Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by groby_b 487 days ago
The only good answer here is "breadth first, or depth first"?

If they say "depth first", go all the way down to electrons bumping into each other on the wire.

It's an "I'm so smart, are you so smart" question, the only right approach is a smart aleck approach.

I work on web browsers for a decade+ now, and worked on network protocols for a decade+, and it's not a question I'd consider in any way high signal. If this particular area matters to you, ask a problem in the space. "Web page X doesn't load, figure out why". It shows you way more than "please regurgitate every detail"
1 comments
notarealllama 487 days ago
That's exactly the point - sometimes too much detail or focused on wrong thing can ve distracting.

But having a frontend engineer aware of Safari on iOS or macOS vs assuming chrome compatibility, or a SRE aware of abusive UDP http2 / h3 stuff...

Again the beauty is in the flexibility and scope of something normies take for granted, and this video delves into some of the esoterics of this topic!

link
groby_b 487 days ago
Yep, having a video explaining it in detail is great. It's absolutely interesting. (I mean, I would say that, wouldn't I ;)

My objection was to using it as an interview question. An broad open-ended question like that without any guidance what the interviewer cares about is a signal of either copy-pasted hiring practices, or a working culture that doesn't know what it wants. It's also a question with little signal in the noise if you don't give a bit more clarity.

I mean, fundamentally I'm happy if other companies use the question, more good hires for me, but in terms of "we should really raise the bar on this interviewing thing" I still object :)

link
fc417fc802 487 days ago
It's only low signal if you directly score the answer based on presence or correctness of specific details.

Forget about that. The question is an open ended and adaptable tool to get a huge amount of information about knowledge, verbal ability, audience awareness, and all sorts of other directly relevant skills. No trick questions just "teach me everything you know about this subject" and then work with the other party.

That said I suppose there's no reasonable expectation that (for example) most firmware developers necessarily know anything whatsoever about loading a web page. But anyone whose touches network (ie most) should know something.

link