O/T : Looking for an entry level LAMP developer for contract work.

[Steve Litt]

On Tue, 28 Jul 2015 22:25:24 -0700
Jerry Snitselaar <dev at snitselaar.org> wrote:

> On Wed Jul 29 15, Steve Litt wrote:
> > On Tue, 28 Jul 2015 20:30:31 -0700
> > Sesso <sesso at djsesso.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > "Companies should focus a little less on buzzwords, and a lot more
> > > on someone's ability/desire to learn, ability to think critically,
> > > and ablility to solve problems.”
> > > 
> > > 
> > > I have a hard time finding candidates with all 3 of the above. I
> > > have met many that have a strong desire to learn but lack problem
> > > solving skills. Now for a shared hosting company, this is fine.
> > > Dedicated/Cloud infra. won’t work out.
> > > 
> > > jason
> > 
> > What are both of you meaning by "problem solving skills?" What,
> > exactly, would the work of someone with "problem solving skills"
> > look like?
> > 
> > How does "problem solving skills" differ from "thinking critically?"
> > 
> > I'm not asking out of idle curiosity, this is actually part of what
> > I do.
> > 
> > 
> > SteveT
> 
> I agree they probably mostly overlap, but when I think of problem
> solving I think of skills specific to the position. 

> Most likely in the interviews the person
> will be asked "A customer's system has paniced and they've sent you a
> vmcore. What do you do?"

To me, the preceding question is part problem solving skills, and part
subject matter expertise (which is info that can be learned quickly).
I'd say the vmcore part of the question is subject matter expertise. I'd
never heard of vmcore, so I looked it up, and it appears to be a kind
of core dump, interpretable by various utilities, primarily in the
Redhat and OpenSuSE worlds. If the applicant came from the Debian
world, s/he might not know about vmcore, but 10 minutes of Googling
shows this pretty complete explanation:

https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.TECH69923.html

The "what do you do" part is problem solving, and to me is kind of a
trick question, because I'd be expecting the person to say "I'd follow a
process", then elaborate on the process to narrow it down to the root
cause.

There are people in this world, I call them WADs (Walking Acronym
Dispenser) that can ace interviews by throwing in lots of buzzwords and
taking good guesses. You can cut right through that noise by seeing if
what they describe is a process. In this particular situation, I'd be
looking to make sure they didn't base their entire troubleshooting
effort on vmcore, and that they actually tested their "solution" after
implementing it. Because I've known a lot of people who wouldn't.

Subject matter expertise is a matter of a little bit of training,
much of which can be self-directed by the employee, and I'd imagine if
one perceives a shortage in the marketplace, it might be better and
cheaper to hire someone missing a little subject matter expertise and
train them or let them train themselves.

Technical troubleshooting is likewise a skill that can be learned from
reading a couple books and/or attending a 2 day course. This is usually
low hanging fruit, because outside of a some technical ex-military
people and people who have taken my course or read my books, almost
nobody has been trained in the mindset and process of troubleshooting.

Problem-solving involves many other things: Here's a short and
incomplete list:

* Understanding of prioritization
* Understanding of bottleneck analysis
* Understanding and belief in cause and effect (you'd be surprised...)
* Understanding that one is a human, not a computer, and must approach
  the problem as a human would, not as a computer would
* Realistic appraisal of one's abilities
* Pride in workmanship
* Ability to make one's point, verbally and in writing

SteveT

Steve Litt 
July 2015 featured book: Rapid Learning for the 21st Century
http://www.troubleshooters.com/rl21