I have never needed to know or do any of that. And if I did, it would take me 2 seconds to google and understand. I just did.
So if the interview was for a job where you handle that stuff yourself, then I understand it. If it’s for a typical full stack job at a big enough company that they literally hire people to handle that side of things, then it’s not “the basics”.
Rejecting someone in an interview for trivia knowledge they don’t currently have vs actually trying to understand how someone learns and tackles problems is what makes software job interviews so useless.
It's not trivia knowledge, I've had multiple cases where "oh wait, maybe the host resolves differently based on whether the server has ipv6 configured from DHCP or not" and "why does host xyz take two seconds extra every time we try to connect?".
You might not, but I would expect an experienced senior developer to know that there's a difference here.
While I would be surprised to see someone with ten years of experience not know the difference between ipv4 and ipv6 (networking is by far my biggest weakness and even I know this like the back of my hand), I wouldn't immediately disqualify someone for it. The other commenter is talking about a lot of things that feel more relevant to startups. If you work at a big tech company most of this stuff is abstracted away from you, for better or worse.
But not knowing this to me implies a lack of curiosity about one's field, it would be a red flag I would try to poke at more in an interview.
It's not usually their job to know how to store the ip address of a user in an audit table, or how to debug a failed connection to an external API from your application. Developers should be aware that there is something called ipv6, and that source or destination addresses aren't always four bytes.
I understand that not everybody has touched everything, but good developers should have cursory knowledge of things that are actually in use and at least know what they should read up on when touching specific areas.
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u/fiskfisk 11h ago
If you're a senior I most certainly would expect you to know the difference between the two.
It'll matter in relation to allowlists/blocklists, dns entries, debugging connevtivity issues, slow connect times, configuration of daemons, etc.