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

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

#91

Post by MichaelGG » Sat, Jan 17, 2015, 9:16 AM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #32

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 other thing the question tests for is rigidity of thinking. You can answer the question - pick whatever part of the stack you're familiar with and explain what's going on there. If you're a web developer, talk about how the browser loads the HTML for the page, then pulls out the tags and fetches CSS for them, then executes any tags. It sees a tag, then an , and uses that to render the query box. If you type and t…

>the whole web is stored in RAM

Whoa wait, that can't be totally true? The full text of everything is in RAM? Not just the indexes and whatnot? I guess the textual information is a small fraction of the total bytes, and some clever compression would make it possible, but wow.

So even at Google scale, some problems are already possible just to put in RAM. (The original Page rank paper spent a bit taking about aiming for 1 seek per lookup.. And my own multi billion record lookup system also found that to be the biggest latency.. But even I'm dealing with at least a TB a day of mostly text protocols and am happy to get the rough indexes into RAM.)

Wow.

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

#92

Post by dogweather » Sat, Jan 17, 2015, 9:17 AM UTC

I prefer to ask open-ended questions more calculated to give me an idea of where the interviewee's head is at:

"What's your favorite programming language? Why?"

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

#93

Post by ekr » Sat, Jan 17, 2015, 10:08 AM UTC

This would make a great subject for a book, along the lines of NAND2Tetris, starting at the transistor level or below.

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

#94

Post by droopybuns » Sat, Jan 17, 2015, 11:39 AM UTC

bobajett wrote: post #47

I would really like to know what happens when Im driving down a highway at say 60mph and browsing the web on my smartphone (or well let's say my wife is doing the driving and Im browsing the web :-) ). What kind of communication is happening between me and the cellphone towers? What data is my phone sending to the different cellphone towers as I drive by them? How does the cellphone tower send that data to the intern…

Jiminy crickets!

Well, once you get past the interrupt stuff, the handset establishes a pdp context.... How many people can afford to hire deep mobile hackers?

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

#95

Post by tonyedgecombe » Sat, Jan 17, 2015, 1:06 PM UTC

bbarn wrote: post #37

By far my favorite question to ask (and be asked) in an interview. As others point out, it's practically impossible to understand the entire system. At one point or another in my career I've been exposed to at least descriptions of most of the components, but if I wanted a processor engineer, I'd be looking for a different answer than a web developer, or a networking guy, etc. Essentially anyone involved in the moder…

An experienced developer is almost certainly going to start by asking you more questions, trying to find out what your expectations are.

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

#96

Post by arkaine » Sat, Jan 17, 2015, 1:24 PM UTC

Lack of arp/layer 2 isp, routing.

There is also a mistake inside the DNS part. DNS queries are done from the client - and this is actually true for a majority of client/server requests - by opening a dynamic random port above 49152.

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

#97

Post by johnchristopher » Sat, Jan 17, 2015, 2:23 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #23

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…

What kind of job description could those different profiles have answered to find themselves in the same waiting room ?

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

#98

Post by stevenspins » Sat, Jan 17, 2015, 2:41 PM UTC

There is also a mistake inside the DNS part. DNS queries are done from the client - and this is actually true for a majority of client/server requests - by opening a dynamic random port above 49152.

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

#99

Post by cursork » Sat, Jan 17, 2015, 2:48 PM UTC

wting wrote: post #42

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,…

Could you expand into why you think this question is indicative of a workplace with "little-to-no learning" on the job? I ask this question to new grad candidates with no expected answer in mind. The goal is to establish some level of technical competency and discover the candidates' interests. Do they talk about kernel, network, backend, frontend, etc? The percentage of candidates who can spend more than 1 minute an…

Yes. My experience of hiring is that it is extremely hard and imprecise. I prefer to give the candidates every advantage possible. I would help them to the extent of my abilities in a work situation, so I see no use in being unnecessarily difficult in an interview. It's a bad signal.

Maybe it's just my experience, but the more 'forgiving' style of interview has tended to result in a better work environment.

There are some situations where you do want to hire someone who 'knows it all' already. In which case, fire away with these challenges. But they're not needed for the 99% case.

Not a direct response, but expanding my thoughts slightly:

1. I know many highly able programmers who wouldn't know how to respond given so many options. These 'tricky' questions just aren't good for some personality types.

2. Everyone talking about it showing what you're interested in is 100% wrong in my case. I am not interested in TCP, DNS, etc. I know the details because at some point I've needed to debug something at that level. I'd hate being pigeon-holed just because I happen to know one thing.

3. There are much simpler ways to discover 'basic competence'. Getting candidates to translate a basic algorithm to pseudo-code even.

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

#100

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 17, 2015, 2:49 PM UTC

[deleted]