[hosh]

Part of the technical assessment I have for hiring new platform engineers involves troubleshooting a service hosted in a headless Linux vm.

Troubleshooting and fluency on the command line are among what I consider core skills. Being able to dig through abstraction layers is not just essential for when things go wrong, they are essential for building infrastructure, and really tells you whether an architecture is fit for purpose.

[dice]

One of my favorite interview questions: "Here are some SSH credentials. What does this system do?"

Sometimes there aren't any docs. Sometimes the docs are wrong. It's important to be able to establish what the actual running situation is.

[scorpioxy]

When I was interviewing people on behalf of a client, I was surprised at the number of people who didn't even know what SSH was. This was for a mid-level software developer and not a junior and they all came with glowing resumes.

They all insisted that it was essential to have a CI/CD process but didn't even know what the "CD" part even did. Apparently you just "git push" and the code magically gets on the server. There are many ways to do deployments and a CI/CD process isn't always suitable and can have many forms, in my opinion, but I was happy to discuss any and all. But it's difficult to do that without the basics. As you said, before I was commissioned the platform had no documentation, was crumbling under tech debt and failing constantly so something like getting on the server to at least figure out what's going on was essential.

[baq]

You’ve listed a whole gamut of reasons why having the process is essential, so they weren’t wrong ;)

[dwedge]

I went for a senior sysadmin interview role and they asked me to debug a website in the browser that was only visible on localhost, ssh was available.

They asked me to double check that part because they assumed I just hadn't done that part, because apparently I was the first person who didn't need help with an SSH tunnel.

[stego-tech]

There’s a lot of that going around, lately. I recently had an interviewer admit I was not in the first round of candidates sent for in-person finals, but they had all bombed out on very basic SSO questions despite having a decade managing Entra; I was a “second choice” candidate and the first one to correctly answer the broad strokes of setting up an SSO app, despite not having touched Entra since it was called Azure AD.

I suspect this is AI’s doing, but cannot be sure. It’s really critical that technical interviewers weed out the over-inflaters though, now more than ever.

[dwood_dev]

This predates AI. I've been interviewing candidates(SRE/DevOps) since 2018, so many candidates that claim to have extensive experience with things completely fall apart when you put them in front of a terminal.

[hosh]

Gathering and mapping unfamiliar systems is part of that skillset. I’m also looking at being able to think laterally, being able descend abstraction layers, and understanding architectural characteristics and constraints (Roy Fielding’s Dissertation), which will recur at each level of abstraction.

[gerdesj]

  # ip a
  # ss -tulpn
  # ps aux
  # df -h
  # apt install lnav
  # journalctl -f | lnav

I'd probably ask you what would you like it to do (risking pissing you off) and then get on with trying to work out what is going on in the box.

Mind you, my job title is MD, so I get that luxury.

[stego-tech]

From a professional perspective, this is a solid question. And yeah, between the basic tool suite (top/cd/ls -l/df -H/grep/pipe '|'/ssh) and some common sysadmin/engie knowledge, I could get by with Linux just fine. "Just fine" doesn't cut it for troubleshooting sludgepipes and Kubernetes though, and my skills with Powershell finally gave me the confidence boost to take CLI/TUI seriously on Linux.

And man, zero regrets. It's nice having an OS not fight me tooth and nail to do shit, even if it means letting me blow my feet off with some commands (which is why, to any junior readers out there, we always start with a snapshot when troubleshooting servers).

Now to finish my mono-compose for my homelab and get back to enjoying the fruits of my labor...

[hosh]

I know there are some brilliant engineers at Microsoft. There are some incredible engineering in some components.

I don’t know why Windows as a whole is such a piece of fractal shit.

Maybe it is shinnegans like this: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-cloud-fedramp-c...

[stego-tech]

It's the management structure focused on short-term gains and promotion cycles, combined with a corporate culture focused very much on the same as management with the added twist of politicking, backstabbing, and undercutting other teams.

I've spent much of my life inside Microsoft's ecosystems. Not merely my career, but my technological life itself started with Win 3.11 on a parental laptop. I've spent so long in their orbit that I can generally infer what their latest thing does and how it works from an IT POV based on its product name alone, because I understand how Microsoft thinks from a marketing and engineering perspective.

As you say, they have some truly brilliant folks in their ranks. Those few diamonds are buried under mountains of garbage and slop from above, though. I mean, this is the company who pioneered full-fat PC handhelds 20 years before the Steam Deck, the smart watch a full decade before Apple, the home media ecosystem years before streaming apps dominated, smartphones before the iPhone, I can go on and on. The problem isn't the engineers so much as corporate mismanagement, but they somehow survive like a cockroach based on install size alone.

[DrewADesign]

Sure... but, I’ve got decades of experience doing that stuff, just not frequently enough to keep it in my head, these days. I usually want a small project server to just do shit and the less there is between that and booting up a fresh Linux install, the better. For example, I don’t keep firewall command line syntax in my head, but I know what needs to be done, and I always seem to need it with small home projects. I lose nothing by having a trustworthy gui do it. I’d give this a shot. I doubt I’d use it in a professional environment, but that’s not really my use case these days.

[hosh]

Which goes to show, experience and maturity changes how people use tools. The person I was responding to was at an earlier maturity stage and realized it was hampering their growth

I am more of a TUI person anyways. I have never found web based server management to be as responsive as TUI, same reason I prefer direct attaching than live tailing on a web tool.

I configure my router through a web interface and not the command line either. It isn’t something I want to mess with on my downtime.