41–50 of 188 posts
I sometimes ask the question "how does the internet work?" in interviews. The vague and wrong answers I hear are astonishing. I'm looking for a basic understanding of the layering of TCP, or RDP, or ICMP (or anything actually) on top of IP. I don't get that level of insight much. The people who do have that insight usually can go deeper -- slow-start, BGP, etc. I wonder if we have a modern version of C.P. Snow's mid-…
I sometimes ask the question "how does the internet work?" in interviews. The vague and wrong answers I hear are astonishing. I'm looking for a basic understanding of the layering of TCP, or RDP, or ICMP (or anything actually) on top of IP. I don't get that level of insight much. The people who do have that insight usually can go deeper -- slow-start, BGP, etc. I wonder if we have a modern version of C.P. Snow's mid-…
I learn a little bit about intra-DC networking on the job, but I've never needed to use anything else yet.
I sometimes ask the question "how does the internet work?" in interviews. The vague and wrong answers I hear are astonishing. I'm looking for a basic understanding of the layering of TCP, or RDP, or ICMP (or anything actually) on top of IP. I don't get that level of insight much. The people who do have that insight usually can go deeper -- slow-start, BGP, etc. I wonder if we have a modern version of C.P. Snow's mid-…
Skype uses TCP, no? Laugh, indeed.
>You have whole industries (gaming, video streaming, VoIP) that will laugh at you if you send time critical data over TCP and rightly so Skype uses TCP, no? Laugh, indeed.
I sometimes ask the question "how does the internet work?" in interviews. The vague and wrong answers I hear are astonishing. I'm looking for a basic understanding of the layering of TCP, or RDP, or ICMP (or anything actually) on top of IP. I don't get that level of insight much. The people who do have that insight usually can go deeper -- slow-start, BGP, etc. I wonder if we have a modern version of C.P. Snow's mid-…
If you ask me "how does the internet work" and what you really want is details on the underlying protocols, at around the range of TCP/IP, why aren't you actually asking for that? Your question is so broad that it's not shocking in the slightest that most people pick a different focal point for their answer, especially given the already hostile interview environment and the added agitation provided by such an unclear question.
If your goal is to elicit and understanding of somebody's background in TCP/IP and the surrounding protocols, ask them a question about that. If that's not relevant for the position (it's almost certainly not for most "full-stack" engineers), switch to asking questions that are relevant to the work they'll actually be doing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks very much for this, these are great articles. It seems one would need some way of synchronizing clocks (or measuring the lag between server and client). Do you know if there is a standard way of accomplishing this?
> Do you know if there is a standard way of accomplishing this? Synchronizing clocks is one of the difficult problems in distributed computing. Games tend to avoid doing proper synchronization of clocks by working in discrete time steps (frames). Because games run at 15-60 frames per second (a bit more for simulators), you can get away with synchronizing the clocks to +/- a few frames, ie. an accuracy of tens of mill…
I sometimes ask the question "how does the internet work?" in interviews. The vague and wrong answers I hear are astonishing. I'm looking for a basic understanding of the layering of TCP, or RDP, or ICMP (or anything actually) on top of IP. I don't get that level of insight much. The people who do have that insight usually can go deeper -- slow-start, BGP, etc. I wonder if we have a modern version of C.P. Snow's mid-…
This goes on the list of interview questions that's great at letting the interviewer claim pretty much any candidate they want to discard is unworthy of the position. It's the tech community's variant of a voting literacy test. If you ask me "how does the internet work" and what you really want is details on the underlying protocols, at around the range of TCP/IP, why aren't you actually asking for that? Your questio…
I'll chime in as someone with a skill set that is completely not special (linux application development, and hardware / firmware / software integration), but in certain circles, is unique since it doesn't involve JavaScript (yet).
I think the question is too vague, but I've asked a similar question:
To kernel hackers (not application developers) - Tell me what you know about the Linux boot process
To anyone with a 5th-gen language on their resume: how's a hash table implemented? (use of a feature or function without understanding why and how it works can lead to really interesting performance problems, even if the code is functionally correct)
[deleted]
Wow, so many downvotes. Why is it considered non-constructive to point out a misleading title? The title is the first impression of an article, and most likely the authors are not aware of that ambiguity.
>You have whole industries (gaming, video streaming, VoIP) that will laugh at you if you send time critical data over TCP and rightly so Skype uses TCP, no? Laugh, indeed.
Skype does many things, not all of them the greatest. For instance, it breaks all my HttpListener-based .NET code when it is running.