Back when I was younger and interviewing candidates for a startup where I was one of the oldest engineers my favorite "fit" question used to be "tell me your favorite 4 letter word".
I never actually based my decision on that one, only the technical questions.
This is an example of where I (probably) contributed to making some people feel uncomfortable and I wouldn't do it now.
If you answered that, my past self would have appreciated your answer and maybe even stopped. I mostly got things like: "code", "cash", "love" and one time a "fart"
I am glad you stopped asking that question. We all make mistakes and learn from them.
An I correct in assuming the “4 letter word” was intended to make the candidate think of curse words? I’m curious what the intent of this question was if it didn’t feed into your hire decision.
I find that it often pulls a solution that is good enough for this problem today. Sometimes that is great, and other times it's just creating a pile of shit
Can you explain to me why either of these is useful?
I've somehow gotten by never really needing to pipe any commands in the terminal, probably because I mostly do frontend dev and use the term for starting the server and running prodaccess
Pipelines are usually built up step by step: we run some vague, general thing (e.g. a `find` command); the output looks sort of right, but needs to be narrowed down or processed further, so we press Up to get the previous command back, and add a pipe to the end. We run that, then add something else; and so on.
Now let's say the output looks wrong; e.g. we get nothing out. Weird, the previous command looked right, and it doesn't seem to be a problem with the filter we just put on the end. Maybe the filter we added part-way-through was discarding too much, so that the things we actually wanted weren't reaching the later stages; we didn't notice, because everything was being drowned-out by irrelevant stuff that that our latest filter has just gotten rid of.
Tricks like this `\#` let us turn off that earlier filter, without affecting anything else, so we can see if it was causing the problem as we suspect.
As for more general "why use CLI?", that's been debated for decades already; if you care to look it up :-)
I probably should have minified it too...