[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