Comment by hughw

7 days ago

I hired a programmer and after giving him his Linux laptop let him set up a few things. A couple hours later he asked me where he could get PuTTY for it, and I recognized a huge gap in my interview coverage.

32 comments

hughw

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syntheticnature  7 days ago

Indeed, a new hire should be able to use Google to find https://puttygen.com/download-putty#Download_PuTTY_on_Linux_... in short order

evil grin

  • petee  7 days ago

    https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

    puttygen.com looks super fishy, the disclaimer:

    > Puttygen software is not created, nor supported by Puttygen.com. The program has been tested and is believed to be safe. [...] The use of Puttygen through Puttygen.com is done at your own discretion and risk

    Edit: or is that the evil grin?

  • glitchc  7 days ago

    apt install putty seems... useful? Don't get it.

    • YoshiRulz  7 days ago

      PuTTY is (or was, in the years before WSL) the go-to SSH client for Windows. If you're a Windows user getting onboarded at a job / uni class which uses Linux machines, installing it is the first thing you'd be told. The laptop in question would obviously have a terminal emulator and SSH client pre-installed, but a Windows user wouldn't think to look for them, and they might not even know that SSH exists outside of PuTTY or that it's a separate concept to the terminal.

      2 replies →

walrus01  7 days ago

Ever hired someone who, when you ask them to send you an ssh key for access to something, sends you their private key? Yeah, that's happened more than once.

  • fragmede  7 days ago

    Who's sending ssh keys around anymore? Just get theirs off gitHub.com/username.keys and shove it in their user account.

    http://gitHub.com/fragmede.keys, for example. Stick that in authorized_keys to let me into your server.

    • tryauuum  7 days ago

      this touches two pieces of my knowledge:

          - microsoft is evil, I cannot delete my github account, will never use anything by this company
    - if the attacker knows your *public* key they can enumerate the list of the servers you have access to https://github.com/benjojo/ssh-key-confirmer

    • walrus01  4 days ago

      Not everyone works in a field where the developers or engineers have public github accounts or publish their profile of things like ssh keys for the world to read.

analog_daddy  7 days ago

Any experience with ‘programmers’ not knowing git?

  • sdfsdfs34dfsdf  7 days ago

    That's more ageism than anything else. I mean surely real "programmers" know the new hotness "ghsfgusdfu", right? How could you live without?

    I know companies running on SVN and they're fine. In fact, it's a better fit for them. Yes, Git is not always superior.

    I'll give you a helpful concept to navigate these issues: "Cargo culting refers to the practice of imitating the superficial aspects of a process or practice without understanding the underlying logic or reasons behind it. This phenomenon is often seen in software development, where developers may adopt certain coding styles or methodologies without grasping their true purpose."

    • hiimkeks  7 days ago

      Git is over 20 years old at this point. If somebody is in their 60s now, they were in their 40s when it came out. This is not about age. They must have slept on it for a long time.

      Nobody expects an engineer to be a git expert, but if a senior software engineer has heard of git only yesterday or don't have a vague concept of how DVCSs like hg or git work (DAG of commits), then something has gone very wrong.

      Maybe there are use cases where SVN is superior (I can't come up with any but they may exist), and maybe engineers in that industry really are so specialized that they never get around to working on anything else!

      But maybe it's because nobody else is willing to hire them.

      7 replies →

  • AussieWog93  7 days ago

    Honestly, I suspect you'd find a lot of self-taught people have random gaps in their knowledge that someone with a mentor/degree won't.

  • connicpu  7 days ago

    When I went to college (early 2010s) professors were still encouraging students to use SVN, so I probably have a fair number of peers who didn't learn git until they got out into the real world

    • fragmede  7 days ago

      Was the encouragement to use SVN to the detriment of git, or was it to the detriment of renaming the file multiple times, from final to final (1).zip to final-no-really-this-is-it.zip?

      1 reply →