apr 2011, Shlomi Fish wrote: > On Sunday 24 Apr 2011 21:01:57 Shawn H Corey wrote: > > On 11-04-24 10:36 AM, Akhthar Parvez K wrote: [ snip ] > > I still think I have to disagree. Sometimes interviewers ask purposely > > obscure questions not to see if you know the answer but to see what > > you'd do if you came across a problem you couldn't immediately solve > > when on the job. The best response is to state you don't know and then > > tell what you'd do: > > > > 1. Inform your immediate supervisor about the problem. > > > > 2. Start searching the company's code base and asking the old hands > > about it. > > > > 3. Search the web. > > > > 4. Ask the perlmonks <http://perlmonks.org/> > > > > 5. (Anything you can think of.) > > I recall a job for a security company that developed an Intrusion detection > system (IDS) or Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) - don't remember which one > - > as a small embedded box running vxWorks [vxWorks] and they asked me "How > would > you design an IDS?" I told them that I didn't know and they told me "We'll > help you. Do you have any ideas?" I had some leads, but I ended up saying I > don't know, and couldn't really get anywhere. Maybe they were looking for > brighter or more experienced people then me, but I naturally didn't get the > job, nor was I very impressed of their hiring and interviewing philosophy.
Actually I was talking about a situation like this, not the context Shawn mentioned. What Shawn mentioned was more of a "what would you do if you're faced with an issue that you couldn't fix on time" case. Let me demonstrate the one I mentioned with the following conversation: Interviewer: How would you design an IDS? Interviewee: I have never worked on IDS so far, hence don't have a clear idea about the designing of the same. However, I was part of a team that developed an Exploit Scanner/Detection tool for Linux machines. It was written in Perl and we used a couple of mechanisms such as signatures, regular expressions etc. to detect the exploits and setup a Hash design to store the scan results in the most appropriate manner. Interviewer: Ok, that's good. So as you said you don't have much idea about designing IDS, how would you proceed if you're assigned for that job? Interviewee: First and foremost, I would talk to the experienced members in my team to get some valuable inputs and then read some books as well as search through the web for more details. In fact, I'll try wherever I think would help me to learn more about the same. I'm pretty sure I would be able to get it done as that has been case whenever I worked on something interesting. Here, the interviewee is not fooling the interviewer and the latter would be generally happy to know the former has got some experience in something related. For the interviewee, he can still use the opportunity to impress the interviewer even if he doesn't know the particular answer. > Most good workplaces I've been to asked me to write a piece of code (a bit > tricky, but not very time consuming) in their language of choice or less > often > "my favourite language", and I do better there because I'm a capable coder, > and I think it's a good idea to actually instruct the candidate to write some > code. Yes, this is good if you're being interviewed for the post of a developer. But in some cases, it's not really necessary. Suppose if they understood your coding credibility already, they wouldn't really want to dig deep into programming. They would rather want to know something else, mostly related to planning, managerial or other non-technical aspects etc. -- Regards, Akhthar Parvez K http://www.sysadminguide.com/ UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity - Dennis Ritchie -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
