Interviewing

I was recently helping some colleagues think about interviewing techniques. I like to see work product from people. So, a while back I developed an assessment that we use. It has been a big help in evaluating candidates. It was incremental problem where each step was a question that led to a larger solution. It wasn't perfect, but I got to see some evolution of thinking. 

When I worked at Microsoft we took our interviewing very seriously. Certainly, there are lots of stories (myths?) out there about the process. Some truer than others. I have a master list of good questions and suggestions I still find helpful to review to get into the right mindset. I avoid the "Mount Fuji" questions since they just don't give me much useful data.

Along these lines...I was recently turned onto InterviewZen. I like the idea of being able to watch a recording of someone creating a work product. We have a classic computer science sort of problem (weighted graph) that I use, but I don't get to see the person working thru their thinking. I am going to try and adapt mine to this format.

Powershell Quickee

As this title rolled off my fingers it made me laugh a little.

But hey, isn't everything in PowerShell a little quicker?  At least that is the intent.  Over the past few years I keep dabbling in PowerShell from time to time.  I have just enough experience to know what can reasonably be done in the tool - without over extending it.  <soapbox> It looks like there are some people who take this tool and use it to bang every nail they have.  But that is another blog entry. </soapbox>

Here is the script I crufted up today for showing me all the services that are on a server set to run at startup (aka Automatic) and yet are NOT running now.

I was using the get-service cmdlet but it did not seem to be return the StartMode and State properties from a remote server (works locally fine).  So I Googled up an alternative that uses WMI.

	foreach ($ServerName in $ServerList)
	{
	$ServerName
	Get-WmiObject Win32_Service -ComputerName $ServerName |
	Where-Object { $_.StartMode -eq 'Auto' -and $_.State -ne 'Running' } |
	Format-Table -AutoSize @(
	'Name'
	'DisplayName'
	@{ Expression = 'State'; Width = 9 }
	@{ Expression = 'StartMode'; Width = 9 }
	'StartName'
	)
	}

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