4 ms·

Perhaps the point was not merely regurgitation of facts but an analysis of your thought-process. It is almost impossible to have such an esoteric bit of trivia

Perhaps the point was not merely regurgitation of facts but an analysis of your thought-process. It is almost impossible to have such an esoteric bit of trivia but you could have at least given them something: "...Well I dunno but let's see...Filesystem Z(let's say reiserfs)...so this one's pretty good with really large files...its preferred to other ones(say ext2) for both support of larger files and better disk checking...at the time of distro x, version y, filesystem D(that you may be familiar with) hadn't even come out and was probably an improvement over Z, so I'd wager less bytes per block than filesytem D but more than...." ...or so could be a possible response...I hope I am getting my point through, though of course you're the one to have lived through the day and not me and I'm sure your reply was what you felt best, at the time.

etherael 16y ago
You're right actually; I've considered that a few times, but decided against it based on the guy's reaction to my reaction, he wasn't hedging for another answer, it was just "Ah, right." That particular thought did only occur to me sometime later though so could be it certainly.
dieterrams 16y ago
If that's what they were really looking for, then they're really just testing whether you can figure out what they're really looking for, whether they know it or not. If you want someone to demonstrate their thought process, you give them a tricky problem and just tell them to solve it out loud. If it's a good problem, they're not going to be able to fake having an awesome thought process. "I'd google it" is exactly the right answer, as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, it's never the answer interviewers want to hear. Regardless of whether they've asked good questions, it's invariably one of the most common responses interviewees will make when they don't know the answer. Whether or not the interviewer had a justified expectation that you should know the answer, "I'd google it" immediately gets you downranked by association with people who don't know their shit.
- imajes 16y ago
  I'd agree. I'd rather hire someone who's willing to know what he/she does or doesn't know, and rather than pussy foot around the issue, trying to remember it, google's the answer, fixes the problem and moves on.
logic 16y ago
This jives with an interview I did with a Google SRE a couple of years ago. He basically took me down a path of increasingly esoteric concepts, until we hit a point at which I couldn't recall the answer off the top of my head. He asked how I'd implement it; once I reasoned through it (and recalled the bit of information I couldn't remember at first), we quickly moved on to another line of discussion. I assume this was an intentional approach: find an area of knowledge the candidate should understand at a high level, but probably hasn't committed the details of to memory, and see if they can reason it out. You learn significantly more about someone when they're a bit out of their element; does their confidence evaporate, or do they work through it and come up with a reasonable solution?

etherael 16y ago

You're right actually; I've considered that a few times, but decided against it based on the guy's reaction to my reaction, he wasn't hedging for another answer, it was just "Ah, right." That particular thought did only occur to me sometime later though so could be it certainly.

dieterrams 16y ago

If that's what they were really looking for, then they're really just testing whether you can figure out what they're really looking for, whether they know it or not. If you want someone to demonstrate their thought process, you give them a tricky problem and just tell them to solve it out loud. If it's a good problem, they're not going to be able to fake having an awesome thought process. "I'd google it" is exactly the right answer, as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, it's never the answer interviewers want to hear. Regardless of whether they've asked good questions, it's invariably one of the most common responses interviewees will make when they don't know the answer. Whether or not the interviewer had a justified expectation that you should know the answer, "I'd google it" immediately gets you downranked by association with people who don't know their shit.

imajes 16y ago
I'd agree. I'd rather hire someone who's willing to know what he/she does or doesn't know, and rather than pussy foot around the issue, trying to remember it, google's the answer, fixes the problem and moves on.

logic 16y ago

This jives with an interview I did with a Google SRE a couple of years ago. He basically took me down a path of increasingly esoteric concepts, until we hit a point at which I couldn't recall the answer off the top of my head. He asked how I'd implement it; once I reasoned through it (and recalled the bit of information I couldn't remember at first), we quickly moved on to another line of discussion. I assume this was an intentional approach: find an area of knowledge the candidate should understand at a high level, but probably hasn't committed the details of to memory, and see if they can reason it out. You learn significantly more about someone when they're a bit out of their element; does their confidence evaporate, or do they work through it and come up with a reasonable solution?