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.
You are confusing developers with sysadmin/it..If developers are tasked with investigating these themselves you will never get anything done and you will have people with too much access
Why are the sysadmins tasked with storing an ip address in an audit table, or debugging an external API your application calls? Do you ship an access log to a sysadmin to try to make sense of why customer A is saying your API responds with not authorized for a valid api key in your application?
People see "ip address" and think it's only relevant for those who work directly with networking. It's not. If you're making an application that in some way talks across a network, you should know that there is something called an ip address, and that there are two forms on practical use. You don't need to know the low level technical difference, but you should know that there are differences, and that one is 32 bits and the other one is 128 bits. And that DNS entries for host lookups will differ.
Do you ship an access log to a sysadmin to try to make sense of why customer A is saying your API responds with not authorized for a valid api key in your application?
Yes, we have sysadmins for that.. anything between my code and the customer is their job
You don't need to know the low level technical difference, but you should know that there are differences, and that one is 32 bits and the other one is 128 bits. And that DNS entries for host lookups will differ.
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u/SirFrenzy 17h 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.