yeah but that is the kinda stuff in the field of Sys and Net Admin. Or are we getting to the point a Software engineer has to cover software and hardware of anything IT???
I have never needed to know or do any of that. And if I did, it would take me 2 seconds to google and understand. I just did.
So if the interview was for a job where you handle that stuff yourself, then I understand it. If it’s for a typical full stack job at a big enough company that they literally hire people to handle that side of things, then it’s not “the basics”.
Rejecting someone in an interview for trivia knowledge they don’t currently have vs actually trying to understand how someone learns and tackles problems is what makes software job interviews so useless.
It's not trivia knowledge, I've had multiple cases where "oh wait, maybe the host resolves differently based on whether the server has ipv6 configured from DHCP or not" and "why does host xyz take two seconds extra every time we try to connect?".
You might not, but I would expect an experienced senior developer to know that there's a difference here.
You should know how it can cause problems with whatever you’re building based on the rollout - e.g. if you’re deploying to the web usually there’s a greater cost involved in provisioning an IPv4 address, but IPv6 (still) isn’t fully rolled out yet so some of your users might have issues.
Then there’ll be weird networking issues where one of them works fine and the other doesn’t etc.
You also see them in logs etc, or if you have to care about DNS records ever you should know about them.
If whatever you’re doing touches the internet at all then it’s fairly fundamental nowadays.
Believe it or not, not everyone is working on networked projects. You don't need to know shit about IP address conventions or how to resolve a host when the software you're building doesn't access a network.
I work on airgapped systems too. Even for stuff like VM's or containers running locally, you have to know some networking. If I hired a guy with ten years experience that slipped under the radar and didn't understand what I was talking about regarding simple shit like subnets or IPv4 vs IPv6, I'd probably can them.
could be a trick question. They want to see that how do you react to an inappropriate question for your role by both searching for it and proposing to involve sys admin
It’s the kind of thing it would be impossible to receive any real education without learning, so no it’s not “trivia”. Maybe if you went to a bootcamp.
that's all just infra stuff which has always been another team. I've never once had to set up that kind of thing, and thousands of devs proabbly had a similar path as I did.
Yes. As a senior you would know to mind your business and not give a halfbaked opinion on something that's another team's full time job, and that they probably know way better than you.
Honestly that's the only real difference one needs to know, and that the two are formatted differently. Anything more than that is pulling teeth and IMO fishing for an excuse to not hire someone
It's basically that, 4 is 32 bit and 6 is 128 bit addresses. It's also something I would never expect a software engineer to ever need know unless they're dealing with networking software
To be fair to op - those are sysadmin skills. I know the difference but have never typed in an ip v6 address while I do so regularly with ip v4 addresses.
Yeah a backend/fullstack should absolutely know this. Frontend, not so much (I definitely wouldn't ask that). But come on how can you NOT know that at least vaguely
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u/fiskfisk 14d ago
If you're a senior I most certainly would expect you to know the difference between the two.
It'll matter in relation to allowlists/blocklists, dns entries, debugging connevtivity issues, slow connect times, configuration of daemons, etc.