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but if the interviewer doesn't think to ask about SSH skills, and the interviewee doesn't realize their skill is out of date, it's easy to miss.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