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What we're trying to do is respect peoples' time. We can get more about someone's technical understanding in 30 minutes of hands on exercises than we can in a full day of panel interviews. It's better for us as we have a much better understanding of where you're at Linux wise and it's better for you because you only need to come to two hours of interviews, total. Seems like a win win to me.

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In my experience this type of interview (and coding interviews in general) usually fall into one of two categories: 1) "I learned this neat trick and want to show candidates how smart I am" or 2) "I have this bug in prod and I want to see if you can fix it for me."

If the interview was along the lines of upgrading the packages on the system, debugging why nginx was crashing, figuring out the specs of the system, etc. that is totally fine with me and I believe respectful of a candidates time. Unfortunately it always turns into something else when people need to come up with new "challenges" for canidates.

Framing a question like “a system has a high load average, what commands would you use to begin diagnosing that?” and taking that conversation as deep as the candidate can go is neither time consuming nor requires a panel of people.

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