questions asked during network engineer interview

Thu Jul 23 22:33:08 UTC 2020

On 7/23/20 3:26 PM, William Herrin wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 23, 2020 at 6:33 AM Michael Douglas
> <Michael.Douglas at ieee.org> wrote:
>> One time I got asked in an interview how to estimate the number of manholes in a city.  I replied that I would google 'pretentious interview questions' for a problem solving methodology.
> Many moons ago, I interviewed at Google. During one of the afternoon
> sessions the interviewer and I spent about half an hour spitballing
> approaches for system monitoring problem at scale. I no longer
> remember the details. With a little over 15 minutes remaining he
> handed me a marker and said, "Okay, now write code for that on the
> whiteboard." For an abstract problem without foundation that I had
> never considered prior to that discussion. I said, "I really don't
> think I can do a credible job of that in the time we have." He says,
> "Well it's okay to use pseudocode. Don't you want to try?" I think
> you're missing the point dude. It's still an abstract problem and
> after half an hour's discussion I might be ready to draw boxes and
> arrows. I'm certainly not ready to reduce it to code.

I would have probably asked whether he'd fire me if I started writing 
code after 15 minutes of handwaving in real life.

Mike