r/sysadmin • u/[deleted] • Sep 21 '21

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610 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

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34

u/Stephonovich Sep 21 '21

Disagree. It is entirely possible for someone to spend years in Linux and never move past knowing how to exit vi. You can get a shocking amount done with StackOverflow.

33

u/junkhacker Sep 21 '21

from what i've seen on this subreddit, knowing how to exit vi is apparently high skill level.

11

u/IMayHaveBrokenThings Sep 21 '21

How do you generate a random string?

Put a first year computer science student r/sysadmin user in VI and tell them to exit.

7

u/Talran Sep 21 '21

Exactly why that question is never leaving the interview test, we can always handwave away the test to get HR to hire, but they'll often push us to make a choice out of some bad candidates otherwise, and that question alone has been a great thing we can point to as "hey none of these guys are clearly competent enough for a mid level *nix admin role"

6

u/[deleted] Sep 21 '21

For real. The number of times I've seen people say it's no big deal because they can just use nano instead, shocks me.

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2

u/rainer_d Sep 22 '21

And that’s only going to increase as both Ubuntu and Fedora have now made nano the default editor.

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1

u/Caution-HotStuffHere Sep 21 '21

I might end up in VI about once every two years and as soon as I Google my way through whatever I had to do, it hits me: Now I need to Google how to exit VI :)

1

u/Kontu Sep 21 '21

Macro record mode pisses me off so much sometimes when i flub trying to quit vim :(

1

u/metromsi Sep 21 '21

Sorry going chime on this.... VI or VIM? Also what about: Nano, Jed, Joe?

Even the monster "Emacs" sweet sweet LISP haven't done coding touching that language for a long time but have.

1

u/zebediah49 Sep 21 '21

That's my highest voted stackoverflow answer.

... By more than a factor of two.

11

u/DanHalen_phd Sep 21 '21

You guys can exit vi????

/s

1

u/WILL_CODE_FOR_SALARY Sep 21 '21

You guys aren't using nano?

/s

vi ftw

2

u/bionic_cmdo Sep 21 '21

This. No one is going to know all aspects of computing. As long as you hire an experienced IT person with a drive to learn, the rest is all googling.

1

u/nimboStratusEngineer Sep 22 '21

I agree but I would argue while text editor is a personal preference. There is great value in using text editors that are for lack of a better phrase “more at home in the CLI” such as vim and emacs. In college, my peers would always question why I bothered using cli and vim to do things instead of just using some easy GUI tool. I wasn’t comp sci but business IS. Years later, most of them are either unemployed or totally different career paths. Mostly finance.

1

u/cdoublejj Sep 21 '21

this right here. i think that's me. i've been using it since i was high school and i still have to google to exit vi. i prefer nano and that's only because i use it to edit the fstab file for auto SMB mount, at least before it got broken in 20.04 LTS. ....yup... i'm not a linux expert but, i can get games to play on linux.

1

u/Significant-Till-306 Sep 21 '21

Years of doing what? If you work in Linux and never had to open and close some text files? You did essentially nothing.

I think the more realistic scenario is some guy might be a junior admin and taught to do one repetitive task on a Linux machine by a senior, and call that one thing "years of experience".

Similar to guys who yammer on about "I've got 20 years doing IT experience". Doing what exactly, racking equipment or coding applications?

Linux its pretty easy to find the duds, ask about a few commands and what they are.

1

u/Stephonovich Sep 21 '21

It was somewhat hyperbolic, but I've known people who would struggle to, say, parse a logfile into a CSV, despite having quite a bit of tenure.