Answers to Support Questions I Wish I Could Use...

[Dieselboy]

I forgot to mention, I interviewed a guy in Sri Lanka last week. Our SL office is now bigger than our Australia office (each head costs management 1/4 to 1/5th the price of a head in Australia), and we need someone to go and build laptops, plug things in, call the ISP when they go down etc..

The guy had an impressive CV / resume. For someone who is 28 years old, 3 degrees and a long list of vendor certifications from VMWare / Microsoft and has a CCNA. TBH I don't know why I was in charge of interviewing him - I hadn't booked the interview and on paper he was overqualified for junior IT person. Then came the interview..

Couldn't answer any technical questions at all. I was getting a bit frustrated in myself, thinking he couldn't understand me or something like that. My Sys admin guy asked the last question. The scenario was that there's a farm of servers, serving a web application to hundreds or thousands of users. A very small number of users are not able to get to the application but instead are receiving Internal Server Error message. How would he go about troubleshooting this.
I thought the guy we are interviewing would say, well there's not enough info - is there a load balancer, ie to try and pin point which server is throwing the error in the farm. But instead he said 2 main things, the first - it's a network issue. And second, he would check the RAM usage of the servers.

I also wasn't able to get him to go into any detail about how he has worked on or troubleshooted any server issues. He mentioned a problem he had worked on, but no matter how I re-phrased the question, he went from A to Z and nothing in the middle, A being the problem and Z being what fixed it but there was no fault finding or explanation of how they / he linked the solution to the problem.

[NetworkGroover]

Lol... typical....

"Well, I rebooted it and now the problem's gone.  On to the next fire." 

[Reggle]

Reminds me, we once got a ticket with an e-mail automatically pasted into it.
All it said was 'Too slow'.
My colleague was hovering above the send key with his mouse after he typed in 'Too stupid?'

[deanwebb]

I almost forgot my favorite response I wish I could use:

[dlots]

But instead he said 2 main things, the first - it's a network issue.

You hired him on the spot right?  He sounds 100% qualified to be a server admin.

[Nerm]

But instead he said 2 main things, the first - it's a network issue.

You hired him on the spot right?  He sounds 100% qualified to be a server admin.

[deanwebb]

But instead he said 2 main things, the first - it's a network issue.

You hired him on the spot right?  He sounds 100% qualified to be a server admin.

[deanwebb]

"Of course that doesn't work. The vendor we picked due to cost concerns makes a crap product. Please transfer this ticket to the purchasing department for support."

[NetworkGroover]

"Of course that doesn't work. The vendor we picked due to cost concerns makes a crap product. Please transfer this ticket to the purchasing department for support."

Heh... when "LPTA" goes wrong....

[Otanx]

"Of course that doesn't work. The vendor we picked due to cost concerns makes a crap product. Please transfer this ticket to the purchasing department for support."

Hmmm, wonder if I can get away with that.

-Otanx

[Reggle]

"Of course that doesn't work. The vendor we picked due to cost concerns makes a crap product. Please transfer this ticket to the purchasing department for support."

That. Would. Be. Awesome.

[deanwebb]

"We have one user that can't get to the Internet. Can we briefly permit any all all in both directions to rule out the firewall as a cause?"