I hate my brain..

Had an interview today with a well-known fashion brand and one of the questions I was asked: how do you dump the kernel buffer in Linux?   Now, I've been a Linux user since pre-version 1.0 kernel days.  I helped co-found the Anglian Linux Group (and provided its hosting in the early days).  I have a LPIC-1 certification.   The answer to the question is that it is one of my most frequently used commands - and I couldn't think of it. 

It is of, course, dmesg. 

I tend to use it a lot to check on Linux servers where services could be considered to be unstable.  One culprit that I've come across time and again is the OOM (out-of-memory) killer which is designed to free up memory if an application wants too much - and there is little to no swap (disk or zram swap).  Other times I use it to check if a module has loaded, or something weird is happening with the filesystem/disks.  Or a million other things.

BUT I COULD NOT PLACE THIS SIMPLE COMMAND WHEN ASKED.  Damn you, brain - you've let me down again.

The thing about me is that I am a very practical hands-on person.  I have good "finger" muscle-memory of commands when I'm sitting at a keyboard and a terminal.  It's almost automatic when I need to use a particular command.  But ask me something and my mind goes blank. 

Another question was about Windows Group Policy.  What would you do if you were asked by first line support why a policy wasn't working?  Simple answer: ask if the problem affects one or maybe two users or whether it's affecting everything that the policy is being applied to.  I went the long way around of investigating the policy itself, logs, maybe Googling.  Again, a simple question - but my dear old brain decided it'd go for a stroll.

This leads me back to the point that I am not terribly good at these kind of interviews.  I'm better when I'm placed in the environment in which I need to do the job and will demonstrate my ability there - but I know that's not how things work when you're competing for one job with potentially hundreds of other people.

That said, I did enjoy this interview all things considered.  Good people, a nice company, and a job in which I'd be able to refind and improve my skills.  I'd hate to have a job that I couldn't improve or grow and just did the same old thing every time.  I'm not sure how I came across to them, but we'll soon know.