Basic Skills

Engineers (and perhaps managers too) need a lot of core basic skills and experience to be effective. The following is a shopping list.

Text editing

Everyone should be comfortable using plain text editors of some kind or another.

edit with vi, vim, emacs, (or at worst nano, gedit, geany or similar)
non-trivial document navigation, including jump to specific line, page up, page down, beginning or end of document
search for complex pattern
search and replace
delete n characters
delete n lines
cut and paste
quit without saving
save to current file or a different one

Operating system on your computer

Linux command-line interface

bash (or some other shell) – pipes – stdin and stdout, and redirecting them
Use command line utilities, at a minimum (with their common options): man (this should help with all the others), info, /usr/share/doc, cd, pwd, ls, cp, mv, grep, find, sort, uniq, sed, awk

Regular expressions

IRC

SSH

understand public/private keys, create your own, understand how/what to copy
use ssh
access services (eg access) via ssh (Note: 2048bit or larger RSA keys, or else 384 bit or larger ECDSA keys are the only acceptable options here. DSA keys are not acceptable any longer).

GIT