[peeky]

I interview people like this all the time. I'm long enough in the tooth to have been using telnet regularly, and it terrifies me that so many people doing what I was doing 20 years ago have found a path to obsolescence in an industry with such a critical skills shortage.

[Jtsummers]

This bothers me. How are people interviewing for (presumably) admin positions without this knowledge?

When I interviewed for my first real job they included a programming "test". It was basic C stuffs (really, more C pointer focused). Things like 4 swap functions, each incorrectly implemented, what are the resulting values of a and b after running swap(a,b) or swap(&a,&b), etc.

Apparently, I found out after getting hired on, I was the only one to have ever gotten every question correct (note: I was not their only hire, the code there made sense once I heard this, I'm not there anymore). So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that sys admin jobs see similar problems. But it still really bothers me for some reason. This is fairly basic knowledge (telnet/ssh for admins, C and pointers for embedded systems programmers).

[dsp1234]

How are people interviewing for (presumably) admin positions without this knowledge?

Because once you've logged in to the box, administration via telnet and SSH is exactly the same. It's not that they don't have admin skills, they just don't have updated security skills.

It's not awesome, but if the interviewer doesn't think to ask about SSH skills, and the interviewee doesn't realize their skill is out of date, it's easy to miss.

How often is the focus on what to do once logged in, as compared to how to log in in the first place?

[jameshart]

It's sad that it's so expensive to retrain someone used to telnet for ssh.

[dsp1234]

Not sure if this is sarcasm or not. But I would specifically say it's not that hard to show someone a different way of logging in, which is why I find the other reactions of shock so weird. I work with one system where I log in via two bastion hosts to a network where there is no direct network access to any host except via load balancers for applications and the bastion host itself. From the bastion host, I SSH to the individual systems on virtual machine network, but I could just as easily use telnet with basically no loss of security since the traffic never leaves the host, and doesn't even hit the network card.