Pither.com

This is one of the homework questions that Digitalbrain has recently been giving out to prospective candidates for a Linux system administrator role.

Working with a large, complex application with many thousands of users, we very often have to manipulate significant amounts of textual data. Perhaps as part of a process to create new student accounts within a school, or to feed to one of our management tools to delete or relocate a collection of user files, or maybe to collate data from one of the many log files.

So this question is based on the kind of work that is a core (if not very interesting) part of the role. I would have expected it to be a core part of any Linux sysadmins knowledge too.

The question:

Attached is a CSV file (a sample from a much larger file). This file needs cleaning and altering in the following ways:-

• capitalise the first letter of the two name fields
• sanitise the formatting
• move the username column to the beginning of each line
• the phone number is missing the area code - look up the city in the following table, and add it to the beginning of the phone number column

Please detail what you did, how, any scripts involved and provide the corrected CSV.

The CSV file

Our recent experience seems to suggest that being able to answer this is a rare skill, even for people who advertise themselves as experienced Linux system administrators (and are applying for such a job)!

Are we being unfair?

Are we expecting too much?

Digitalbrain has been looking for new systems administrators for it's main platform services (Linux based) since the first of the old team resigned in April. During this time we've hired two new people. Ie it seems to take over two months to find each sysadmin!

Digitalbrain is still looking at least one more systems administrator.

So where are all the Linux sysadmins?

Digitalbrain is based in the lovely city of Brighton, commutable from London and anywhere in between. The salary being offerred is reasonable and we have enlisted the help of several recruitment agencies.

Yet we get few CVs. Fewer still get to start our interviewing process (which is initially two simple 'homework' questions). Practically no one seems to make it beyond that, only about 5 in the last four months.

I can't see that we're doing anything wrong. So perhaps the IT skills shortage that I keep reading about is real?

Or are our standards too high?

I shall be publishing one of our 'homework' questions in my next post and will then also publish a few (nameless) submissions that we've had, so you can judge for yourselves.

One other result of this recruiting difficulty is that I will now be staying on at Digitalbrain until Christmas!

August will be the fifth anniversary of my employment with Digitalbrain. While I have enjoyed much of my time there a great deal and learnt a lot, it is now time for me to move to a new challenge.

Along with this change I am wanting to move from systems administration into development (probably perl or java, although ruby is also fun) and from permanent employment to contracting.

So ideally, I am looking for a programming contract that will start around the end of August. For anyone who would like to help me with this, I have an online CV.