What Your Server OS Says About You?

We’ll start off with just about the worst answer, though not necessarily bad.

This is a red flag to me. I do understand that most people have lives (which often includes family, children, and non-technical hobbies). However, the really good engineers typically experiment as a hobby because it is fun. These are the folks who have "the knack". While no server at home isn’t an immediate writeoff, it makes me a bit skeptical. Usually, I’ll ask about your hobbies if you give me this answer (some folks prefer to learn about cars, woodworking, gardening, cooking, etc in their spare time).

You don’t experiment much (at least not where we are interested), or you are more of a Microsoft person (which is fine, we’re just looking for Unix/Linux folks).

You probably use this at home because it is what most companies use. Not very curious, but driven to be better. I find these folks either currently work for RedHat, did work for RedHat, or are very book-oriented; typically more interested in a defined path than forging their own. There are of course exceptions, this has just been my experience so far.

Perhaps a little more adventurous than the run-of-the-mill RedHat person. Still, not super curious, but still driven to be better at what they do. Again, there are of course exceptions (one of the best people I’ve worked with used almost nothing but OpenSuse).

While this isn’t running the Linux kernel, it still uses mostly the GNU tools, with some differences. Anyone who knows why they like FreeBSD is okay in my book, even if we might not completely be on the same page.

Good answer. This used to be a really amazing answer before Arch made it to the top 10 of DistroWatch. Nowadays a casual Arch user might just be looking for a popular but technical distro; or they’re really amazing at Linux. It used to say "bleeding edge, fearless, plenty of spare time, cat person". Regardless, still a good answer. Arch is just different enough that this answer shows creativity, curiosity, drive, persistence, and aptitude.

Getting warmer (same as "Arch", but +10 points for being extra nerdy)

Better answer. This is a particularly great answer because it tells me you don’t scare easily [from technical challenges at least]. It also tells me that you don’t mind forging your own path to learn or have a better system. I find these people to be the most learning-oriented of these groups. When asked how to learn how a command works, they typically answer "man" before "Google".

On a more practical note, this answer also tells me that you’ve been deep enough in the bowels of Linux that you could likely learn any distro we have at our company (which is two, but still…​). If you have this and minimal to no RedHat/CentOS/Suse/Debian, I won’t mind. It also says that you know most of the tools to troubleshoot just about everything, from runtime issues in binaries, to kernel parameter tweaking.

While a good answer, it does throw up a little yellow flag for me. Some people are distro-junkies (this used to be me) and like to jump around because it’s fun and/or they have commitment issues. While this is a good trait (jumping around, not commitment issues) in many cases, it hints to me you might make tech decisions because they are cool, new, or just different - hence the yellow flag. Making long-term decisions because something is shinier than the other thing is often a foolish mistake.

You’re hired

Also a great answer, but with the caveat of the obscure distro. I don’t want finicky people making long-term decisions for the team (does anyone here have that guy at work that pushes for Oracle databases inside of Docker containers because "Docker"?).