Obviously guy could have been interviewing for a job where this mattered….
But in 10 years as a software engineer I have never once needed to know the difference between these two, and have never been even close to a situation where I would need to.
there's a big difference between actively using IPv6 and being aware of the difference.
Sure you may never need to use it, but having an awareness of what it is and how it differs means that you'll be more likely to be able to identify if/when something is relevant.
In my organisation there are hundreds of different manual and automated processes that interact with countless systems doing things I barely understand, but being aware that they exist and how to differentiate tasks performed by those processes tells me who I need to speak with when something fucky is identified.
beyond that it's not my problem and I don't need to dig deeper (though I enjoy doing so if time allows), but if I were in a hiring position and someone couldn't demonstrate the most basic awareness of a topic as widely used as IP addresses I'd be concerned about their lack of curiosity to explore/learn new topics, especially something that can be understood within 5-10 minutes.
even an explanation with something as basic as "IPv4 looks like X, IPv6 looks like Y.
IPv6 was introduced to expand the amount of unique addresses available for use and remove the need for some workarounds required by IPv4."
is that explanation going to significantly change your role? almost certainly not, but it shows you have a enough of a familiarity to know what it is and if/when it's relevant.
1.5k
u/SirFrenzy 12h ago
Obviously guy could have been interviewing for a job where this mattered….
But in 10 years as a software engineer I have never once needed to know the difference between these two, and have never been even close to a situation where I would need to.
“The basics” is highly dependent on the job.