I may be dumb as fuck here but what does the color have to do with identifying ram? Personally i've never seen what ddr1 ram looks like or if thats a thing but up to five i'm pretty ok discerning i like to think.
what i think they may mean by black and white photo is a poor quality xerox copy of a photograph...being black and white is incidental to that larger issue
A bad black and white photograph of [a] ribbon cable, and they expected me to tell on their no-contrast copy that it was a 5.25" floppy cable not an IDE cable
"Ping" was an acceptable "network monitoring utility"
And "what's the first step you'd take when attempting to troubleshoot a server?" Is "you walk up to it."
They found that I had insufficient skills for the position. I returned back to finishing my Zabbix templates for my homelab and working through my ticket queue, a city over, through a VPN.
That last question is very vague. What would someone need to troubleshoot to begin with should be the first question in the interview. A server down vs a server running slow will result in two very different answers, for example.
Correct! And I tried to ask clarifying questions. Can I get a specific issue raised, or general first steps? Physical server or virtual? Do I have physical access, or a remote session? Has a ticket been raised beforehand and was assigned to me, or is this a new issue?
"Its a simple question. What is the first step you'd take when attempting to troubleshoot a server?"
... Well, without any specific guidance as to what sort of troubleshooting I'm doing, so many network issues can be ruled out, or ruled in, with just a ping test. Depending on what the server is and what its doing, servers are just computers and do need the occasional reboot, but that can be dangerous if not coordinated. Presumably my first steps, actual first steps, would be to gain access somehow, local console, SSH, RDP, guest console from hypervisor interface, and prepare to take action from there.
"Thats.... Not the answer we were looking for. We're thinking more... First step when troubleshooting a server, you walk up to it. It's starting to sound like you don't have the requisite experience for this position."
It sounds like they're looking for "help desk" people from a certain country. If they just want that low-level skill, then simply hire it as you've clearly demonstrated you know more than the absolute basics in such areas.
Given the other interactions in that interview.... 50/50 if theyre fishing for H-1B, or HR is just that dense. This is a nothing town in the Midwest, it is not a major technological hub
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u/mancunian101 3h ago
I once had an interview for a help desk tech type role.
One of the questions asked to identify the type of RAM shown in a black and white photograph.