[ex_amazon_sde]

> who ... understand the OS internals? ... How about write a library for their fav language? How about actually troubleshoot a misbehaving *nix process?

Ex-Amazon here. You are describing standard skills required to pass an interview for a SDE 2 in the teams I've been in at Amazon.

Some candidates know all the popular tools and frameworks of the month but do not understand what an OS does, or how a CPU works or networking and do not get hired because they would struggle to write or debug internal software written from scratch.

[added later] This was many years ago when the bar raiser thing was in full swing and in teams working on critical infrastructure.

[rantwasp]

LoL. Also Ex-Amazon here. I can tell you for a fact that most SDE2s I've worked with had zero clue on how the OS works. What you're describing may have been true 5-10 years ago, but I think is no longer true nowadays (what was that? raising the bar they called it). A typical SDE2 interview will not have questions around OS internals in it. Before jumping on your high horse again: I've done around 400 interviews during my tenure there and I don't recall ever failing anyone due to this.

Also, gate-keeping is not helpful.

[nitrogen]

Also, gate-keeping is not helpful.

This term is really getting over-used. The purpose of job interviews is to decide who gets to pass through the gate. It is literally keeping of a gate.

[darksaints]

The term is perfectly apt and descriptive here, because gate keeping isn't about the keeping of a gate, it's about the inappropriateness of the criteria that is used.

Software engineers, even the ones that are so superpowered that they :gasp: got a job at Amazon once in their life, can go an entire successful career without knowing how to use a kernel debugger, or understand iptables or ifconfig, or understand how virtual memory works.

Some engineers might need to know some of those things, but it is absolutely bonkers to claim that you could never progress past level 2 at Amazon without knowing such things. I know this because I once taught a senior principal engineer at Amazon how to use traceroute.

For many roles in Amazon (particularly the tens of thousands of SDE positions that will end up working with the JVM all day long), asking such low level questions about how OSes work is about as useful of a gatekeeping device as asking them whether white cheese tastes better than yellow cheese. And that's why the term gatekeeping is used.

[rejectedandsad]

Yikes. Do you think Amazon engineers are overall just dumber or just less used to the lower abstractions? After all, I can’t even ssh into the machines my code runs on nowadays.

[rantwasp]

newer engineers are less used to lower level abstraction. anecdotal, but that’s what I observed

[emerongi]

Yes they do. There is too much software to be written. A person with adequate knowledge of higher abstractions can produce just fine code.

Yes, if there is a nasty issue that needs to be debugged, understanding the lower layers is super helpful, but even without that knowledge you can figure out what's going on if you have general problem-solving abilities. I certainly have figured out a ton of issues in the internals of tools that I don't know much about.

Get off your high horse.

[leesec]

Says one guy. Sorry, there's lots of people who make a living writing software who don't know what an OS does. Gatekeeping helps nobody.

[proxyon]

Current big tech here (not Amazon) and very few know lower level things like C, systems or OS stuff. Skillsets and specializations are different. Your comment is incredibly false. Even on mobile if someone is for instance a JS engineer they probably don't know Objective-C, Swift, Kotlin or Java any native APIs. And for the guys who do use native mobile, they can't write Javascript to save their lives and are intimidated by it.

[exdsq]

I agree with you, as opposed to the other ex-amazon comments you've had (I had someone reach out to interview me this week if that counts? ;)).

Playing devils advocate I guess it depends on what sort of software you're writing. If you're a JS dev then I can see why they might not care about pointers in C. I know for sure as a Haskell/C++ dev I run like the plague from JS errors.

However, I do think that people should have a basic understanding of the entire stack from the OS up. How can you be trusted to choose the right tools for a job if your only aware of a hammer? How can you debug an issue when you only understand how a spanner works?

I think there's a case for engineering accreditation as we become even more dependent on software which isn't a CS degree.