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Comment by ZephyrBlu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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 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

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

And electron, don’t forget about electron.

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.

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