'Clean your desk': My Amazon interview experience
Semi-related tangent: I had a not-terribly-unpleasant experience when taking an online exam for a linux certification.  The certification exam was effectively an interview round similar to this one because it was the first step the employer suggested after I submitted my resume for the job.  The test proctor was unseen but could use my webcam to see me.  It made me uncomfortable, for some reason I thought I&#x27;d be able to see and hear them if I needed anything.  I suppose they might multiplex the proctors across multiple test takers.  I knew in advance that they wanted a tidy area, so I used a guest bedroom with a small dresser that I set my laptop on.<p>I was logged into a VM through my browser and tasked with several simple sysadmin jobs.  Unlike this person&#x27;s Amazon interview, the technical difficulties that I encountered were all my own doing.  On my server, I tried to be very disciplined and used &#x27;sudo&#x27; sparingly (sudo for each command that I issued that required escalation.  No &quot;sudo -i&quot;, that doesn&#x27;t leave quite as nice of an audit trail.  Well, I fat-fingered something while in visudo (grant privileges to a user was one of the tasks).  I forgot the user&#x27;s name so just exited but I must&#x27;ve &#x27;ZZ&#x27;d instead of :q!&#x27;d.  visudo puts up big scary banners about the syntax error and I quickly dismissed them because I planned to go right back in fix it in a jif.  Well, sure enough, those syntax errors effectively neuter sudo.  Of course, that&#x27;s the right behavior for sudo and I just hadn&#x27;t thought it through.  I couldn&#x27;t complete the remainder of the exam&#x27;s tasks without sudo.  I thought for sure there&#x27;s a way for the proctor to reset the system to neutral -- I&#x27;ll just start the exam over and go through it quickly.  No such luck.  I can reboot the VM but there&#x27;s no way to halt the VM during the bootloader.  :(<p>I did whatever I could without privileges and wrote detailed text files about what I would have done for the ones that required privileges.  The autograder gave me a failing grade and the human that told me to take the exam didn&#x27;t seem to care about the problem I encountered (or believe me).<p>Lesson learned: leave a terminal open in the background with &quot;sudo -i&quot; for later.  You never know when you might need it.  [this advice is for exams and not real sysadmin].  And while you&#x27;re at it, go slowly and heed that warning from visudo.  ;)