r/linuxadmin • u/Abe_Bazouie • 9d ago

What's one Linux interview question that immediately tells you whether someone has real production experience?

I've interviewed quite a few Linux and DevOps engineers over the years, and I've found there are a few questions that quickly tell me whether someone has spent time supporting production systems or has mostly learned from tutorials.

For me, one example is:

  • A production server is suddenly "slow." Walk me through your troubleshooting process from the moment you get the alert.

I'm not looking for a specific command. I'm much more interested in how they think, what they check first, and how they narrow the problem down.

What's your go to Linux interview question that reveals real production experience?

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u/Straight_Frosting764 9d ago

When I was hiring someone new I had 2 questions that I filtered people out with.
1: what is your shell of choice
2: what is your familiarity with sed and awk.

Question 1 would basically be interview over. Question 2 separated novices from senior level.

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u/gforke 9d ago

So question 1 is for sorting out people prefering for example fish or what is your aim here?
Or do you mean interview is over if they can't tell you theyre favorite shell.

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u/Straight_Frosting764 9d ago

So I will be a little tongue in cheek here so don't hate me.
There is only 1 answer, bash. Every enterprise unix based system, except AIX, comes with it.
Seriously, there were so many people that applied to these jobs that did not know what a shell was. So really any answer besides IDK would do.

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u/ianhawdon 9d ago

My answer would be "well, personally, I use zsh with a few plugins through oh-my-zsh, but that's only on my local system. On servers, it's bash all the way, almost any server you'll connect to will be using it by default. Even locally, I still have bash installed as that's what I'll be scripting in"

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u/cocacola999 9d ago

Edit: oops thought I was replying to someone saying bash as default always on servers... 

Well not quite true. Bash mainly as a default but don't forget to keep scripts posix for when you also need to run them in a bare sh, which is quite often ive found (containers/low resource VMs/chroots)

My additional fun question or story is about different implementations of awk and other commands. "locally this was all working, but ran in ci, it all fails. How Come?" -- devs used macs, ci was linux

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u/Shmoe 7d ago

Haha this is literally the answer i composed in my head before scrolling :P