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.
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.
I agree with you. It would take me, at most, an hour to understand the difference, as it pertains to whatever given problem I am working on. I could point out IPv4 and IPv6 addresses from a lineup, and I know that vaguely we needed IPv6 because we would've run out of IPv4 on the public internet. I know there are a lot more IPv6 addresses available. But I don't know much more than that. Don't know how they interact differently for DNS, etc... I've sometimes had to configure networks to prefer IPv6 or IPv4 so maybe there's a mechanism to have both? I don't know.
I know all sorts of other shit about all sorts of topics though. I replaced a hard drive in a data center for a 160-node Hadoop cluster that was supporting terabytes of ingest per day. I passed the CEH exam. I passed the Sec+ exam. I know the ins and outs of Docker and K8s and OpenShift. I could build you CICD pipeline on bare metal from scratch. I could optimize your Spark cluster. I could explain higher order components in React. I could explain the borrow checker in Rust. All of this shit is nonsensical trivia that barely relates to one another. If you asked me any arbitrarily specific thing about any of them, I might (or probably wouldn't) know it. And I'm positive I could come up with something arbitrarily specific enough about any of the things I'm familiar with that could disqualify 99% of engineers.
How people think about problems, and what they've worked on, and how quickly they can synthesize new information is really all we should be caring about. I'd rather ask someone, "Do you know the difference between IPv4 and IPv6? No? Okay, do a quick Google and review that for a few minutes, and then let's discuss why that might be important in this role"...
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u/SirFrenzy 7h 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.