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1764 points fatihky | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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lordnacho ◴[] No.12701486[source]
I'm amazed he knew things in such detail. I mean who would know just how long a MAC address is? Or what the actual SYN/ACK etc tcp flags are? You just need to know what they're used for, and if you need the specifics, you'll find out with a single search. He seemed to know that as well though. Kernighan for bit twiddling algos, that kind of thing.

It's a bit strange to have someone non-technical interviewing a techie. You end up with stupid discussions like the one about Quicksort. If you point out qs is one of several things with the same big-O, you'll probably also get it "wrong". But the real problem is that a guy who is just reading off a sheet can't give any form of nuanced feedback. Was the guy blagging the sort algo question? Did he know if in detail? Does he know what the current state of research on that area is? There's no way to know that if your guy is just a recruiter, but I'm sure even a relatively junior coder would be able to tell if someone was just doing technical word salad.

I wonder what would happen if ordinary people recruited for medical doctor jobs? Would you be comfortable rejecting a guy who'd been in medical school for 10 years based on his not knowing what the "funny bone" is? Wouldn't you tell your boss that you felt a bit out of that league? It's amazing you can get someone to do this without them going red in the face.

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1. mgkimsal ◴[] No.12701648[source]
"I mean who would know just how long a MAC address is? Or what the actual SYN/ACK etc tcp flags are?"

This isn't even my domain, but I remember some of this stuff. I had to dig in to this area years ago, and was knee-deep in that level for several months debugging and configuring stuff. Some of it stays with you, even if you're not there any more.

For someone applying for a director of engineering, I'm kind of split as to whether this should be required "off the cuff" knowledge. Would certainly help, but seems it would depend on the culture of the company - how hands-on they expect director-level folks to be - some companies seem to want that, some don't.