Re: questions asked during network engineer interview

[Mark Tinka <mark.tinka () seacom com>]

On 24/Jul/20 00:26, William Herrin wrote:

> 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 said, "No," and needless to say I didn't get an offer. And I'm okay
> with that. I really didn't fancy making a career of competing to be
> the first to write poorly considered software.
>
> The booby prize for failing the interview was a Google coffee mug. I
> still have it in storage somewhere.

Where the industrial revolution praised expertise, the digital
revolution rewards curiousity.

I prefer to have staff that are burdened with being curious, rather than
staff who think they don't. After all, all the information is already
out there. Having experience is just as important as being diligent to
obtain it.

Mark.