The term is perfectly apt and descriptive here, because gate keeping isn't about the keeping of a gate, it's about the inappropriateness of the criteria that is used.
Software engineers, even the ones that are so superpowered that they :gasp: got a job at Amazon once in their life, can go an entire successful career without knowing how to use a kernel debugger, or understand iptables or ifconfig, or understand how virtual memory works.
Some engineers might need to know some of those things, but it is absolutely bonkers to claim that you could never progress past level 2 at Amazon without knowing such things. I know this because I once taught a senior principal engineer at Amazon how to use traceroute.
For many roles in Amazon (particularly the tens of thousands of SDE positions that will end up working with the JVM all day long), asking such low level questions about how OSes work is about as useful of a gatekeeping device as asking them whether white cheese tastes better than yellow cheese. And that's why the term gatekeeping is used.
Software engineers, even the ones that are so superpowered that they :gasp: got a job at Amazon once in their life, can go an entire successful career without knowing how to use a kernel debugger, or understand iptables or ifconfig, or understand how virtual memory works.
Some engineers might need to know some of those things, but it is absolutely bonkers to claim that you could never progress past level 2 at Amazon without knowing such things. I know this because I once taught a senior principal engineer at Amazon how to use traceroute.
For many roles in Amazon (particularly the tens of thousands of SDE positions that will end up working with the JVM all day long), asking such low level questions about how OSes work is about as useful of a gatekeeping device as asking them whether white cheese tastes better than yellow cheese. And that's why the term gatekeeping is used.