Re: questions asked during network engineer interview

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

On 24/Jul/20 09:59, Peter Kristolaitis wrote:
 
> I would suggest that companies who follow FAANG-type development
> models actually value both expertise and curiosity, and also throw in
> the ability and willingness to rapidly iterate.  Certainly one can
> search Google for solutions to nearly any problem, but it takes
> expertise to take the bits you find and structure them in a way that
> makes sense for your particular problem -- both to solve the immediate
> problem and to make addition of future features or bug fixes easier.

And I agree with this. You need some reasonable level of base expertise
in order to get the gig first.

What I mean with "curiousity" being much more important nowadays is that
the skills you got the gig with may not necessarily apply in their
entirety as you rapidly iterate. So what your expertise gets you, at
that point, is the fastest path toward the result of your curiousity in
figuring out how to adjust with the changing landscape. When you get
that result, you add to your expertise, further reinforcing your
curiousity; and so the wheel goes.

What I am not in support of is expertise getting hired, and assuming it
doesn't need to be curious anymore because you hired it for what it was
good at. That is how you find yourself in the same place, 10 years
later, reminiscing about how great Multicast was. Except that with how
ubiquitous the Internet is now, obsolescence has a much shorter
gestation window than 10 years.

Mark.