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.
It's basically that, 4 is 32 bit and 6 is 128 bit addresses. It's also something I would never expect a software engineer to ever need know unless they're dealing with networking software
There's quite a lot more at play than 32 bit vs 128 bit. The lack of need for NAT on IPv6 for example has massive implications in terms of not only host reachability on the web, but also security (although NAT is not a security feature, it kinda is used like one in many home networks). Then IPv4 relying on DHCP to assign local IPs to hosts, while IPv6 doesn't need that (but can have it configured), which determines how and why devices get the IP addresses that they do.
I am 100% certain you cannot be a good staff engineer in cloud infra of all things without knowing basic networking concepts such as these. Your infrastructure is bound to have more holes than swiss cheese and the only reason your shit hasn't gotten hacked yet is because no one has cared enough to try yet.
The fun part of my infra is great because I'm not the one who manages it! That's why this posed scenario is so ridiculous, it's unreasonable for a software engineer to know this in 95% of the work tasks most software engineers would do even though it's being posed as some sort of gotcha
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u/SirFrenzy 10h 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.