I strongly agree with the sibling comment that this is a perfectly valid interview question.
One of the biggest red flags in an interview is if I ask a question and the person doesn't know how to say 'I don't know', because it suggests there's a big risk that if I assign them a task in their day-to-day work, they won't tell me if they feel unprepared to tackle it. That's a far bigger issue than not knowing that traceroute uses variable TTLs to figure out the timing along the route.
The problem with "I don't know" is that it's really not culturally appropiate to say! Americans are supposed to be rugged, resourceful individualists and asking for help is frowned on because it shows weakness. Can't do that in an interview!
I don’t doubt this happens but seems like a poor example. She effectively rooted out a bullshitter. No worries if you don’t know how a tool works, but just say I don’t know. That answer was nonsensical.
The purpose of an interview is not to root out a bullshitter but to find someone you can work with. If that guy doesn't know about TCP/IP, move on to the next topic. If the guy has poor attitude, be polite. Just don't waste time with making fun of the candidate, it does not reflect well on interviewer and company.
For what we know, the guy may well have been employing "test-taking strategies", and he may have been led down the garden path by the interviewer.
There's far too many posts in Rachel's blog where she goes on about "the one", who knows much better already, and here she channels the asshat that she complains about when she encounters him at work.
Each router checks its table for the destination, and if it doesn't know it, queries the next upstream router, its default route, the next hop. Each router likely ultimately informs you of the hand-off via a packet of some sort, and your then traceroute sends a ping/ICMP to each hop to learn how far away they are.
He maybe could've been pushed to expand on what he did know in more detail, but it seems like she just threw out SNMP as misleading bait, and he maybe mixed up ICMP and SNMP. She is right to call herself a troll, but wow, that's crazy to say she caught the guy in a lie of insanity.
The stepwise increasing TTL is the fundamental mechanism that makes traceroute work. Any answer that omits this is so vacuously incomplete that it might as well be considered wrong.
When you think about it, the candidate isn't even that wrong. Back then, at university, a certain professor would explain the oral exam to the candidate at the beginning. He would explain that he would incrementally increase the difficulty and skip from area to area. The goal would be to find the limits of the student's knowledge, the student would walk away feeling terrible, and he, the professor, didn't enjoy the experience.
That's how it ought to be, but here? OK, candidate doesn't know ICMP well, next topic, no need to waste time and dig in.
Here's another unfavourable thought: some people with abusive childhoods react very badly to dominance displays, and here is Rachel engaging in just that. One wonders what had happened before.
Downvoted for jumping from legitimate criticism of her interview methodology to very personal and completely baseless accusations. This is not the internet I want to live in.
Storytime! In a previous workplace a disagreement over fire safety with escalated into uncalled-for and unwelcome dominance behaviour from my supervisor. All attempts to deescalate were rebuffed, and now there is litigation from multiple plaintiffs, this person took out her sociopathic tendencies on many people. With a minimum of professional detachment or a HR department with a clue the peace would have been kept. (Yes, a few months later the fire marshal issued a code violation, as predicted.) You may not wish to live in that internet, but we live in a world where sociopaths are overrepresented in leadership positions.
Something rubs me here just the wrong way. Rachel complains about ageism and contempt for women in tech, and with good reason, and then she takes it out on an overenthusiastic candidate who can't read the room.
I wasn't denying the existence of antisocial people, I was decrying the public shaming of someone you've never met as a victim of child abuse, and now also as a sociopath, based on only a small thing they wrote on the internet.
I assure you, I've met many people who treat their interviewees worse who are not sociopaths.
Yes, that happens, and elsewhere she goes on about culture in tech.