questions asked during network engineer interview

Tue Jul 14 20:14:32 UTC 2020

On Tue, Jul 14, 2020, 11:00 Ahmed elBorno <amaged at gmail.com> wrote:

> 15 years ago, I applied to a network admin role at Google, it was for
> their corporate office, not even the production network.
>
> I had less than two years experience.
>
> The interviewer asked me:
> [...]
> 2) If we had a 1GB file that we need to transfer between America and
> Europe, how much time do we need, knowing that we start with a TCP size of
> X?
>

I *love* questions like that, because I can immediately respond back with
"well, that depends; did your sysadmin configure rfc1323 extension support
in your TCP stack?  Is SACK enabled?  What about window scaling?  Does your
OS do dynamic buffer tuning for TCP, or are the values locked in at start
time?"

Depending on how the interviewer responds gives me a pretty good idea how
much clue the people I'd be working with have, and how well they work
collaboratively even with people they don't really know.  If they respond
well on their feet, and give me better inputs, I respond with a better
answer.

If they say "It doesn't matter", then I respond by saying "See, that's why
things aren't working so well for you here; you don't really understand how
far down the rabbit hole goes", and respectfully ask to end the interview
before we waste any more of each other's time.

I *love* teaching--but only with people who are open to learning.

Stay safe!

Matt

>
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