Following my last post about sample questions for PowerShell interviews that I’d stumbled across I’ve been asked what sort of questions I’d ask – given my statement that many of the question sets were out of date.
I’ve thought about it and decided I’ll run an occasional series of questions and the information I’d expect.
Before I start that I’ve thought some more around the whole issue of PowerShell interviews and there are some things to think about before jumping into performing an interview.
The most important thing is what are you interviewing for. What exactly does the role entail? There are a number of possibilities:
You want a PowerShell developer – the person will spend all of their time writing and maintaining code. Requirements and and specifications will be given to them. for this sort of role you’ll need to be mixing developer technique questions in with the powershelll questions.
You want someone to automate your administrative processes. Again development techniques ae going to feature alongside PowerShell questions. Ideally, you’d also want some one who would question the processes because automating what you have now is necessarily the best thing. I can remember being asked to generate a report about some products when I worked for a financial services organisation. Easy enough to do. I then asked 1 question – what was the report used for. It turned out that the data on the report was keyed into another system. The job then became extract data from system a and feed into system b and produce a report of what happened. That single question saved the users a bunch of time, effort and reduced errors from the re-keying of data.
You want an administrator who can also automate the administration of some or all of your environment. At this point you’re looking for someone who can administer X (or a bunch of Xs) and write PowerShell code that’ll make that job easier. You need to ensure that the person actually understand the system[s] as well as PowerShell.
Once you know the sort of person you want its time to think about the questions to ask. I’m going to assume that any other questions and just concentrate on questions about PowerShell from a theoretical and practical perspective. If you can sit the candidate down and make them write some code for you – but we’ll get to that another time.