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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26212 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Looking at your resume, I see someone I'd invite to an interview for a tech or junior sysadmin role, if we had one open (we don't right now, but we had recently, twice in the last year).

I'll ask you the three questions I always ask in interviews, maybe it will help understand how the hiring process looks like from the other side of the table:

  1. A user is unable to login to their computer, list as many possible reasons as you can think of this could happen.

  2. Describe to me the process you go through to troubleshoot an issue you're never encountered before.

  3. A piece of software on Windows crashes during a common operation, but there is no error message that pops up. Where do you go look to find more information.

Question one is an open-ended experience yardstick. Everyone who's worked operations has encountered login issues, they exist at every support "level", how many come to mind will tell me exactly how much shit you've seen. It can be as simple as "user is not entering the password correctly" and the slightly trickier "caps lock was on", then harder ones like AD account issues (lockouts) or the user might be trying to log on to an AD-joined computer with uncached credentials on a computer that isn't able to talk to a DC, the list really goes on and on... At your level, I would expect the easy "user error" ones and at least a few trickier ones.

Question two is to make sure you work in a structured way. I honestly don't really care what the process specifically is, as long as you DO have a way to untangle an issue you've never seen. I've had to work with juniors who did not have a process, and it was really annoying as they would either end up asking me every single thing or just spin their wheels making fruitless google searches with generic error messages or behaviors, before they even tried isolating the issue, eliminating possibilities, etc... If you tell me that you try to find error messages or logs that are unique to the issue, so that you can narrow your searches, that's good.

Question three, as long as it's not completely entry level, I expect you to at least go looking for log files, and ideally you'd mention the Event Viewer by name. If it's a linux position, log files and JournalD.

If I were sitting in an interview with you, if you got these three right, you'd get the thumbs up from me. If there are multiple candidates that got the thumbs up from me, then it comes down to whether I feel like you'd make our users/clients feel confident, etc...

I could probably beat those 3 questions without issue. My technical knowledge is fairly sharp - I probably need to find a way to just beat out the other candidates out via soft skills. Not that i dont have them. But at the final stages ive heard many people say it can come down to who the HM likes more, who has a better personality if all else is equal. "Culture Fit" so to speak.

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