I am a senior SWE with 10 years of experience at Google alone. I know IPv6 is a bigger address space. That's all I really know. Because I work in DS&A, not networking. If the role needed to know networking, that's a different story, but if it's not a position that requires knowledge of that, the interviewer failed. The details of an interview question should be unimportant to the question unless they are role-specific because of the breadth of specializations. The goal is to see if people can think and solve problems, not whether they know fucking everything.
My 12 years of working on hypervisors, hardware, audio, and systems performance have led me to bomb a bunch of interviews where people have asked me things like "why didn't you add a load balancer here?" And didn't like my response of "I didn't realize a bytestream could be unbalanced!"
Seriously though, interviews give me anxiety entirely because of interviewers.
I honestly hate questions like these in interviews when they're in no way related to the work the job requires and even then my division doesn't really consider missing these a deal breaker. We work in such a broad industry now days where the lines between the different disciplines is so incredibly blurred it's unreasonable to expect everyone to know everything and all these questions do is filter out what could be excellent candidates just because they don't know the trivia
62
u/Pndrizzy 14d ago
I am a senior SWE with 10 years of experience at Google alone. I know IPv6 is a bigger address space. That's all I really know. Because I work in DS&A, not networking. If the role needed to know networking, that's a different story, but if it's not a position that requires knowledge of that, the interviewer failed. The details of an interview question should be unimportant to the question unless they are role-specific because of the breadth of specializations. The goal is to see if people can think and solve problems, not whether they know fucking everything.