System Administrator interview loops

A system administrator — a sysadmin, or in a smaller company simply the IT administrator — keeps the servers, the directory and the backups working for everyone else, and is judged mostly on things nobody sees: a patch night nobody noticed, a restore that worked the first time it was needed, an account that stopped working on the evening its owner left. This role covers systems and the identities that use them. Switching, routing, firewalls and wireless belong to network administration, and cloud architecture and delivery pipelines to other roles.

Most failures in this job are not a single dramatic mistake. They are something configured years ago and reported as healthy ever since: a backup job that never included the data disk, a script that matched on a surname, a build note that switched off time synchronisation, a deny entry nobody remembers adding. Interviews for the role drift towards what is easy to ask — port numbers, command flags, the difference between RAID levels — and a candidate can answer all of it from a revision sheet while being unable to read a backup report. So every round here puts evidence on the table, the kind a working administrator reads every week — event log excerpts, a patch plan, a backup report, a script and its run log — and scores what the candidate finds in it, and what they decline to do.

A loop is a set of round plans in order. Each round scores one to three competencies, every must-have is scored in at least two rounds, and the debrief goes competency by competency rather than interviewer by interviewer, so no single interview decides the hire. How these plans work covers the rest of the method.