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points by intrasight 3 days ago | 0 comments

My first job interview in 1989 after college:

Them: "Do you know TCP/IP?". Me: "Yes". Them: "you're hired"

Job at the Westinghouse instrumenting nuclear power plants. Simpler times then.

Back in 1989 that was a rare skill. Many of the engineers who had experience were working on government projects. I mean TCP barely had congestion control at that point, it was very early days.

[–] sigttou 3 days ago

"Usually we don't hire people from high school, but you had Common Lisp in your CV, so the engineers said to take you anyway." 2010, still simpler times.

[–] vconnor 3 days ago

Same for me in 2006 as a junior Linux sysadmin:

“What does ifconfig do? What does it mean to mount a disk? What editor do you use? You’re hired.”

None of that culture fit nonsense.

[–] Tyr42 3 days ago

Did you say vim or emacs? Might have been culture for afterall.

[–] vconnor 3 days ago

I forget. I used to use emacs but very superficially; when I started the job a literal greybeard UNIX admin shook his head and took me under his wing to teach me vim, which I used for a long time before switching back to emacs (and learning the elisp underpinnings of it)

[–] selicos 3 days ago

Do you know DNS? How does an HTTPs/SSL handshake work? Man this kid is good hire him. - 2015 era job interview

[–] mrheosuper 3 days ago

Have you finished 3 months Javascript bootcamp ? you're hired - 2019 era.