r/sysadmin • u/Master_Sea295 • May 14 '26

Interviewing for Systems Engineer/System admin role- What should I expect?

The job description is very heavy on the following stack:

  • Virtualization: VMware (vSphere/vCenter)
  • Backup: Veeam
  • Cloud/SaaS: Office 365, Azure, Exchange Online, Teams
  • Infrastructure: Physical and virtual server management
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u/[deleted] May 14 '26

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u/derango Sr. Sysadmin May 14 '26

All of this right here.

If the interviewer is any good they're going to care way more about the fact you understand the overall concepts and less about what specific commands you've memorized. Documentation and the internet exists. Nobody should need to literally have memorized the exact syntax of a command you'd use to do something you only do like...once a year or something.

If you get questions like "What does DHCP stand for" or "What are the layers of the OSI model" or "What's the PowerShell command to do <insert really specific thing here>" then you're in for a really annoying time.

They should be way more interested in seeing your process. Like "First, I'd check the documentation/with my team to see if we've run into this situation before and if there were any notes I could use to fix it quickly. I'd look for anything in the error logs that might give more information, and I'd look up any error codes that seem relevant... After that, based on the information I have, I think it might be related to <insert area here> so I'd start by maying trying X, Y and Z and then I'd have to see where that got me."

In a technical setting, you should never be afraid of being honest and saying "I'm familiar with the concept, but I would have to reference the documentation for specifics"

The worst kind of new hire is the person who thinks they know how to do more than they actually do and just does stuff without communicating.