i recently did a few tech interviews with some guys who claimed they knew unix --- solaris actually --- and i was quiet disappointed ... turns out the guys had tried to read a book a few days before their interviews and were thinking that they could pass off their help desk and/or their sys admin experience as something we could use ... unfortunately for them, i do situational interviews where i can assess troubleshooting skills and basic unix knowledge as well as reaction to stress situations in 1 shot so i quickly found out where their weaknesses were ... it's not pleasant to hear people whimpering on the phone sounding like they're begging you to give them a chance ...

... i usually end up cleaning after other people's mistakes (i.e., recovering servers from crashes where the servers have no redundancies of any kind nor any documentation) so i have ulterior motives to be hard-nosed ... i'm not perfect and i'm still learning a lot but i do expect people to at least know how to do the jobs they're applying for before i hire them ...

the moral of the story? if you know what you're doing and you can prove it to the world, it doesn't matter where or how you learned your stuff --- somebody will hire you. if you don't know what you're doing, you'd be whimpering on the phone too.