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“What happens when you type Google.com into your browser and press enter?”

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Re: “What happens when you type Google.com into your browser and press enter?”

#21

Post by matthewmacleod »

RogerL wrote: post #20
robertcope wrote: post #15

I didn't know this was so popular of a question. I've been asking it for many years. I love it because anyone with expertise in any part of the system should be able to answer it. Are you a networking guru? If so, you should be able to talk a long time about the network bits. Are you a kernel guru? Same. Etc. It also gives me a good idea how broad the interviewee is. It is always amazing to me how many people fail th…

So, everyone fails and you think it is a good question? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I can't reasonably answer the question, because I haven't really needed to know it. When I need to know it, I'll learn it, and quickly. How is that question a good measure of me if you are not hiring me to architect a router or something where it pertains? I could ask you questions in my domain that you'd be hopeless at an…

The parent clearly said "so many people" and not "everyone" - that's a really important difference!

I really struggle to believe that a competent software developer would be unable to answer this question with some degree of accuracy. It's not like it's a networking question - it's fantastically open-ended and covers everything from hardware, operating systems, networking, GUIs... and that's useful flexibility. On top of that, it's useful to help judge communication skills - engineers must be able to clearly express ideas, understand the audience that they're communicating with, and be able to discuss and reason with other engineers.

I would not hire an engineer who was not able to answer this question.

Re: “What happens when you type Google.com into your browser and press enter?”

#23

Post by nostrademons »

cursork wrote: post #5

Love it! One of my favourite bad interview questions. I got asked this in an interview ~5 years ago. My response was to look shocked... Pause. Then ask: "What do you mean? What detail do you need? DNS? SYN / ACK? HTTP?" At the point I started talking about syn/acks they just cut me off and moved on to the next question. Same company (different person) started the phone screen with 'oh so your CV says you know linux,…

That's part of the point of the question - which part you go into detail on is a pretty good indication where your strengths lie. Someone who spends a lot of time on DNS and SYN/ACK is probably a low-level networking guru, and the rest of the interview should be structured accordingly. Someone who immediately jumps into HTTP requests, HTML parsing, and stylesheet application is probably a web developer, and the rest of the interview should be structured accordingly. Someone who talks about the enter key firing off an interrupt that the keyboard device driver handles and puts into a message queue for the windowing system's event loop to handle is a low-level desktop OS person. Someone who talks about the browser retrieving the event from the window loop, dispatching it the urlbar's hwnd, and kicking off an HTTP request is a Windows application programmer.

The advantage of this over just looking at someone's resume is that you can tease out areas of strength beyond someone's particular work experience, so that if eg. you get someone who's been stuck doing Win32 programming his whole life but has managed to teach himself a bunch of web technologies on his own time, he can talk intelligently about the browser's style rendering. It can also identify areas of cross-training, eg. the bulk of my professional experience is in web development, but I know enough about how the other layers of the stack work to write this comment.

Re: “What happens when you type Google.com into your browser and press enter?”

#24

Post by emirozer »

cursork wrote: post #5

Love it! One of my favourite bad interview questions. I got asked this in an interview ~5 years ago. My response was to look shocked... Pause. Then ask: "What do you mean? What detail do you need? DNS? SYN / ACK? HTTP?" At the point I started talking about syn/acks they just cut me off and moved on to the next question. Same company (different person) started the phone screen with 'oh so your CV says you know linux,…

I completely agree with your last statement and I would like to add that i think any question that can be answered by a 'single' google search provides absolutely no valuable information to the interview process.

Re: “What happens when you type Google.com into your browser and press enter?”

#26

Post by RogerL »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #21
RogerL wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, everyone fails and you think it is a good question? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I can't reasonably answer the question, because I haven't really needed to know it. When I need to know it, I'll learn it, and quickly. How is that question a good measure of me if you are not hiring me to architect a router or something where it pertains? I could ask you questions in my domain that you'd be hopeless at an…

The parent clearly said "so many people" and not "everyone" - that's a really important difference! I really struggle to believe that a competent software developer would be unable to answer this question with some degree of accuracy. It's not like it's a networking question - it's fantastically open-ended and covers everything from hardware, operating systems, networking, GUIs... and that's useful flexibility. On to…

He said "really had only one person answer it reasonably in all these years ". Are we going to quibble about this wording?

Let's see. I've done flight software. I've done cancer statistic software for the NIH. I've done autonomous robots and UAV. I've done drones. I've done weapons systems for the military. I've done mapping applications back on 486 machines with 16 bit software (hard to be responsive in that environment). I've design/built/debugged circuit boards. I've disassembled compilers and sent bug reports back to the manufacturer. I've done machine vision and computer vision. I've done simulation, solved partial differential equations, built bayesian filters.

But, you know, I haven't had to do anything significant with resolving google.com. I mean, I know that it resolves to something like 145.234.34.45, I know there is a difference between TCP and UDP, and a few other things, but I pretty much just need to open sockets once in a while. I'm pretty much the goto person for hard problems whereever I've worked. I've written articles, and am writing a book.

How does not knowing some specific fact make me unhirable?

"there are no good engineers". Well, I guess there is one, since one person was able to answer the question.

Re: “What happens when you type Google.com into your browser and press enter?”

#27

Post by kevan »

egypturnash wrote: post #4

> The keyboard controller then encodes the keycode for transport to the computer. This is now almost universally over a Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection, but historically has been over PS/2 or ADB connections. What about Bluetooth keyboards?

Ooh, now we can add a big section on EMR, wireless protocols, forward error checking, the possibilities are endless!

Re: “What happens when you type Google.com into your browser and press enter?”

#28

Post by robertcope »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #21
RogerL wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, everyone fails and you think it is a good question? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I can't reasonably answer the question, because I haven't really needed to know it. When I need to know it, I'll learn it, and quickly. How is that question a good measure of me if you are not hiring me to architect a router or something where it pertains? I could ask you questions in my domain that you'd be hopeless at an…

The parent clearly said "so many people" and not "everyone" - that's a really important difference! I really struggle to believe that a competent software developer would be unable to answer this question with some degree of accuracy. It's not like it's a networking question - it's fantastically open-ended and covers everything from hardware, operating systems, networking, GUIs... and that's useful flexibility. On to…

Context is important. My team is a web systems team. I wouldn't expect someone that has written flight software to know the answers. I would expect someone that is advertising themselves as a senior web developer or web systems guy to.

Re: “What happens when you type Google.com into your browser and press enter?”

#29

Post by _almosnow »

>17.78 mA of this current is returned on either the D+ or D- pin (the middle 2) of the keyboard's USB connector.

Oh, so we will look at it at THAT level of detail, nice.

Then hardware interrupts, seems ok...

Then HSTS and DNS, yeah, no, you are skipping like 3 more pages of things that happen in between. Good luck with your naive experiment.

Re: “What happens when you type Google.com into your browser and press enter?”

#30

Post by matthewmacleod »

RogerL wrote: post #26
matthewmacleod wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent clearly said "so many people" and not "everyone" - that's a really important difference! I really struggle to believe that a competent software developer would be unable to answer this question with some degree of accuracy. It's not like it's a networking question - it's fantastically open-ended and covers everything from hardware, operating systems, networking, GUIs... and that's useful flexibility. On to…

He said "really had only one person answer it reasonably in all these years ". Are we going to quibble about this wording? Let's see. I've done flight software. I've done cancer statistic software for the NIH. I've done autonomous robots and UAV. I've done drones. I've done weapons systems for the military. I've done mapping applications back on 486 machines with 16 bit software (hard to be responsive in that environ…

But, you know, I haven't had to do anything significant with resolving google.com. I mean, I know that it resolves to something like 145.234.34.45, I know there is a difference between TCP and UDP, and a few other things, but I pretty much just need to open sockets once in a while. I'm pretty much the goto person for hard problems whereever I've worked. I've written articles, and am writing a book.

You are actively answering the question here - this is exactly the sort of thought process and reasoning that would be required. There are no specific facts - that's the point. And I can help but feel you've missed that.

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