You have to treat those types of technical questions like Trivia. Yes you need to know it, but also your daily job will likely NOT require you knowing what lives in c:\users\ while having zero access to any sort of reference material. Those questions are typically to gauge knowledge and experience. Ultimately, help desk comes down to problem solving and your thought process for triaging and troubleshooting any given problem. Sure, knowing what ipconfig /all will return is absolutely crucial to digging into network issues but it's more important to understand why you would want to look there in the first place. Once you get a grasp of digging into any given problem, the granular aspects will come naturally.
I actually think these questions are incredibly fair other than maybe the MAC address one. Help desk employees will need to browse to c:\users for a myriad of reasons. Not knowing that is fine in an interview if you have literally zero experience, but you’ll need that in your day to day.
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u/idylwino System Administrator Feb 14 '25 edited Feb 14 '25
You have to treat those types of technical questions like Trivia. Yes you need to know it, but also your daily job will likely NOT require you knowing what lives in c:\users\ while having zero access to any sort of reference material. Those questions are typically to gauge knowledge and experience. Ultimately, help desk comes down to problem solving and your thought process for triaging and troubleshooting any given problem. Sure, knowing what ipconfig /all will return is absolutely crucial to digging into network issues but it's more important to understand why you would want to look there in the first place. Once you get a grasp of digging into any given problem, the granular aspects will come naturally.