questions asked during network engineer interview

Tue Jul 14 20:27:15 UTC 2020

On 7/14/20 1:14 PM, Matthew Petach wrote:
>
>
> On Tue, Jul 14, 2020, 11:00 Ahmed elBorno <amaged at gmail.com 
> <mailto: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.
>
This is the generic problem with interviewing is that people seem to 
believe they are born with a god given innate ability to interview 
people. They ask a generic question, and are surprised and often 
offended that they get an "it depends" and "please clarify XYZ". 
Interviewing is *hard* and doing a semblance of a good interview for a 
candidate is time consuming, so most people just punt with stupid 
unthoughtful questions where they think that all of the requirements are 
perfectly clear. Your answer *should* impress them, but I doubt that's 
the case in general.

Mike

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