[Beowulf] Working for DUG, new thead

Tue Jun 19 11:38:29 PDT 2018

>If a sys admin position involves shell prorgramming/scripting, knowing the
details of a specific programming language or processor are secondary, but
thinking like a >programmer is skill not everyone has or can develop.Just
last week a wrote a Lua script without knowing a thing about Lua. I looked
at the example scripts, and then >googled to fill in the blanks. I think
most SysAdmins do stuff like that on a regular basis.

Nooo.. I would never do that.
At one stage I had a whole shelf of Oreilly books at work. Still have them
at home, but a bunch went to Textbooks for Africa recently.
My local library gladly accepted some rather heavy tomes on parallel
programming. Goodness knows what the residents of SE London make of them. I
rather hope that some youngster is inspired by one of the books.

On 19 June 2018 at 18:01, Prentice Bisbal <pbisbal at pppl.gov> wrote:

> Despite the source (just kidding, Bill!) I'm going to have to support this
> line of questioning.
>
> HPC (and general IT), consists of systems with many different layers, and
> it takes the correct personality type with the good analytical skills to be
> able to trouble shoot things effectively. I really don't care about
> questioning an interviewee about technical minutiae in an interview. Most
> of that can be easily googled these days. The real value/skill is in coming
> up with a plan of attack: knowing where to start troubleshooting, what to
> google, how to correctly interpret those google results, and then now to
> apply what you find online to fix your problem.
>
> If a sys admin position involves shell prorgramming/scripting, knowing the
> details of a specific programming language or processor are secondary, but
> thinking like a programmer is skill not everyone has or can develop.Just
> last week a wrote a Lua script without knowing a thing about Lua. I looked
> at the example scripts, and then googled to fill in the blanks. I think
> most SysAdmins do stuff like that on a regular basis.
>
> If a position involves writing optimized code, I wouldn't apply this logic
> - getting really good performance can require knowing the minutiae of a
> specific language, but most HPC sys admins don't do that level of
> programming.
>
> I also look for people who have hobbies that involve understanding how
> things go together and work: working on bicycles or cars, electronics, etc.
> If you can understand how other things go together or work, computers, are
> not that big of a jump.
>
> Prentice
>
>
> On 06/13/2018 02:37 PM, Bill Abbott wrote:
>
>> One of my standard interview questions is to say ok, you start on Monday
>> and you're placed in charge of a web/db server, tell me what you do your
>> first week.
>>
>> What I want to hear is security, backups, log checking, monitoring,
>> performance, functionality, etc., but most of all I want to know how they
>> think and if they can come up with a coherent plan.
>>
>> Another version is "A user says the cluster is slow.  What do you do?"
>>
>> Bill
>>
>> On 06/13/2018 02:27 PM, Andrew Latham wrote:
>>
>>> Such a broad topic. I would assume things like DHCP, TFTP, Networking,
>>> PXE and IPMI which come to mind. Troubleshooting tools, configuration
>>> management, version control, monitoring, issue tracking and many other
>>> processes are at play. I would love to hear any interview questions which
>>> could cover this array of topics sanely.
>>>
>>> Suggested question: Tell me the best hardware horror story?
>>>
>>>
>>> On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 12:08 PM Jonathan Engwall <
>>> engwalljonathanthereal at gmail.com <mailto:engwalljonathanthereal
>>> @gmail.com>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     John Hearne wrote:
>>>      > Stuart Midgley works for DUG?  They are currently
>>>      > recruiting for an HPC manager in London... Interesting...
>>>
>>>     Recruitment at DUG wants to call me about Low Level HPC. I have at
>>>     least until 6pm.
>>>     I am excited but also terrified. My background is C and now
>>>     JavaScript, mostly online course work and telnet MUDs.
>>>     Any suggestions are very much needed.
>>>     What must a "low level HPC" know on day 1???
>>>     Jonathan Engwall
>>>     engwalljonathanthereal at gmail.com
>>>     <mailto:engwalljonathanthereal at gmail.com>
>>>
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>>> - Andrew "lathama" Latham -
>>>
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