One of the things you might see a lot on sites like LinkedIn is the recommendation to not ask interview questions for stuff that is easy and trivial to look up. For example, asking about command line options to a program. To an extent I agree with this. I always need to look up the “key field” options to the sort command (especially since they changed from when I learned the command!
Back in 2018 I was asked about whether someone should become a Unix specialist. In a similar vein, I saw a question on LinkedIn that asked whether someone should become a generalist or a front-end specialist or a back-end specialist. Of course I had opinions :-) This is an extended take on my quick reply to the LinkedIn question. Let’s scope this a bit better I think, first, we need to think slightly wider than “front/backend”.
I get email… What are your thoughts about making a career out of specialising in Unix? It seems like you’ve done quite well… Interesting question… Realise that I started doing this 30 years ago. At that time there was no Windows (Windows 1.0 was around the corner). We had DOS. Networking was mostly serial based; if you were (un)lucky you might have had Banyon Vines or Novell or some other proprietary network stack.
