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I hate this interview question. This question however would be a great intro to CS/CMPE in university, "What happens when you type google.com into your browser and press enter....well you'll be able to answer `most` of that by the end of your PHD Dissertation."
I hate this interview question. This question however would be a great intro to CS/CMPE in university, "What happens when you type google.com into your browser and press enter....well you'll be able to answer `most` of that by the end of your PHD Dissertation."
Why? It's so much better than the standard white board questions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you gave this amount of detail during an interview, you would have one frustrated interviewer and not much time for anything else.
"What happens.... and give as much detail as you can" is how I phrase it. If the candidate tried to give this much detail, I'd stop them, congratulate them on their ability to Google, put a positive mark next to that and move on. Or not, as I've detected they're effectively plagiarising someone else's work. Depends on how far they go with it I suppose. It could go either way! That said, if I let them completely hijac…
As an interviewer, I love this question, but I don't have very good luck with it. My goal is for them to find the area they know the most about and tell me about it extreme detail. But the answer I always get is very short and broad, and never dives into anything. I will probably modify the question to just ask about how the TCP/IP portion works, or just ask about how the HTML rendering portion works.
The problem with the original question is that it masks your true question and makes it really difficult to understand what the discussion is about. If someone is used to answering questions succinctly, directly, and usefully (which are valuable traits in a productive engineering environment) then it's really difficult to formulate a clear answer on the spot, regardless of your depth of knowledge. The best response is probably the question, "Exactly which part are you interested in, and in relation to what kinds of problems?"
Just by quick browsing I see missing a lot of network and server-side: what if name server doesn't have domain record, routing protocols (BGP), what happens when request hits Google on their side, there's load balancer for sure -how do they work-, there's probably CDN -how do they work, anycast etc-, there's HTTP to HTTPS redirect...
As an interviewer, I love this question, but I don't have very good luck with it. My goal is for them to find the area they know the most about and tell me about it extreme detail. But the answer I always get is very short and broad, and never dives into anything. I will probably modify the question to just ask about how the TCP/IP portion works, or just ask about how the HTML rendering portion works.
That's nice, but you forgot to explain how electrical circuits work. Which ideally would have begun with with a rigorous statement of Kirchhoff's laws (and in particular how these are generalizations of Ohm's law, and corollaries of Maxwell's equations in the low-frequency limit).
We were also hoping to see you demonstrate at least a basic understanding of how modern semiconductors work, to a point where we could feel confident that you were at least reasonably conversant in the underlying language of solid state physics. If you really wanted to get our attention, you would have asked for extra time at the whiteboard to derive at least, say, the 1-soliton solution to the wave equation, and used the first few terms of the expansion series to obtain both elementary conserved quantities and additional non-trivial quantities using the invariance and multiplier approach based on the well-known result that the Euler-Lagrange operator annihilates to total divergence.
That is, you could have. But you didn't.
We thank you for taking the time to discuss this opportunity with us; but mind you, when we said we were looking for candidates with "strong CS fundamentals", we meant it. So unfortunately we'll be moving forward with other candidates, and we wish you the best of luck with your job search.