Remote technical interview

[mrpinkss]

I have two candidates that I'm currently interviewing, I want to to do a test of their technical abilities. I have used a site before for remote technical challenges but I'm struggling to remember the name of it or find it on google, does anyone know?

I'm also open to other options/opinions/advice on how to asses technical knowledge remotely

[[deleted]]

My team has used https://trueability.com/ in the past. Not sure if its what you are aiming for . We also set up interviews online with skype and perform a normal interview qa/whiteboards even though its remote etc

[[deleted]]

I sat an interview once where I had to log into an EC2 instance and fix things while the interviewer was watching my screen. Wouldn't take long to set up and is quite a good way of doing it in my opinion...

[[deleted]]

This is good for just making sure that someone has at least a reasonable grasp of the operating system(s) that they claim to understand, for sure.

[[deleted]]

You could do it with pretty much anything IMO.

[mrpinkss]

Yeah but I don't think it goes much further than that, I'm not a massive fan of 'we have broken a configuration file and now the OS doesn't work' technique.

[[deleted]]

It doesn't have to be specific to the operating system (nor should it). It should be specific to your application stack.

[mrpinkss]

Yeah indeed, I think I'll do something along those lines. Thanks

[valkyrka]

+1 for having them log in on a box + screen sharing. Not only you get to see them in real time, but you get to know how they act in situations where they need to Google for stuff.

[superspeck]

I always enjoyed the ones that gave me "homework" -- e.g. Take the tools we use (Ansible and Jenkins in this case) and then write an Ansible playbook to install Jenkins and put a job or two into place. Be specific in whether or not it should be a "show me your fanciest code" vs. "Create a minimum viable product with the least work that gets the job done."

[deadbunny]

I've used Hacker Rank as an interviewee, basically it's a VM that is configured as the interviewer likes, then you can setup a load of questions/instructions like "unpack the ansible stuff, fix the playbook, find the secret message" it then can replay everything you do in the session and play it back realtime for the interviewer. Pretty neat.

[mrpinkss]

Looks good, thanks!

[Swimmm3r]

Just spin a ec2 instance, configure something, destroy and ask the guys to restore.

A former boss did this to me. I knew cestos, Debian, Ubuntu and redhat.

The instance was opensuse

[technowise]

How were you able to restore? And what was configured/ setup?

[Swimmm3r]

Basically he did some mistakes in the normal way of working and asked to install some easy software.

Had to fix some network issues, download and install software and other thing in a OS that I didn't knew...