26 Oct 2002 ib   » (Master)

shlomif - welcome to the ODP. Understanding it all and getting "into" it, can be intimidating at first. Just don't be shy, only a few Eds bite :)

Recession? My behind! No matter where I go, I keep hearing about high levels of unemployment, people laid off from work and being unable to find a new job, employers who pay minimum wages for their top-Unix staff, etc. Yet, my company's been looking for some clueful Unix engineers and programmers, without any luck.

Yes, we have stacks of resumes, but only a few even survive the basic ego and resume deflating we use during the initial phone-screen and interview. It's ridiculous. Some of the gems I encountered in the past weeks include:

* The dude who claimed "Intimate Unix Knowledge", which - during the interview - translated into "Runs RedHat since 5.x and was not able to configure TCP/IP on a box without the help of RedHat's utilities, knows nothing about Unix kernel work, is unable to write even rudimentary scripts or programs and failed the "How many IPs are in a /25" test.

* The dude who'd "run FreeBSD and Linux since 1994", but had a hard time explaining the difference between Linux' and BSD's boot concept.

* The "security professional" who ran Windows exclusively.

* The "I was not promoted, because I am female" applicant who did not know what a man-page was and how to show interfaces on a Linux system.

Is it THAT hard to find someone clueful enough to stand his man or woman in an enviroment that does not believe in hand-holding and expects some level of familiarity with the basic concepts of networking and Unix OSes?

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