[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.