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For a sysadmin/devopsy position I asked the interviewees to write a program in any language that gave the average of numbers given as command line args.

Not one did it successfully. Most didn't even try. The best one assumed five numbers given. But we had to hire someone, and it wasn't this one. The deciders just hired the nicest person.

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Wow. Were these candidates with CS degrees? What was the problem? Did they not know how to parse command line args in any language? Not know how to compute an average? Not know how to do anything on the command line (or outside an IDE)? Something else?

We didn't go into it unfortunately.

I don't want to ask it of the one we hired because I don't want to cause bad blood. :-(

It's possible that what little programming they did in their 'information science' (or whatever degree, not straight CS) only involved Windows programming, and nothing on the command line.

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