nanog mailing list archives
Re: questions asked during network engineer interview
From: William Herrin <bill () herrin us>
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2020 12:46:16 -0700
On Tue, Jul 14, 2020 at 10:59 AM Ahmed elBorno <amaged () 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: 1) What is the difference between flow balancing techniques on Cisco IOS and Linux? 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?
Hi Ahmed, Those are terrible questions. I've been in the business for a quarter century, a Linux and Cisco IOS user for most of that and I don't, off hand, know the answer to #1. As for number #2, it's highly variable depending on when you lose the first packet, ending fast window growth. And you will. On a gigabyte transfer over any real-world network, you will lose some packets both to congestion and bit errors. And that's before you consider the long-fat-pipe problem. Trying to treat it like a math train problem is bizarre. My Google interviewers asked much better questions, along the lines of "build me this" or "debug this problem." Even then they fell in to one of the traps with that methodology: on the "debug this problem" question, the interviewer wasn't familiar with one of the diagnostic commands I went to, so he guessed at what the output would be. His guess was just enough wrong to eliminate the cause he wanted me to find. The command should have hung accessing a faulty NFS mount but in his version of the story it didn't. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William Herrin bill () herrin us https://bill.herrin.us/
Current thread:
- questions asked during network engineer interview Mehmet Akcin (Jul 11)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Greg Skinner via NANOG (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Michael Thomas (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Owen DeLong (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Shawn L via NANOG (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Michael Thomas (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Peter Kristolaitis (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Michael Thomas (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Michael Thomas (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Greg Skinner via NANOG (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Michael Thomas (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Ahmed elBorno (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview William Herrin (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Miles Fidelman (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Michael Thomas (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Joe Hamelin (Jul 14)
- RE: questions asked during network engineer interview adamv0025 (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Matthew Petach (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Michael Thomas (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Miles Fidelman (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Mehmet Akcin (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Sabri Berisha (Jul 14)
- Re: questions asked during network engineer interview Mark Tinka (Jul 20)