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Comment by hosh | Hacker News Reader

There was a company I interviewed at which had a particular way of hiring. Although I did not end up working for them, it was something I tried doing when I was involved in hiring for people with ops experience.

And that is, being able to troubleshoot complex systems when you have no idea what is going on, under time pressure.

Every site is a unique combination of side effects that no one on the internet — or even within the company — have any idea on. Yet there is generally a way to start approaching how to figure out what is going on. Though experience with the components of the system helps a lot.

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I call it Zero-knowledge Troubleshooting on my resume. It’s amusing how often, when I still worked in an office, that I would overhear part of a discussion, and some detail would tickle my spider sense, without even being sure what the problem being discussed was, and I’d ask a question or two, and it would help unblock the process.

That sort of thing is literally the only thing I miss about the office.

Neat term. I might steal that for my resume.

Intuition does play a good part of it for me, though I have worked with good troubleshooters who are more methodical and rely less on intuition for these situations. But then again, having these different takes can help the team as a whole to figure things out and fix things.

I’m brushing up my resume today, and I would say there is a good chance this phrase will show up on mine too.

Recent blog post along a similar vein.

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2023/05/30/eng/

Reminds me about one step within the interview process for Spotify (which I liked):

Live root-cause analysis of a failure which previously occured in Production - you explain your thought process (check connectivity between System A and B via ping, DNS name resolution, look at open ports, etc...) and they tell u the result like "ping returned 'Name or service not known'".

SWE role in infra.

DNS, it’s always DNS.

Except in distributed data processing, where it's always skew.

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