Tag Archives: Office

Job Interview Questions You Should NOT Answer Or Ask | LinkedIn

LinkedIn never ceases to amaze with me the articles it has, especially about recruitment. Did you know some questions that may be asked in interviews are actually ILLEGAL in some parts of the world?

Looking at this list, I realised that I’ve been asked some of these questions before in some of my own interviews without realising they are not really relevant (or in some cases, legal).

Here are some commonly asked interview questions that are inappropriate and in fact illegal in many parts of the world:

Have you got children?
What is your age?
What is your citizen status?
What is your weight?
What is your financial status or credit rating?
Have you got any debts?
What is your family status?
Do you believe in God?
Where do you go to church?
Do you drink alcohol?
What do you do at the weekends?
What religious holidays do you observe?
What is your race?
Have you ever been arrested?

Job Interview Questions You Should NOT Answer Or Ask | LinkedIn.

Irony or Hypocrisy?

A couple of months ago, I got hauled in front of one of the directors and given a formal written warning for both performance and going over the line in terms of access and what I was allowed to do.

A few months later, the company is offloaded with a high-priority (CEO-driven) project, onto which they put all their best and most-knowledgeable people (myself included). Now, one more than one occasion on this uber-high priority project, I’ve had to write things like scripts and conversion routines which are out of my jurisdiction, to which I previously got into trouble with, but they’ve been accepted for this project, presumably because they saved the company, and saved time. I also wasn’t supposed to touch a machine without being watched by a member of the tech team, but the same director that gave me the lashing and the verbal warning, asked me to come in on a weekend, work on one of these machines – and unsupervised, I might add.

So I get in trouble for using a machine, but then am asked to work on it without supervision?

Speech

Public speaking is always nerve-wracking. Even a small group is nerve-wracking, especially if they’re directors.

‘Like driving a Ferrari at 20mph’: Why one region ditched Microsoft Office for LibreOffice

Linux News

If you’re up for a visit to the beautiful Italian region of Umbria, better make sure your laptop is running some open source software — chances are you’ll feel more at home there.

This small area in the middle of the Boot, known for its centuries-old monasteries and for being the birthplace of St Francis of Assisi, is in fact quickly becoming a mecca of free software.

Thanks to a project called LibreUmbria, the biggest local government bodies are migrating to LibreOffice in what’s thought to be the most carefully-designed transition away from proprietary software ever undertaken. Though not as big as other international migration initiatives, the Umbrian project has been praised for its attention it pays to every aspect of the transition, not just the technical ones.

And if money is the primary motive, cultural and ethical reasons also play a prominent role. “Right now, along with Munich…

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Corporate Linux

Had my first encounter of Linux, or specifically, a linux-like environment in a corporate environment. The IT peops were trying to setup an environment on Xenserver, and they had setup a storage space to copy a virtual machine image onto. But they kept running out of space. It took me a while to figure out what they were doing (wrong), though.

They were trying to copy onto the PV partition, and Xenserver had setup its environment to use LVM, so the PV partition was already allocated to the LVM system, and therefore had no space to copy onto.

After figuring out which LV was the one they wanted to use, I had problems mounting, with mount saying I had to specify the filesystem. After trying various switches with mount and specifying a filesystem (only NFS, ext, ext2 and ext3 were supported by Xenserver. No vfat, ntfs or btrfs. Admittedly, however, the Xenserver version the IT people were using was an older version), I soon found out that the IT people had created the storage space, but not done anything else. Therefore, that would explain why I couldn’t mount it — it hadn’t been formatted. So a simple mkfs.ext3 (remember ext4 wasn’t supported) on the block device in /dev/mapper/ meant I could mount it without specifying filesystem. scp’ing into the server and copying into the path proved it worked.