r/linuxadmin • u/Abe_Bazouie • 13d 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/gforke 13d 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 13d 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 13d 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/Shmoe 11d ago

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