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we used to conduct an interview where you had to log in to a linux VM that we’d “pre-broken” with a handful of obvious footguns (disk full, wrong perms, etc etc) and we had to stop running it because opus 4.6-era could one-shot it

Jim Calabro ♟️@calabro.io

the real answer to the php-fpm linux challenge we ask is to delete the box and rewrite it all in rust

21/10/26, 6:54 pm4 reposts58 likes

Norman Wilson (⚠️extremely tired) 🔵

@oclsc.bsky.social

Was the task to diagnose or to fix?

austin (eeek!/ackkk! 👻)

@thebadcode.com

both. mostly its just a prompt to start talking about linux stuff

Norman Wilson (⚠️extremely tired) 🔵

@oclsc.bsky.social

A scheme I've enjoyed from both sides: here are some sheets of paper, each with a snippet of a file printed on. What type of file is it, what's it used for? Samples include shell script, fstab, a bit of HTML, /etc/group.

Norman Wilson (⚠️extremely tired) 🔵

@oclsc.bsky.social

A variant I've also had from both sides: here's a bag of bits of hardware. Pull a few out and say, generally, what they are and if there's anything unusual about them. I have to admit I found both fun, even as candidate. It was even fun to need hints for the speaker out of a laptop.

alias (in chains)

@antiali.as

lord

alias (in chains)@antiali.as

>ssh into the vm >about to compile app >ask package manager if Cannot mkdir: No such file or directory >she doesn't understand >explain the differences between Cannot mkdir and error: writing to file >she still doesn't get it >run compiler >it's error: writing to file: No space left on device

Aes ⎔

@itisamystery.com

oh I did that for k8s! vcluster on a very small cloud VM and gave the candidate a public key and told them to identify and fix everything going wrong in the cluster. that too was very easily thwarted unfortunately and we had to stop doing it. sad about that, it was a great competence filter.

austin (eeek!/ackkk! 👻)

@thebadcode.com

hell yeah 👍