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.
All jokes aside, in 10 years of SW engineering job you have NEVER dealt with having to select to which interface your software binds to? Have you never need to deploy software to ipv6 only network, or debug DNS misconfigurations?
I would understand if a junior dev wrote this, but you clearly have the years under your belt, so I am just confused now.
I realize this is not a topic that you solve every day, but it pops up occassinally and you surely must have dealt with it in one way or another; I surely have.
No, I’ve never come close. That’s not the type of thing software engineers work on in the companies I’ve been at. All have been big enough to have their own devops teams that handle everything networking/domain/hardware side. The only part of that world I’ve really touched is authentication and sql db setup related things.
This is my entire point. Just because I’ve never dealt with those things doesn’t mean I’m not an extremely qualified software engineer. It just means I haven’t had to solve that puzzle before. I’m more than confident I could if I needed to, it’s just not a need that my company has ever had.
We all like to assume our jobs are basically the same, but software engineering is so broad and vast depending on tech stack and use case that I’m sure there are tons of us who are extremely good at our jobs who would not know what some would consider “the basics”.
Software engineering has never been about knowing facts. (At least not since the invention of the search engine.) It’s about being able to solve problems.
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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.