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Comment by fooblat | Hacker News Reader

Back in the day, the company I worked for required all newly hired system and software engineers to take their Unix Fundamentals class. 8 hours a day for 4 days they covered how the shell, coreutils, and filesystems work.

Sometimes people would complain that they didn't need a "beginner" class but I bet there wasn't a single person who didn't learn some important subtlety like how the trailing / works in different situations.

I've never had another company require or even offer a training like that. Do other companies still teach this stuff?

edit: typos

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I’m not familiar with the “Unix Fundamentals” class (got a link?) but when I have interns I make the “missing semester”[1] course part of their onboarding. I find it’s a nice balance of pragmatism and the classroom structure they are already familiar with.

I will also note that I think skills like this end up being way more valuable to me as a mentor than hard CS knowledge.

[1] https://missing.csail.mit.edu/

Unfortunately I don't have a link. It was an internally developed class at that company. This was in 2002.

When I was much younger I worked at a small ISP/CLEC started with a week of training, including editing regex mail filters, configuring bind, and sending email via telnet.

It was a tech support job for mostly dial up customers. The manager had developed a binder of training materials that included many things to help us troubleshoot.

JP Morgan Chase does (or did) offer a 18 month mainframe training program called zUniversity that combined in-house materials and IBM training programs. Not sure about new hires (it would have varied by team and line of business), but they also had lots of formal and instructor led training courses for new technology, frameworks, and patterns

Debian has a #debian-til chat channel where people post things they learned today. Often there will be things that someone learned that senior folks will say they didn't know. Sometimes people say that they re-learned some basic thing they forgot too :)

There was an old joke at my company that anyone who showed up for the beginner's Unix class would be fired on the spot.

That seems like a terrible joke. Even as a joke rather than a real policy, that's a great way to create a culture where people are afraid to ask questions and instead pretend to understand things they don't.

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