Not so well. Some teams have a high threshold for hiring, some don't, but overall it's been going down because it becomes more and more difficult to find new employees.
Private companies and banks see coops as the devil [for very obvious reasons] and fight them using regulatory capture and not engaging in business with them. It's pretty well-known in the coop world.
Coops sometimes mitigate this disadvantages by networking with each other.
It uses an internal tool but the implementation is not important. Applications and libraries and packaged independently just like any Linux distribution.
I've been in companies that owned their datacenters and it was much, much cheaper than using any cloud service.
Poorly managed datacenters exist but that's an organization problem. Remove the datacenter and you'll have poorly managed cloud instances and services costing millions.
> who ... understand the OS internals? ... How about write a library for their fav language? How about actually troubleshoot a misbehaving *nix process?
Ex-Amazon here. You are describing standard skills required to pass an interview for a SDE 2 in the teams I've been in at Amazon.
Some candidates know all the popular tools and frameworks of the month but do not understand what an OS does, or how a CPU works or networking and do not get hired because they would struggle to write or debug internal software written from scratch.
[added later] This was many years ago when the bar raiser thing was in full swing and in teams working on critical infrastructure.
> So I can't fault people for trying to avoid this mess.
Ex-Amazon here. Being deeply familiar with OS fundamentals and internals, "low level" tools, and so on is crucial.
A lot of candidates show to interviews with CVs filled with names of popular frameworks and fancy devops tools and often don't understand what really happens behind the curtain.
People are becoming less familiar with the basics and tend to reinvent the wheel. In many teams this does not get you hired.
Not so well. Some teams have a high threshold for hiring, some don't, but overall it's been going down because it becomes more and more difficult to find new employees.