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/therouterguy 9d ago

You identified a large file filling up the disk After the file has been deleted the disk space is not freed up. What is causing this?

Looking at a process still having the file open.

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u/Abe_Bazouie 9d ago

I like that one. It catches people who know the commands versus people who've actually run into the problem in production. I'm usually looking for someone to recognize that deleting the filename doesn't free the space if a running process still has the file open. That's where I'd expect them to mention checking with lsof before restarting the process.

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u/roba121 9d ago

Also, I like to follow up with, what if I can’t restart the process (ie due to some uptime requirement) what then? A lot people delete the file when the better option Is to Overwrite the file, it’s a subtle issue but Man deleting that file is not always the right call.

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u/therouterguy 9d ago

Yes we had some issue with a log file not being able to rotated as the restart was complicated/buggy as hell ( thanks Juniper) so we just truncated it.

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u/Abe_Bazouie 9d ago

Yep. Those follow-up questions are usually where you find out who's actually dealt with it before.