[colug-432] Computer Programmer Productivity Ratio

[Ethan Dicks]

On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 7:10 AM, Jim Wildman <jim at rossberry.com> wrote:
> As part of my work with Red Hat, I interact with the sys admins at many
> companies.  I am no longer shocked at how many do not understand the
> basic productivity enhancement tools available to them like
>
> shell history
> screen
> commands like watch
> in place shell programming (basic for loops, etc)

If you are saying there are sysadmins who sit at a shell prompt all
day (as opposed to the GUI-clicky types, which is a different problem)
and _don't_ use one or more of those tools *every day*, I have to
wonder what other obvious things they don't know.

> It's not hard to be better than most when the bar is set so low.

One of my standard interview question threads explores how much the
candidate knows about signals and processes - things like "what does
the command 'kill -1' do?" or "what does 'kill' really do" (i.e.,
"send a signal to a process".  Even Wikipedia knows that).  I've had
"experienced" sysadmins tell me they don't really know because they've
"never done that"... one guy was a greybeard who got started with UNIX
before there was an Linux... I asked him if he ever edited a crontab
(before "crontab -e") and how he got cron to notice what he did...

-ethan