4 ms·
I was asked the "what syscall returns an inode?" question (and agree with DannyBee that this is extremely similar to my successful SRE screen) and I answered st
by jsmthrowaway 10y ago
I was asked the "what syscall returns an inode?" question (and agree with DannyBee that this is extremely similar to my successful SRE screen) and I answered stat() without the clarification because I understood what the screener was doing and the parameters in which she was operating. That context on how phone screens work is missing from this transcript, but it's also unfair to expect that sort of context from a candidate because not every interviewee is familiar with the standard Google style tech interview.
The screener is the wrong person to walk down Pedantry Lane or Hexadecimal Packets Street and that's the sort of thing you save for the actual interview. But yes, I agree that it's shitty that the incentive is to answer for the test instead of the exact truth. (I wasn't extremely supportive of the interviewee once he turned slightly sarcastic and rattled off hexadecimal bytes instead of just saying "SYN" and "ACK," though.)
As an unrelated addendum, I'm intrigued by the following four things:
1) The author wrote a Web server and framework, G-WAN
2) I've seen G-WAN advertise itself questionably in the past w/r/t perf
3) gwan.com is powered by G-WAN
4) Under Hacker News load, the entire gwan.com domain is hard down
I'm not drawing a conclusion, but it is tempting.
- dilemma 10y agoYou are drawing a conclusion and you're making it public to discredit this person.
- jwatte 10y agoIt is true that gwan.com is (still) down.
- mikeash 10y agoEven if I give you that, it's still 30% of the official answers that are wrong, and 10% of the questions.
- csallen 10y agoAlthough I can see why it's tempting to poke fun at this situation, his site could be down for any number of reasons not directly related to the quality of the code he wrote for G-WAN.
- hvidgaard 10y agoNo software can perform better than the hardware allows it to. End of argument. Even if you make 100% optimized ASM tailored to the hardware and workload, and you can still kill it hard with enough requests. For all we know he hosts the website on a free tier of whatever to show how well it performs. It being down doesn't tell anything useful other than the current workload exceeds its capabilities.
- ZoFreX 10y ago> I wasn't extremely supportive of the interviewee once he turned slightly sarcastic and rattled off hexadecimal bytes instead of just saying "SYN" and "ACK," though. His response: > in hexadecimal: 0x02, 0x12, 0x10 – literally "synchronize" and "acknowledge". What do you think SYN and ACK stand for? Could it be "synchronize" and "acknowledge"? Moreover his point that knowing the bytes is more useful when you're looking at packet dumps is valid.
- Klockan 10y agoThe messages contains a lot more than the flags though so those bytes aren't enough and he didn't mention SYN-ACK.
- daveio 10y agoThey're bits. SYN can be represented as 0x02, ACK can be represented as 0x10. 0x02 BITWISE-OR 0x10, ie SYN BITWISE-OR ACK or 'SYN-ACK' colloquially, is 0x12. "in hexadecimal: 0x02, 0x12, 0x10".
- Klockan 10y agoThose are just flags, the message contains much more than the flag. Therefore it is wrong to say that they just send the flags and that the flags are equivalent to SYN and ACK.
- gnurag 10y ago> I'm not drawing a conclusion, but it is tempting. Except that you did draw a conclusion.