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Comment by nicolas_t | Hacker News Reader

What kind of college grads don't know how to operate in a linux dev environment? That'd be an immediate no-hire from me.

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At my first job out of college, I met a lot of junior developers who could sort of get by in a Unix CLI, but didn't know anything except the very basics and didn't much like it. I was a Linux hobbyist from the age of 12, so I thought that sucked. Since the company had a practice where developers could give their peers educational talks, I decided to demo some of the things I use to make my Unix command line environments feel really great to work in.

I found that pointing CLI-shy devs to a nicer shell designed with ease of use in mind (Fish) and some basic navigation tools like fzf and autojump got a good chunk of them genuinely excited to learn more about the command line and make their environments more comfy. I also reviewed the available in-terminal documentation tools including those they likely hadn't seen in school (e.g., tldr, bro-pages), and I think that helped make clear how efficient exploring the command line from the command line can be. (Nowadays I'd also direct them to explainshell.com and some other web resources, though I think emphasizing the 'in-band' stuff is important.)

The next day, and every now and then for some time, I saw them reading the docs, writing their own little plugins and scripts and aliases, customizing their prompts, and so on. I knew about it because they sometimes even called me over to show off!

It would have been a shame to blow them off because, not having seen how it can be delightful to use, they saw the terminal as something to be avoided. They were smart, capable people who just hadn't encountered a good enough pitch yet.

Once the environment is comfy, learning individual tools in it becomes a lot less intimidating and more appealing to people. But you have to show them how good it can be and offer them a decent starter kit. :)

The kind that went into the subject just because it pays well and are taught some kind of bimodal syllabus: Lots of heavy Math/CS stuff they forget after the test and then practical programming as defined by "industry", industry being the big consulting firms churning out Java.

This is exactly it. I'm involved with a lot of hiring for junior developers. It saddens me how many of them are trying to get into the field not because they're passionate for programming, interested in computers, or enjoy tinkering with digital tools. They're here because they're allured by big paychecks and "because everyone else at school is doing it."

There are, of course, exceptions, and those are the junior developers who excel the most but they are few and far in between.

Yup, and given that my entire career has been in startups environments, people who lack that passion and interest are usually not a good hire. Not knowing one's way around linux is a major red flag because it shows they lack curiosity for their chosen profession.

It’s more common than you think. I graduated in 2013 and can tell you there were minimal opportunities to learn how to operate a Linux command line (if you didn’t already want to). Most jobs will set you up with some IDE with the codebase preloaded and a big green compile button, it’s just easy to avoid I guess.

I’ve been using Linux since 2008 and it’s the most high-yield skill set I have, it makes everything simpler and I encourage others to learn it.

It's crazy how fast it changed then. I graduated in 2002 and you literally could not leave without knowing how to use Unix. When I started in '98 the school's email system had to be checked through terminals and my dorm hadn't even been wired with Ethernet, although we had it by the second half of my freshman year.

I believe that. Others may have had a different experience to mine. I was always searching for a class that would give me the “real” Linux experience but nothing really exists like that, I think you just have to live with the tools for a bit.

If you can't onboard a fresh grad into a usable state with version control, a toolchain, and an editor in 1-2 weeks, you shouldn't be hiring fresh grads. Expecting Linux familiarity fresh out of college is just plain gatekeeping.

Even when I graduated in 2004 there were lots of people there for the money side of it rather than much interest in programming / computing itself. I would say maybe 1/4 or less were taking more interest.

Most lol. You only hiring MIT and Stanford grads?

Stanford or MIT or UWaterloo

Bah. I took community college courses in highschool and the basic bitch introduction C++ course at that community college had the students using linux in the lab. The second-rate university I ended up going to after highschool required CS students to learn either Vim or Emacs to pass one of the required introduction courses, and all assignments had to compile and run on linux otherwise the TAs would reject them.

As far as I've seen, basic linux skills are taught if not required in the CS programs of colleges of any reputation or stature.

On my first day at a frankly pretty shit Australian university, we had mandatory Linux and Solaris training. I managed to skip it because the IT guy turned his screen to me and said "What's this?" and I replied "Dunno, looks like Fedora Core", but anyone who couldn't do that sat through several hours of training on SSHing into things and using bash, after which they were expected to turn in assignments that would compile in a remote Solaris environment.

This story doesn't have any real point, except maybe to say that knowing your way around a shell is up to the arbitrary whims of your university's administration and lecturers.

And maybe it awakens them to the fact that there is more out there than the abstract "what i run at home" environments available.

Stanford ain’t gonna teach you Unix either. I think they at least teach git usage in the intro classes now, but certainly did not while was there. Wasn’t a CS major but took a number of classes.

The only class I took that touched on anything practical for the working world was “programming for scientists and engineers”, CME211 I think? And most people only took it because it counted for grad level math credits.

I was taught how to get around a UNIX box in CS 101 at a state school.

Purdue CS in the mid/late 1990s. All coursework, if it wasn’t handwritten on paper, was developed and submitted with your account on the department UNIX cluster.

I switched majors so didn’t have any freshman courses; I certainly hope they taught people how to use the system. You couldn’t pass a class, let alone graduate, without being able to use UNIX.

There were a few side benefits to this setup. First, it allowed you to use the Sun pizza boxes in the engineering admin building, which were insanely powerful (back then). Second, it meant you could use any computer lab on campus, because they all had terminal emulators installed. So while the average student waiting in line for an open Windows PC, you could go down the hall and sit down at a Mac in a lab that had maybe two other people in it. Third, you could submit all your print jobs to the service center in the basement of the math building, where they’d collated, staple, whatever you wanted and then put it in a mailbox for you to collect at your own convenience, rather than deal with the clown show at the printers in all the Windows computer labs.

Good times

Oh, hey, IU in the mid 1990s here. We were doing Scheme on DEC ULTRIX boxes. (Which is also how I ended up being an emacs user. Oh well. Nobody's perfect.)

Good times indeed!

I graduated in a third world country. We did have a course or two on Unix.

I went to a state school, 75% of the CS class used linux, 20% used OSX and maybe 5% used windows.

Umm, most professional programmers probably don't know how to operate in a linux dev environment bro...

That is also an extremely stupid requirement. You can be a good programmer (Especially as a junior) without knowing all the linux command line tools.

this is the most common. id say most people i’ve worked with start caring to learn the shell and dig into the os more around year 8 of their career

> id say most people i’ve worked with start caring to learn the shell and dig into the os more around year 8 of their career

That sounds tragically late to me. It represents a serious failure on the part of those who know and love the command line to make it accessible to newcomers, imo.

nah it just shows how the valuable abstractions have moved up. i bet this 8 year mark will only get later over time until it disappears

Level of abstraction is largely orthogonal to the GUI/CLI divide, though.

nmcli is more abstract than ip+iw+wpa_supplicant, but it's no more or less abstract than any GUI network configuration widget.

The output of ls is no more or less abstract than the contents of a directory as displayed by a GUI file manager. It's the same metaphor and the same information displayed in two different formats.

I haven't met a good professional programmer working in webdev who didn't know their way around linux. I've met plenty of bad programers who got into this field for money, didn't know how their way around unix, were barely able to do fizz buzz and would be better doing something else. I haven't hired them though. Not knowing one's way around linux is a sign of lack of curiosity and passion for the topic.

It's obviously different in some fields (like gamedev) where the code produced by the dev is not supposed to run in a linux environment.

I work in gamedev and all our servers run on Linux. Theres a world of difference between knowing your target environment, and knowing a laundry list of shell commands that you can pipe together. "Knowing Linux" falls into the second camp in my experience

> Not knowing one's way around linux is a sign of lack of curiosity and passion for the topic

Complete bullshit. The only thing it's a sign of is that you're not curious or passionate about linux.

Knowing about and being interested in linux may be a positive signal, but the opposite is not a negative signal.

Knowing linux is not a requirement to be a good professional programmer working in webdev.

Exactly this. I feel like a lot of operating system enthusiasts forget that the operating system is, to many people, merely another tool to enable them to do something else. You can absolutely be enthusiastic about achieving an end result and not give a damn about the tools that got you there.

I was under the impression all the cool kids used MacBooks these days.

And electron, don’t forget about electron.

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