Back in 2011, I interviewed at a large-ish tech company from the US for an "SRE" role (and never had I hear that term before) that, amongst other things, create

Back in 2011, I interviewed at a large-ish tech company from the US for an "SRE" role (and never had I hear that term before) that, amongst other things, created an online, browser-based alternative to MS Office. Some rounds in, after the usual phone screening, the task was some sort of supervised programming in a $thatcompany Docs document while talking to the interviewer on speaker phone. Since I had rated "shell scripting" and "Linux" fairly highly in my mandatory self-assessment sheet that I had turned in weeks prior, I was tasked with conjuring a `netstat` replacement in bash. I quickly realized I couldn't do it (because I did not, at the time, know where and how exactly socket information was held in /proc/), but I offered to write trimmed-down replacements of `ps` and `fuser` instead. The interviewer deemed that - and my solutions eventually produced in that wretched, browser-based word processor - acceptable, and a few weeks later, I shipped out to the on-site interview series. Now I wonder if the hypothetical scenario presented as the motivation for this exercise is more grounded in reality than Izabera (thanks for all your help in #bash over years btw!) would care to admit... ;)