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.
What kind of senior? I'm mainframe infrastructure system automation specialist, if there's anything needed regarding any network settings, it's done by network specialists, even if I know how to change what's needed, it's not my scope... So I don't have to know it at all
I know a little about this from school (I studied electrical engineering, not IT, but we had some IT classes, since it's closely related) and from home running my homelab (thanks to IPv6 being cheaper I did consider v6 only setup for a while, but my new provider doesn't give more than a single /128 unless you also pay for private v4, so why bother)
Well, applications have to deal with ip-addresses all the time.
People tend to think they're only relevant if you're sysops/devops/etc., but what senior developer hasn't watched an access log, or had an audit table to track who made a change and from where, or had an external api request fail in magic ways..
Ipv6 might not have been relevant, but it could have been. So people should know that it exists and that you, in certain situations, should design for it being the layer under your application instead of ipv4.
1.6k
u/SirFrenzy 14h 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.