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by solatic 3212 days ago
Do remember that we are talking about internships here.

If I have a task for an intern that requires some shell-scripting, and the intern already understands what it means to pipe commands, I put my hands together in silent thanks.
2 comments
rawland 3212 days ago
Exactly that I was thinking, too.

However, the HR person clearly filtered with "==UNIX". Hence, any explanation to him/her just wasted everybodies time. A different approach might have landed Stanley an interview with a Tech and the world might have looked different.

But then, he has plenty of new Tech contacts now. ;-)

Thanks for this lesson.

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golergka 3212 days ago
> If I have a task for an intern that requires some shell-scripting, and the intern already understands what it means to pipe commands, I put my hands together in silent thanks.

I thought we were talking about university students studying CS or related discipline?

How on earth would a uni student in CS don't know about piping commands? Does this actually happen? I dropped out of uni after 1,5 years, and I studied bioinformatics, not CS, but even then I considered using pipes as basic and universal skill for any "advanced user", not even an engineer.

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PhoneRemote 3212 days ago
> How on earth would a uni student in CS don't know about piping commands?

Beyond the obvious ones, lots and lots of valid reasons this could happen:

1. Student is entirely new to programming as a concept and just started in university. Not every fresh CS student has been programming since birth.

2. Student uses the shell entirely for basic commands and honestly doesn't even realize it can be used for more advanced things

3. Student is really interested in the "Science" part of CS and isn't planning on being a developer. Plenty of brilliant CS minds are awful at the programming part but extremely adept at, say, consensus protocols.

Your basic first year CS curriculum might offer a crash course in things like basic shell scripting, but it's certainly not a given. Computer Science is a very broad field and it's arguably a huge waste of time for them to teach you how to pipe commands when they could be teaching you something you can't pick up in 10 minutes, like automata theory.

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solatic 3212 days ago
> How on earth would a uni student in CS don't know about piping commands? Does this actually happen?

People fail FizzBuzz. 'Nuff said.

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loopbit 3212 days ago
Yes, it happens. And much worse.

Many interns I've been in charge of were not comfortable in the command line and most had no experience outside of windows. Writing shell scripts? The everything-is-a-file concept in Unix? You're lucky if they know what you are talking about.

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detaro 3212 days ago
It highly depends on where and what exactly you study, but in many cases you've probably been explained shell basics once and can get by with knowledge how to to copy-paste commands to install packages and basic git usage.

Of course, many students are interested in more and learn it, but isn't a requirement, so students with other interests have no real need for it.

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