The Keys to the Kingdom: Why `chmod 777` is a Career-Limiting Move Junior/Mid Engineer Asked at: Every company that uses Linux. Q: How do you recursively give read access to all users for files under /data? Why this matters: This is a deceptively simple question. It's not about syntax. It's a test o...
The Digital Landlord: Finding Who Occupies Port 8080 Junior/Mid Engineer Asked at: FAANG, Startups, Cloud Providers Q: How do you check which process is listening on port 8080? Why this matters: "Address already in use" is the most common reason an application fails to start. This question isn't jus...
The Digital Heartbeat: How to Find a Rogue Process Before It Kills Your Server Mid/Senior Engineer Asked at: FAANG, Unicorns, Startups Q: Find processes using more than 80% CPU. Why this matters: A server pegged at 100% CPU is having a digital heart attack. It's alive, but it can't do any useful wor...
The Janitor and the CEO: Finding High-Leverage Points on a Full Disk Junior/Mid Engineer Asked at: FAANG, Startups, Cloud Providers Q: Show the top 5 largest directories under /home. Why this matters: This isn't a trivia question; it's a proxy for determining if you can handle a real crisis. A full ...
The Accountant vs. The Detective: How to Count What Actually Matters in Logs Junior/Mid Engineer Asked at: FAANG, Startups, Cloud Providers Q: Count how many times the word "failed" appears in syslog. Why this matters: This isn't just a syntax quiz. It's a test of precision. In system monitoring and...