My worst offense of this was for a linux admin position when asked from another abmin about how to list connections on a machine. My answer was "lsof -i, since I've found it's easiest to pull granular information."

"lsof just prints open files... you would use netstat, not lsof."

I tried correcting him, but he wouldn't listen and ended the call soon after.

I never received a call back.

Most people don't know that lsof works into two modes- the typical one is to run it against a process ID. The rarer one is no args, which runs it against everything on the system. however, I observe that lsof needs to run as root to print the same information that netstat -tanp returns for a reglar user.

Yeah, you're right about needing root (edit: for processes not owned by the current user). Though, if you have the access, it's a very, very worthwhile tool to learn:

  ~ $ lsof -a -n -c chrome -iTCP:443 | head -2 #sanitized output
  COMMAND   PID USER   FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
  chrome   1234 me   12u  IPv4 12345      0t0  TCP 127.0.0.1:12345->127.0.0.2:https (ESTABLISHED)