[clue-talk] Assessing technical skills?

[Greg Knaddison - GVS]

On 7/18/06, Kevin Cullis <kevincu at viawest.net> wrote:
>
> PMG4:~ KC$ ls -alr > kevintest
>
> While this is simple, by asking them to read what is says and tell you what
> it does. Do this on the most COMMON things you do you can get an idea as to
> what experience level they have. If you need to, you can get even more
> difficult.
>

I like that idea.  I even thought "how could I find the commands I use
most frequently" and came up with these two commands:

$ history | awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

$ history | cut -b 8- | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

You may have to change them for your system, but they worked for me.
Basically, the first gives you the list of programs that you run
sorted by their frequency.  The second gives you the full command and
options and piping and redirection etc. that you run sorted by
frequency.

The first is more likely to have something like "cd" at the bottom
while the second is more likely to have ls or pwd at the bottom.


In addition, showing the command to the person may test their CLI-fu :)


-- 
Greg Knaddison | Growing Venture Solutions
Denver, CO | http://growingventuresolutions.com
Technology Solutions for Communities, Individuals, and Small Businesses