Re: questions asked during network engineer interview

[Peter Kristolaitis <alter3d () alter3d ca>]

On 2020-07-24 3:06 a.m., Mark Tinka wrote:
> On 24/Jul/20 00:26, William Herrin wrote:
>
> > Many moons ago, I interviewed at Google. During one of the afternoon
> > sessions the interviewer and I spent about half an hour spitballing
> > approaches for system monitoring problem at scale. I no longer
> > remember the details. With a little over 15 minutes remaining he
> > handed me a marker and said, "Okay, now write code for that on the
> > whiteboard." For an abstract problem without foundation that I had
> > never considered prior to that discussion. I said, "I really don't
> > think I can do a credible job of that in the time we have." He says,
> > "Well it's okay to use pseudocode. Don't you want to try?" I think
> > you're missing the point dude. It's still an abstract problem and
> > after half an hour's discussion I might be ready to draw boxes and
> > arrows. I'm certainly not ready to reduce it to code.
> >
> > I said, "No," and needless to say I didn't get an offer. And I'm okay
> > with that. I really didn't fancy making a career of competing to be
> > the first to write poorly considered software.
> >
> > The booby prize for failing the interview was a Google coffee mug. I
> > still have it in storage somewhere.
> Where the industrial revolution praised expertise, the digital
> revolution rewards curiousity.
>
> I prefer to have staff that are burdened with being curious, rather than
> staff who think they don't. After all, all the information is already
> out there. Having experience is just as important as being diligent to
> obtain it.
>
> Mark.

I would suggest that companies who follow FAANG-type development models 
actually value both expertise and curiosity, and also throw in the 
ability and willingness to rapidly iterate.  Certainly one can search 
Google for solutions to nearly any problem, but it takes expertise to 
take the bits you find and structure them in a way that makes sense for 
your particular problem -- both to solve the immediate problem and to 
make addition of future features or bug fixes easier.

I suspect the question posed to Mr. Herrin was intended to probe not 
just the expertise factor, but the iteration factor as well -- firstly, 
can you, with only partial requirements (or minimally-viable-product 
requirements), structure your code in such a way that it covers the 
currently-known requirements and reasonable design assumptions given the 
nature of the system (how does the control loop work?  are we collecting 
data by polling or pushing?  what layer is responsible for aggregation?  
how do we define a new monitoring check?  what are the interface points 
with external systems?  how are alert thresholds set?)?   Secondly, 
after you're done that exercise, if we throw a (reasonable) new 
requirement at you, is your code well-structured enough that the change 
doesn't necessitate a complete rewrite?

I've never been to an interview where I received a 400-page design 
document that is blessed by all 18 major stakeholders before being asked 
to write code.    It's almost always either small, well-defined problems 
(which are often related to your understanding of algorithmic 
complexity) or an iterative design process as above.  In the latter 
case, the point isn't to write perfect and flawless code for version 1, 
it's to see how you write version 0.1alpha and then how you think about 
getting to version 5.

And, realistically, we're talking about an interview here.  There are 
time constraints, and no one (interviewer or interviewee) should expect 
a production-grade system as the output of some whiteboarding exercises.