Again? What again? I told you, “manipulate data files, manage processes, synchronize or backup data and interact with the OS”. The world is bigger than your experience.
One experience I had was training a couple of administrators on a distributed system that included an SCO box running a Centenium predictive dialer for a bank of collection agents. We were combining collections for hospital and physician, something never before done, at Stanford. Backup and occasional processes needed to be run on the server by the lead collection agent turned business analyst for the new system. It was very political so they agreed to hire her for that spot.
She needed to understand many things like how to identify the latest daily physician and hospital billing data files on SMS and Informix, FTP them from mainframes over to her PC and to troubleshoot problems in them. She would process them into a single “merged” call file, FTP it over and process that in the Centenium system. Occasionally she needed to traverse across the SCO file system to trouble shoot there. She failed, and then she sued, having something to do with her race.
Another girl with a little more technical experience came in and did a great job, but it took time to get her comfortable with the command line on a new OS in addition to all else.
If you grew up on all that, or if you’re used to mature systems built to isolate all that from the user, you might not relate.
Okay, you're talking about the inability of an idiot AA-hire admin, not an end-user, to manipulate the data. I didn't pick up anything about a VP end-user trying to do this.
You're talking about taking data from diverse sources, manipulate it, and regurgitate it in a usable form. This is difficult even if you're working with databases all running on Windows platforms. The best tools to do these tasks might very well run on a Windows workstation, but as far as I can tell from your story doesn't have much to do with Linux.
You don't indicate whether your organization took time to actually train anyone on any of these platforms... perhaps you're expected to pick up Linux / Unix / whatever expertise by magic?
You're talking about SCO. If you're running an old copy of SCO Linux you need to get current (think "DOS 6.2 vs Win2K3"). My hunch is that you're running SCO's UNIX? Poor basards.
My world would throw you for a loop, just as you think that yours would baffle me. Every day I get dropped into a new environment, mostly with no documentation and precious few clues as to how things are supposed to work. I don't get the luxury of perfecting one client, and then sitting back and watching it run. As you think that I can't handle your world, I'm pretty sure you couldn't handle mine.