[ale] Let's draft a support personnel competency test! [was: A vent and whine - ignore with dignity]

[Chuck Payne]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Richard Bronosky <Richard at bronosky.com> wrote:
> I would like to draft a list of ~5-10 questions that could be used to
> pre-screen (like you would to a job applicant) your support
> technician. If they fail, you say "I'm sorry but you do not appear to
> be qualified to handle my support requirements, please transfer me to
> the next tier of support." I don't know how well it would work, but it
> would be a fun exercise. We just may end up creating a new meme in the
> process.
>
> Here is my v0.1 draft:
> 1. An IPv4 address is composed of how many octets?
> 2. The OSI model is composed of how many layers? Name them.
> 3. What purpose does an ARP table serve?
> 4. How many runlevels are there in conventional "system five"? What
> does zero do? What does six do?
> 5. How do you identify and bounce a network interface in a POSIX-like
> OS without rebooting?
>
> On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 9:51 AM, Michael B. Trausch <mike at trausch.us> wrote:
>> On Mon, 2010-06-21 at 07:26 -0400, Geoffrey wrote:
>>> I dumped Comcast (TV) because they were complete idiots.
>>
>> Aye, most of them are.  However, business class people actually know
>> what networking is (gasp!) and know that if you call in and say "look, I
>> appear to have a routing issue, and here are the traceroutes..." they'll
>> say "oh, let's see that please!" instead of saying "Excuse me, but have
>> you checked to see that your coax is secure?  Because you know you won't
>> get to MSNBC (but you can get to Google!) if your coax isn't screwed in
>> or is disconnected."  GRRRRRR.
>>
>>> I went with AT&T Uverse and I have been perfectly happy ever since.
>>>  I've dealt with both AT&T Uverse and AT&T DSL support, and I can
>>>  honestly say they are most definitely from different worlds.  The
>>> AT&T Uverse techs know their stuff.  The DSL folks must have been
>>> trained by Comcast, they're idiots.
>>
>> The lower tiers of support are paid a low wage and aren't really
>> trained; they just read from virtual sheets in a database somewhere.
>> They don't know anything about TCP or UDP or IP or Ethernet, they don't
>> even know what a node or a head-end is most of the time.
>>
>> The people over in business class actually are paid reasonably well and
>> are expected as a part of their job to know how the infrastructure they
>> support works.
>>
>>        --- Mike
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> .!# RichardBronosky #!.
>
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Wow, sound like the question I had, but you could add

If you do a ps ax, what is running pid 1?

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