job screening question

Fri Jul 6 02:29:14 UTC 2012

On Jul 5, 2012, at 6:09 PM, William Herrin wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 7:01 PM, Randy <randy_94108 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> --- On Thu, 7/5/12, William Herrin <bill at herrin.us> wrote:
>>> The less precise answer, path MTU discovery breaks, is just
>>> fine.
>> 
>> Precisely! and if I understand correctly, a non-techinical person
>> within HR is expected to hear this answer and relay it to you?
>> That is more than a long shot. Unless of course they have
>> photographic memories, are great typists or perhaps do
>> "short hand".
> 
> So I get a garbled answer about disk fragmentation. I can't tell the
> difference between an answer garbled in transit and an answer that was
> flat wrong to begin with?
> 

I suspect this was a candidate answer about "Packet Fragmentation" (e.g.
the answer you were looking for) and that your HR might have translated
"packet" into "disk" because that's the only place they've heard of fragmentation.

> The point of the question is to help me decide which people I want to
> spend half an hour on the phone with and which ones get a polite
> thank-you-not-it from HR while I do the parts of my job that don't
> involve interviewing folks. If there's any doubt about whether they
> belong in the not-it category, they proceed to the phone interview.

Makes sense, but, the example garbled answer you provided seems
entirely legitimate to me.

> 
> Regards,
> Bill Herrin
> 
> P.S. Yes, I got an answer about "degrading DNS port unreachables and
> MTU disk fragmenting as well." I asked HR to set up a phone interview.
> If that wasn't an HR garble, I *really* want to hear the explanation.
> :D
> 

Yep... Pretty sure that everything you listed here so far would be an HR garble
of a legitimately correct (within your parameters) answer.

Owen