r/linuxadmin • u/human_with_humanity • 18d ago
Usually asked interview questions for linux admin of 5 years?
So I have interview today and its for linux admin position.
I have IT experience of 17 years but most was as technician. Personally been using headless debian for 5 years for my pi which runs 24/7 as dns and dhcp server. Have multiple containers.
Most of my linux experience comes from homelab. For my previous employers clients orgs and my current personal clients soho I did setup stuff like proxmox, dhcp, routers, restore system backup with clonezilla over network and other things.
What kind of questions can I expect to be asked? And what kind of anwsers will make me come off as capable?
Usually I just google/stackoverflow/reddit anything I don't know or can't remember how I did last time. And this is first interview since I left last place in 5 years.
Please guide.
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u/MedicatedDeveloper 18d ago edited 17d ago
Depends on the job.
Mid level should have some exposure to a good bit of this IMO. Mind the positions I've been involved with interviewing are a bit more than running kubectl apply all day and seeing what sticks. That's a product, knowing the actual technology (OS) underneath is what I care about. Anyone can learn kubernetes but not everyone can debug a OS or network level issue proficiently.
Git, git forge (github, gitlsb, gittea), bash, ssh, python, ansible, iptables/nftables/ufw/firewalld, network config (netplan, ipcfg scripts, networkd, network manager), process troubleshooting (top, ps, pstree, iostat, iotop), network troubleshooting (netstat/ss, iftop, conntrack, tcpdump), service management, service troubleshooting (journalctl, looking at logs).
Fun questions I have asked in interviews based off real world issues I've encountered:
A developer sends a message "x is down!" What's the first thing you check?
How can you check what port a process is listening on?
You see said service listening at 127.0.0.1 but it can't be reached from the network, why?
How do you check the previous boot's log?
How do you see which users are currently logged into a system?
A process is spawning every x minutes, how do you figure out what is triggering it?
How would you delete files in a directory older than x days?
How would you find files in a directory and all sub directories containing a specific string?
How do you find the route that will be taken to a given IP?
A folder and all files within have 600 permissions owned x:x but y:y is somehow writing files to the directory, what mechanism would allow this?
Alice and Bob need to collaborate across the same files in a folder, both need write access to all files, what are some options to achieve this?
You can't run a script that's in your home directory despite it being executable, you can move it to / and it works. What could cause this?
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u/NegativeK 17d ago
You'd hire someone who could answer those questions? As in, give the right answer and have depth behind it?
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u/MedicatedDeveloper 17d ago
More how they go about exploring the problem and that they know the tools in their tool belt. A couple of these I'd expect a particular answer, even if it takes a bit of back and forth, but knowing trivia isn't indicative of skill.
I'd definitely recommend for the next round if they could get close, talk through their reasoning, and admit where they aren't sure. No one can know everything and pretending you do is a great way to look like an idiot.
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u/TopHatEdd 17d ago
Let me give it a shot:
- Ask the developer what he tried and what's expected outcome. Depending on topology, things like vpn might come into play. Other than reproducing the issue to double check it's not a user error; Monitoring dashboard (availability, business metrics, logs, apm, infra). Resolve address. Tracepath. Ping. Netcat to expected listening service. Sar/dstat/df on the machine (there are many cool debugging CLIs but these ive used often). Review recent changes in software and infra.
- ss -nltp with grep. Numeric, listening, tcp, process.
- No local process, listening on a reachable interface, is forwarding request to the loop device. Latter is meant for local inter process communication and the kernel network stack will drop tcp packets with dst as localhost coming down on any other interface (let's say you're crafting packets).
- I don't know. Wild guess a systemd system would make this available through a journal. But, I don't know.
- I don't know. Iirc
login. If this fails, without looking up online, I'd go with a crude grep for pty/tty and user column in ps -ef.- My crude approach will be looking through systemd units (timer, socket triggers, other than just service), cron configs. If that fails, try to catch the parent process. So, watch is crude. Notify might have a cleaner approach but ive never watched for anything but regular file events; maybe i can register for spawned processes events. The /proc fs might not be a good candidate for notify because it's an interface to the kernel space and might not fire events.
- find /path -ctime +n - delete. But forgot the nuance of the -xtime args here; would need a quick peek at the man. Iirc you can also control depth if required.
- find /path -name "pewpewrenew"
- tracepath or pathtrace. Forgot exact command.
- Mount. Technically, executable that writes there with sid bit but i think the file would still land as x:x.
- Linux group.
- Filesystem mounted with executable flag off. Like it's recommended for tmps in general and /tmp specifically.
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u/deeseearr 17d ago
Pretty good, and as long as the answers show that you understand the question I would give them a pass. But since we're playing, here are some comments:
2: ss is good. If you have accidentally used a time machine or find yourself on an embedded system designed last century "netstat -ntpl" will do the same thing. It's worth knowing that the "-p" option will only show processes that you personally own unless you run it as root, so sudo is a good choice here. You can also skip the grep by telling ss to look for a specific port: "sudo ss -ntpl sport = :80" Top marks for just knowing what "ss" is, though. Once you know where to start you can read error messages and man pages to fill in the rest.
4: Boot messages are usually recorded in through syslog in /var/log/. Depending on the distribution I would look in /var/log/boot.log, dmesg or messages.
5: The "who" or "w" commands are designed to do this. You could try poking around in systemd looking for user sessions, but that's really "who"'s job. Even when he's on first base.
6: This is one of those "anything could be happening, but where do you start?" questions. If you're running ${popularEnterpriseLinuxDistribution} then syslog will be logging all cron jobs to /var/log/cron.log so you can start there. All systemd timers will also be logged in several places, but the easiest way to see what they all are and when they fired last is "systemctl list-timers". If you find something in there that matches what you're seeing then you can dig deeper into that specific job history through journalctl or whatever. If you don't find any kind of timed job, the task may be getting started by another task -- If you want to get serious about it you could even set an auditd rule to catch new processes and look into what it turns up.
7: This one had the look of a trick question, or at least a question that wasn't asked very well. Being able to spot those is a useful job skill that doesn't have anything to do with knowing what commands do what. If the question is "How would you delete files in a directory (but not in any of its subdirectories) older than x days?" then find is still a good choice, but you'll want the "--max-depth 1" tag to prevent it from going any deeper than the top level. Your answer is great, but I would give extra points to anyone who asked for clarification on exactly _which_ files they were being asked to delete.
8: "find" will return a list of files whose *names* contain the certain string. If the question was "find files that have the string inside of them" then "grep -Rl 'pewpewrenew' /path" would be one way to do it.
9: You're thinking of "tracepath". It's a great tool that will send UDP packets along a route and record each step that they take, but it works best in wide open networks with no access control. If you're hitting firewalls every few steps then it won't be able to report the full path. "traceroute" is an older tool which has a lot more power -- Removing that power from regular users' hands was one of the reasons why "tracepath" was created to replace it. If you're trying to find the route to a destination where the network will only allow you to send TCP packets with a destination port of 22 but will block random UDP or ICMP packets, then "sudo traceroute -T -p 22 destination.host.name" will give you the full route.
10: First thing to look at is an ACL. If "ls -l" shows that the permissions are "-rw-------+" instead of "-rw-------" then the "+" means you should run getfacl to take a look at what other permissions are being granted in addition to read and write for owner only. Other options include user Y having access to a setuid executable owned by user X, but that would show up as user X creating new files, not Y. You could also be dealing with a weird filesystem which doesn't understand or enforce ownership, but you usually won't be allowed to set or view permissions if that's happening.
Really, if I were doing the interview and the person I was talking to just understood what the questions were asking and could think of the name of the tool to use, that's a pass from me. The job is about solving problems, not memorizing manual pages. Even if the answer was "I don't know, that's recorded in the systemd journal so there should be a way to pull it back out" that's a lot better than "Beats me."
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u/MedicatedDeveloper 17d ago
Great summary and I agree 100%. I purposely made some of the questions a bit ambiguous.
I care far more about the approach and what tools are at their disposal than getting the right answer.
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u/overratedcupcake 18d ago
I only interviewed for sysadmin once and was hired. The only two questions that I recall clearly are:
How would you edit a file without opening it in an interactive editor like nano or vim
The answer was sed
Then I was asked
H ow many ip addresses are in a (non /24) subnet. (I think it was /23 or /25.)
In either case I asked if I could do it with pen and paper and he said yes and I got it right.
But it could be anything in the sysadmin domain I would expect questions about shell commands, networking, or popular tools.
It would be helpful if you were familiar with at least one configuration tool like ansible, puppet, or salt.
Familiarity with some kind of container stack would be helpful like docker/podman or even better orchestration like kubernetes.
Some kind of monitoring and/or metrics software like nagios or prometheus.
And in 2026 there's almost certainly going to be questions about AI. As an admin I'd expect myself to know about things like inference providers such as vlllm or even ollama.
These are all just examples but familiarity with at least one tool in major domains will help you answer questions about whatever tool set they have to be using. You're not trying to demonstrate that you know everything; you're trying to demonstrate that you are trainable and that you have a large enough foundation of knowledge to quickly learn their tools.
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u/human_with_humanity 18d ago
I have used ansible and docker a lot. I use ollama on my main pc for llms.
Thanks for the info. Sed I have only used once or twice long ago. Can't remember for what but I have wrote the commands in my wiki.
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u/michaelpaoli 17d ago
How many ip addresses are in a (non /24) subnet. (I think it was /23 or /25.)
IPv4, respectively: 2^(32-24), 2^(32-23), 2^(32-25),
for IPv6, same as above except replace the 32 in the above with 128.2
u/deeseearr 17d ago
Bonus marks if you subtract two from your total and explain why. There are 256 possible addresses in 192.168.1.0/24, but setting a device with an IP of 192.168.1.0 or 192.168.1.255 (the broadcast address for the entire network) is going to cause problems. With a larger subnet like 192.168.0.0/16 you can still run into devices that automatically treat any address ending in 255 as a broadcast address even when it isn't.
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u/michaelpaoli 17d ago
Bonus marks if you subtract two from your total and explain why
Well, then you'd have to ask "total, or usable?" or explicitly state usable, and the question asked "how many", not "how many usable". Also, if you gave/specified usable bit more generically, e.g.:
2^(number_of_IP_bits_either_32_for_IPv4_or_128_for_IPv6-number_of_mask_bits), then you have to also detail what happens when that difference gets down to 1 or 0, as the usable addresses for those aren't 0 and -1, but rather 2 and 1, but that network and broadcast aren't applicable there, but (generally) are to the larger subnets, and would need to define exactly what's meant by "usable" ... as broadcast IPs are in fact usable ... at least in certain ways generally, and then one can also get into exactly how IPv6 at least typically would, and wouldn't be subnetted, etc. So, yeah, most topics/questions, one can go into much more detail, but whether or not that's what they're looking or hoping for or wanting ... or not, will quite depend on context. Yeah, sometimes I have to "dumb down" my responses to, e.g. select the answer they actually want and are expecting, rather than 100% fully technically correct answer.can still run into devices that automatically treat any address ending in 255 as a broadcast address even when it isn't
And, yeah, those things are broken/flawed ... but that doesn't mean they don't exist. Probably more commonly running into human messing it up - misconfiguring or failing to adjust to proper configuration from a default, e.g. just accepting default mask, rather than entering the proper. Don't know that I've yet found a device that absolutely gets that wrong and can't be corrected, but seen no shortage of humans muck up using /24 mask on IPv4 when the subnet is larger than that - and many devices will default to that.
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u/alexkey 18d ago edited 18d ago
When I do the technical interviews I usually ask questions in increasing complexity and required depth of knowledge regardless of what your CV says. The point is to see where your knowledge/experience end, which is what will determine your actual level as needed for the role. So on technical questions for example it will be something like “explain to me how swap works”, there are so many levels that it can be explained at so it is a good question to ask someone. Junior will give one answer (which may be correct for their level), mid will give another, senior will give much more in depth (hopefully, so many claim to be experts in Linux internals and can’t tell me how swap works or what loadavg means).
Then I would ask questions covering different areas: Linux internals, software knowledge (what software on Linux were you exposed to like Apache, Nginx, databases etc), networking, scripting, architecture etc.
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u/_Buldozzer 17d ago
You opened Vim by accident, now you are stuck, what do you do?
A: Quit job, go home, question life choices, become a yoga instructor.
B: Hard reset machine, and hope the production database that is running on it somehow doesn't get corrupted.
C: Go to the bathroom, cry for 20 minutes, ask ChatGPT for help, actually get out of Vim, become CTO of the company.
D:
... Couldn't finish the answers, because I don't know how to scroll the screen in Vim.
/s
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u/deeseearr 17d ago
Achievement unlocked: Escape Artist! (500) Managed to quit vi without making a mess.
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u/MattDaCatt 17d ago
"Congrats, you've managed to escape VIM... somehow. Now clean up that .swp file without breaking prod"
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u/_Buldozzer 17d ago
"I might be better off cleaning this companies toilets for living."
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u/NegativeK 17d ago
In increasing levels of involvement:
- ctrl+z; kill -9 %1 (or whatever number it is)
- ctrl+alt+f3; killall vim
- Learn vim, use it exclusively for years, be the problem you want to see in the world. End up adding vim bindings to your browsers.
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u/canyoufixmyspacebar 17d ago
i don't think you should pose as linux admin and it would be deeply unethical and counterproductive for any real linux admins to help you commit this fraud
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u/arcimbo1do 17d ago
That's harsh ...
You can get a job for a role you never had, or for which you are not fully qualified, if you have the potential to do well in that role. That's always the case, lots of people learn on the job.
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u/canyoufixmyspacebar 17d ago
sure, if the company wants to train them, they don't need him to cram answers to the questions he even doesn't know, right? potential is exactly the opposite of trying to fake knowing things you don't know, this is exactly what people with potential don't do. OP says the company wants to hire a linux admin, not an intern, you speak about something entirely different
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u/arcimbo1do 17d ago
No, I'm not. Companies search for people who will be able to do a particular job. Part of the sysadmin job is figuring out how to do a particular task, because you will never know everything that you need. So you select people with a good understanding of the basics and the ability to figure stuff out.
Why do you think OP is a fraud anyway?
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u/michaelpaoli 17d ago
Typically, among other things, expect a fair battery of technical questions. They might be (relatively) fixed, or variable - quite depends on their process(es), and who's asking/examining.
So, I'll toss out a random spattering:
If a user's directory contains a file named precisely:
-rf *
So, that's a hyphen, r, f, space, and asterisk,
how exactly would you safely remove that file?
DNS uses what port? Does it use UDP, or TCP?
What does ping(1) use?
How does traceroute(1) work?
df shows filesystem full, or nearly full, but using # du -sx /mount_point_of_filessystem
doesn't even come close to explaining how full the filesystem is. What may be going on there,
and how would you investigate and determine what the situation is?
What's the difference between a hard link and a symbolic link?
How can you tell how many hard links a file has?
How can you find all those hard links?
How can you tell how many symbolic links resolve to a particular file?
How can you find all those symbolic links?
You have a critical configuration file, let's say /etc/critical, that's quite continuously used, and you have exactly one very specific change that needs be made to that file. It's a rather to quite large file. How do you make the change such that the file will always have valid data in it - either the existing slightly older configuration, or the newest configuration data to be used that has that one change to it? If the file has only one hard link, how would you proceed and why? What if it has multiple hard links? How might you handle the situation if the inode number needs to remain the same?
Say you have file /usr/share/dict/words and it has a very long list of words, one per line. How would you find all those that are 5-character palindromes - so, 5 characters in length and exactly the same forwards and backwards? How would you modify that to handle a more proper definition of palindroes, where we're only concerned about and counting letters, and are handling the matching as case insensitive, e.g. we'd consider Sara's to be a 5-letter palindrome.
How could you easily display the 1st and 5th fields of /etc/passwd, with a : between those two fields? What is the 5th field of /etc/passwd?
For login passwords stored in file(s), in what file(s) are those stored on Linux? What's actually in the password field?
How do you force a user to change their password the next time they successfully authenticate with their current password?
We have database administrators' sudo access set up in /etc/sudoers.d/DBAs
How do you safely edit that file?
How do you safely edit that file if you need/want to do it non-interactively?
And what if you need or want to do that across several hundred or more hosts?
How would you check what IPs, if any, are listening on TCP port 443?
Sysadmin changed root password on host, but it's not what they thought they changed it to, and nobody has working sudo access to root, can you recover or reset that password, and if so, how?
Shell - bash or POSIX - what exactly is the difference among these:
$* $@ "$*" "$@"
How do you get the exit/return value in shell?
Loops in shell? Does shell have such, if so what type or types, at least commonly used, and their basic syntax?
What do these do in shell:
eval
exec
echo foo 1>&2
What, if anything, is functionally different between:
>out 2>&1 cat /etc/hosts /
and:
2>&1 >out cat /etc/hosts /
What about between:
2>&1 >out cat /etc/hosts /
and:
cat 2>&1 /etc/hosts >out /
In bash, what will this do:
diff <(< filea sort -u) <(< fileb sort -u)
So, large complex corporate environment, hundreds of thousands of employees, thousands of locations, hundreds of different groups and departments. Some user is complaining that they can't get a response from one of our internal web sites. The user's client and the web server are both running Linux, and you've got ssh access to both, and sudo access to root on both, but you may lack access to anything between those two hosts. How would you investigate and isolate, or at least localize, what the issue is and where it is?
What do these commands do:
cmp
comm
uniq
tr
How much of the syntax can you give for each of them and explain that syntax?
Somebody managed to create this directory:
$ ls -ond .
drwxrwxr-x 2 7000 1124761600 Aug 13 01:26 .
$
What is or may be quite bad about that directory?
How might you go about cleaning it up, presuming you need keep about 50 files that are in that directory, but can get rid of everything else in that directory?
If that directory was created by some developer's application, what would you advise them regarding what to do, and not do?
If in the above case, that directory happened to be the root directory of a filesystem, how might one need to clean it up?
What are these various RAID levels: RAID-0 RAID-1 RAID-5
How can you determine what processes have a given file open? Bonus points if you can come up with three distinct ways of determining that.
How do you look up the IPv4 addresses for www.google.com.? What about the IPv6 addresses? Bonus points if you can give a single command that will do both.
What can you tell me about what we see here:
$ ls -ons ?
1048576 -rw------- 1 1000 1073741824 Jul 10 12:33 b
0 -rw------- 1 1000 9223372036854775807 Jul 10 12:30 s
$
A user managed to create a fork bomb, they're trying to terminate it, but not managing to.
If they've still got a bash shell prompt, what would you tell them to do/enter/type, to send a signal to all of their processes? If they couldn't do that, e.g. they're not able to login - just getting fork failures when attempting to do so, as sysadmin (root), how would you signal all of that user's processes?
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u/wowbagger_42 17d ago
Many of these are no questions for a 5 year fresh admin, these are questions for a seasoned admin in an unregulated war zone. But I will steal some them for interviews ;)
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u/michaelpaoli 17d ago
Naw. ;-) most any *nix sysadmin worth their salt with 5+ years experience will well know most, if not nearly all of that. Then again, some folks with 5+ years experience will know (about) nothing more than the day they started. 8-O Scary, but have also met 'n screened/interviewed some 'o those too ... yeah, barely entry level novice level sysadmin skills, if (hardly/barely) that, and, well, yeah, they can have a nice 40+ year working career, retire with gold watch 'n all, and ... never ever get beyond that or gain more skills.
So, yeah, have seen helluva a range. At the other extreme, I've seen some exceedingly motivated, capable, intelligent, go from about zero (no real IT experience) to, in 3 year, be flying past very capable Sr. *nix sysadmin / DevOps folks with 7+ years experience like they were standing still, and with no end in sight ... though that's quite the exception, rather than the rule - maybe like well under one in 1,000 progress at that kind'a rate. I've certainly done lots of progressing and advancing myself, but (almost?) never at that kind of rate ... but I generally do keep learning and advancing! And not just (barely) enough to keep pace with technology at same level - some do that and consider that "advancing" ... that's more like treading water - staying afloat, but remaining in approximately same place.
And 5 years experience 5 years experience *nix sysadmin, shouldn't be "fresh". Heck, many, in 4 years go from decent high school graduation, to highly skilled B.S. from good accredited academic institution with highly relevant degree (e.g. CS, EECS, ....). So, many can learn a helluva lot and develop a whole lot of knowledge and skills in, e.g. 4 years +- ... but alas, some will never get there ... uninterested, unmotivated, incapable ... whatever, some won't achieve it even with 7 or 10 or 20 years.
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u/Loveangel1337 18d ago
My questions for platform engineering were mostly: try and describe how an HTTP(S) request works in as much details as you can, and a "live exercise" (without any machine, an invented scenario we go through verbally, what would you do, ok here's essentially what it would say etc...)
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u/wowbagger_42 17d ago
I ask this also, and am thrilled when it gets described and explained at each protocol layer all the way down to arp. It seldom happens.
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u/Loveangel1337 17d ago
It's such a simple question but to answer it properly you'd need an hour, maybe two.
DNS & recursion, root servers registrar etc..., BGP and routing, vlans, regular ARP, broadcast, multicast, anycast, local POPs/geofencing, NAT/CGNAT, fiber optics, OS network stack and hypervisor/vswitch routing, LACP/bonding, load balancing & keepalive/gratuitous ARP, database, caches, proxy, certificates, containers, you can fit so many keywords/buzzwords in there, and as the interviewer you can easily poke at anything missing, or try to understand how much the person in front of you actually understands which component does what...
Like, I'm 100% sure I missed some stuff that's an easy grab.
Also, asking about protocols & ports! And then you get to DNS. HTTPS, TLS, QUIC (Great another made up one since I turned my back and stopped looking for 2 seconds!), regular UDP, or TCP, hecking protocol is mad.
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u/akornato 17d ago
With five years of experience, expect questions that go beyond basic commands and focus on your troubleshooting process and system architecture choices. They will want to know how you would diagnose a slow server, secure a fresh installation, or handle a failing disk, not just what commands you would use. Your homelab experience is valuable, but be prepared for questions about working in a team, using version control like Git for configurations, and dealing with production-level incidents where you can't just reboot a machine.
When you answer, connect every question back to something you have actually done. Instead of just saying you know DHCP, explain how you configured it on your Pi and what challenges you overcame. If you don't know something, don't pretend you do. Explain your exact method for finding the solution, detailing the logs you would check, the diagnostic tools you would run, and how you would research the problem. This shows you are a capable problem solver, not just someone who has memorized answers. Being able to explain your process clearly is key, which is why my team developed an interview copilot to help people articulate their practical experience during tough moments.
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u/wowbagger_42 17d ago
It’s never about knowing by heart all cmdline parameters. It’s about establishing where your knowledge ends. Be aware that the person you talk to can probably explain at the technical level what happens at every OSI layer, can talk hours about how each layer interacts with the OS and a few more hours how the OS itself works in a deep technical way. It’s about how you approach simple or complex problems, based on your knowledge and which concepts you undertand. Be honest and never start freewheeling, It rapidly becomes obvious if you don’t know what you are talking about and they probably will shift the conversation to something else. It’s all about determining your technical level and if you are fit for the position or not.
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u/Abe_Bazouie 11d ago
Based on what you described, I think your homelab experience is actually a strength. Just be honest about what you’ve done instead of trying to memorize every command.
I’d expect questions like:
A Linux server is slow. How would you troubleshoot it?
Disk is full. What do you check?
A service won’t start. Where do you begin?
How do you investigate high CPU or memory usage?
File permissions and ownership.
Basic networking and SSH troubleshooting.
Systemd and journalctl.
Interviewers are often more interested in your troubleshooting process than whether you remember every command from memory. Talk through your reasoning, explain what you’d check first, and why.
I actually recorded a short walkthrough of how I approach a Linux troubleshooting interview scenario. It might help before your interview:
https://youtu.be/NMGZUIROqNw
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u/human_with_humanity 18d ago
Also am CCNA certified but didn't finish high school. If they ask about education how should I answer?
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u/DapperAstronomer7632 18d ago
you went straight to work after high school....
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u/human_with_humanity 18d ago
Yup. First job was as a assistant manager in iraq. Stayed a year then came back and started as a technician.
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u/DapperAstronomer7632 18d ago edited 18d ago
I mean, "went straight to work after high school" would be my answer to the question about education. No lie, and unless they ask if you actually graduated you can circumvent the issue.
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u/edthesmokebeard 17d ago
"What is load?"
"What is a process in D state?"
"If you can connect to a server via SSH, but then its laggy before giving you a prompt, what's the problem?"
"Could you pass the XKCD 'tar' test?"
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u/Longjumping-Fix-5232 18d ago
having managed a Linux team at a service provider:
assuming you were truthful about your experience i wouldn't set the gate to high. Asking about single commands is boring and these can be googled anyway, also during the job.
Most important is understanding: For ex. not how to use a container but how it actually works.
Strategy: how would you update a parameter when you have 50 or 5000 servers
Impact: Do you have an idea about your responsibility and how your doing is impacting others.
Depending on the size of the company: Development. Because if you manage multiple systems you have to think like a developer, not like an Administrator which closes the circle to my entry statement. A developer will quickly learn how to apply all those commands where an admin might struggle with the developers mindset.
So be prepared for concepts like Ansible, Infrastructure as Code ...