System Engineering Interview Questions & Answers

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Are you a systems engineer or a systems administrator? Why?
How does a clock work?
How did they build the Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt?
Do you admire any systems? Which ones? Why?
What is an example of a new issue in systems engineering / admin? What impact does it have on how you practice?
What do you think are common mistakes managers make when dealing with systems professionals?
What is an all-too-common example of unethical behavior for a systems professional?
Can you name a systems thinker from history? What do you admire about them?

Difference between telnet and ssh?
What do you need to do to start a service at startup?
What are different levels of RAID and what level will you use for a web server and database server?
Whats your favorite shell and why?
Describe the boot process of the Linux of your choice in as much detail as possible?
What debugging steps will you take when your manager tells you that the website is slow?

This is basically how I ask, "How much have you used Unix?" Nobody ever knows all of the possible answers, so if you keep following up with "Good. What else?", you get a good chance to see how they say, "I don't know." Or how they won't say that.

This is basically a role-playing game with the interviewer as dungeon master. It is a good chance to see how they think about systems, what sort of questions to ask, and how they handle being uncomfortable.

Where do you want to be in 5 years? How does this job/role fit into that vision?
What would your last manager say about you? The good and the bad? How are you working to improve or mitigate the bad parts?
When have you had the most fun at work?
Tell me about a time you have gone over and above the call of duty.
Which project is your biggest success and why?
Have you ever read a book that made a big impact on you? What was it and what did you learn?
Do you consider yourself weird? Why or why not?

How do you balance customer service skills and technical skills?
Have you ever had to create a schedule for a project? What was the project? How did it go? Did you always hit your deadlines? If not, what did you learn from the experience?
How do you like to work? By yourself, as a team? At home? At work? What are the conditions under which you do your best work?
Tell me about a time when you 'wowed' a customer.
Are there any coworker behaviors that really drive you crazy? How do you deal with them?
What makes you a great teammate? How do you think you could improve your soft skills to be an even better teammate?

You have an application running on its own server and you want to host it at www.globalguideline.com/newservice
What do you need to do so that when users go to that url it will resolve to the right host.
Write a script that will ping each of the following websites (insert list of 3-4 websites of your choice) and report the time they take to respond and then output these response to the screen.
It should do this every 10 seconds for a minute before terminating.

This should be a gimme question for most candidates. You are just looking for someone who installs things often and can tell you about it. Ideally they have some stories when things haven't worked as well and can share an anecdote about incompatible versions or something else interesting.

Not all roles will require knowledge of cloud computing, but I would expect all engineers to have some opinions on these technologies and know some of the basics of what is offered. And I expect both pros and cons.

What is the worst mistake you have made at work? How did you fix it? What did you learn from it?
Someone says the website is slow. How do you troubleshoot the problem? What steps do you take? At what point do you ask for help?
Write a regular expression that can find all the [ phone numbers | websites | emails addresses ] in a file?

What is a 3-way handshake? Hint: TCP uses it.
How do TCP/IP networks work?
How does DNS work? Have you ever had DNS go down? When should you have backup DNS – have you ever had to set this up for a website?
How does traceroute work?
You have a MySQL DB, once you login how could you find out the schema of the db? (or any other set of basic SQL commands)

Have you ever been on call before? Did you like it? Did you ever miss a page?
When have you gone over and above at work? If you had to do it over, would you do it again? Why or why not?
Have you ever done something on the job that you were really proud of, but no one else really knew about?
What does being awesome at your job mean to you?
Based on our current website (or ask about a past project or site they worked on – any example will do) what is the minimum set of things you should monitor? What is the optimum set? What has worked well in practice?
Have you ever needed more monitoring and didn’t have it? If so how did you get around the problem?
Have you ever setup a monitoring system like Nagios, Munin, Zabbix, etc? If so, what were some of the things you learned from the process? Any changes or improvements you would have made?

Talk about the core duties of your profession: troubleshooting and debugging, data backup, automation of promotions and releases, virtualization, hardware provisioning, etc.

You can include any management and support projects, including things like batch processing and real-time web services.

Relate to any infrastructure troubleshooting operations in both production and non-production environments alike. Talk about specific occasions. Include troubleshooting of corporate websites, ticketing websites, SFTP and SMTP sites and services, etc.

You can talk about any type of documentation: internal documentation, installation and configuration documents, release notes, environment diagrams, reports to management, etc.

Every good candidate should have a response to this line of questions. A lot of systems engineering involves debugging or solving complex problems - often with software you didn't write or have prior knowledge of. Being able to learn quickly, be resourceful and come out victorious are important to any role.

► Great teamwork
► Reliable - they always follow through and are good at juggling a lot of things.
► Intellectually curious - a learner seeking knowledge
► Understands technology basics required for their job (and usually much more than just the basics)
► Can figure almost anything out (and takes enjoyment in solving problems - big or small)
► Pragmatic, hard working, and tenacious.

Difference between telnet and ssh?
What do you need to do to start a service at startup?
What are different levels of RAID and what level will you use for a web server and database server?
Whats your favorite shell and why?
Describe the boot process of the Linux of your choice in as much detail as possible?
What debugging steps will you take when your manager tells you that the website is slow?
Are you a systems engineer or a systems administrator? Why?
How does a clock work?
How did they build the Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt?
Do you admire any systems? Which ones? Why?
What is an example of a new issue in systems engineering / admin? What impact does it have on how you practice?
What do you think are common mistakes managers make when dealing with systems professionals?
What is an all-too-common example of unethical behavior for a systems professional?
Can you name a systems thinker from history? What do you admire about them?

Be specific. For example, describe web product deployment built on Microsoft stack, deployment of SQL server data patches, managing company Windows or Intel systems, etc.

Their positions are often hybrid, requiring expertise and creativity. Besides the management of operating systems, web services, and databases, they may be charged with things like planning and deploying releases of products.