7 ms·

I often ask people I interview what their home network looks like and what their visions are. This often open doors to both inner motivation and thoughts you do

I often ask people I interview what their home network looks like and what their visions are. This often open doors to both inner motivation and thoughts you don't find elsewhere in an ordinary tech interview.

jeffwass 9y ago
What percentage have done anything beyond the default wifi-router that comes with their provider?
- pwg 9y ago
  Here on HN likely a much higher percentage than in the general population. In my case, the default wifi-router that came from the provider sits unplugged and idle.
- Spivak 9y ago
  No idea but I'll submit myself for counting. I replaced my provider's router with some Unifi gear and am running DHCP/DNS/Storage/Backups/Misc. off a small server running KVM. I would be excited to talk about my lab in an interview.
- arca_vorago 9y ago
  Who even uses the provided router? Docsis is a horrible spec and basically a perma-backdoor, use your own cable modem if you can manage it with your isp, turn off everything and pass through to your own edge firewall, and keep the WiFi router separate, preferably on a DMZ.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Who cares if the ISP controls the router? They control my connection to the Internet anyway. I just assume my LAN is untrustworthy, and authenticate & encrypt everything inside it.
yardie 9y ago
I wish someone had asked me about my homelab. Trying to run a homelab from a sailboat presented some very unique challenges (power, no physical internet) and opportunities (low interference, environmental data). While most homelabbers are hacking on pfsense or other networking tools I was hacking our boats NMEA sensor network.
- owenversteeg 9y ago
  Another HN liveaboard! But I have a feeling your boat was a larger boat with lots of people living aboard from your wording. What did you end up doing with the homelab/sensor network?
  - yardie 9y ago
    It was a great life. Now we're domesticated bluewater sailors waiting to take off again. It was a 38ft catamaran. So there were boats larger than us and many more smaller than us. For us it was the right size, comfortably took a family of 3 (+2 crew) across the Med and Atlantic. The network was pretty tightly integrated into the boat, a mix of Seatalkng, RS485 and RS232. All connected to my PC through wifi. Sadly, my homelab suffered from saltwater exposure and high humidity. My Mikrotik router and LR wifi antenna stayed with me. Since coming back stateside I've replaced most of my gear with Azure, IFTTT, and Alexa. 3 things we didn't have access to while sailing.
tptacek 9y ago
Interesting! I mostly focus on whether they're capable of performing the functions of the job I'm hiring for.
- to3m 9y ago
  I hope this isn't unusual. I like to think I'm at least OK at software development, but my home network consists of a wifi router that I bought in late 2005 from PC World.
  - twic 9y ago
    Ah, someone who doesn't feel the need to overcomplicate things. When can you start?
  - tlrobinson 9y ago
    While I don’t believe advanced home networking is a good indicator of software engineering skills, I’d at least hope you occasionally check for firmware updates/vulnerabilities and replace it if the manufacturer stopped supporting it. Consumer routers (especially from that era) aren't known for good security (drive-by pharming etc).
- kindfellow92 9y ago
  This is a sarcastic snarky underhanded jab at his interviewing style and doesn’t contribute constructively to this discussion. Please dang/sctb can you flag down this comment?
  - to3m 9y ago
    Well, you're quite right, but I disagree that it's a problem. Snark, sarcasm and underhanded jabs are absolutely valid rhetorical techniques; and, if you don't like them, there are plenty of good responses in kind, that will reflect on you far better than if simply tell on them to teacher. In case you were having difficult guessing, I'm minded to agree with tptacek. (And not just because of my sibling comment, in which I admit that my home network is indistinguishable from that of a 90 year old technophobe who got his not-daft-but-still-technically-ignorant grandson to set it up for him.) Is the interviewee's home network, assuming they even have one, really relevant? If they're going to be setting up a network for you, wouldn't you rather they had experience doing something significant on a professional basis, not just setting something up at home? If they're going to be doing something else, what relevance does any of this have?
bluedino 9y ago
At this point in the interview, I make up a story involving a FreeBSD box doing the firewall duties and segregated guest network, failover to 4G hotspot, caching proxy, fancy graphs and logs...and also pretend to be a little embarrassed about it.
jaryd 9y ago
I love this -- thank you for the tip. I'll start using this immediately :)
toast0 9y ago
I was asked this before, and I enjoyed sharing my network; I'm not sure how it related to what I was hired for. Perhaps debugging my home network provided tcpdump experience, which is always handy for a job with networking. It also lead up to a load balancing discussion which was interesting. I'm now good friends with that interviewer, but I'm still not too sure it's a good question. Maybe it's useful for 'can this person describe something complex they worked on' with lots of places to dig into 'how much low level networking knowledge does this person have,' but a large number of my peers use the WiFi that comes with the modem from their ISP, and don't even realize they're doing everything wrong.
cthalupa 9y ago
Asking about home labs/home networking runs the risk of being a very discriminatory question if you take the negative as a mark against the question. I highly recommend not asking about it. Particularly, it is discriminatory in that it penalizes people based on their home situation, both from a time and financial perspective. People with children, especially single parents, are often not in positions to actively maintain a home lab or complex home network, due to time constraints. Others just might not have the inclination, and it doesn't say anything at all about their ability to perform the job. Even if you're not going to take the lack of a home lab as a negative, it can throw a candidate off - candidates are very conditioned to feel that a hard no to an interview questions is going to be taken as a mark against them, and this is going to effect their ability to answer other questions as effectively. A much better question is to ask how someone approaches learning new technologies or keeping up with the changes in technology in general. For some people that will be work related, for some it will be home labs, and is an important skill regardless of how much time you have available. People with home labs will almost universally talk about it, and you can get the same discussion with them, without risking discriminating against people that have to keep their skills sharp through other methods. It's also more likely to be directly relevant to the skills related to the job, rather than random projects that might be tech related but not relevant to the position being interviewed for.
- dvdgsng 9y ago
  This statement is so generic, you could replace "home labs/home networking" with literally anything.
  - cthalupa 9y ago
    Not literally anything - but things outside of work. In which case, yes, it still all applies. You should focus on the things required for the job. Not what people do in their free time.
    - ericd 9y ago
      The reality is that spending your free time on job-related stuff is likely correlated with improved job-related skills, though. It's not a correlation of 1 obviously, but it's probably not 0 either, so it is relevant.
Q6T46nT668w6i3m 9y ago
My answer is a phone with a cellular plan. Would I get extra points for my minimalism?

jeffwass 9y ago

What percentage have done anything beyond the default wifi-router that comes with their provider?

pwg 9y ago
Here on HN likely a much higher percentage than in the general population. In my case, the default wifi-router that came from the provider sits unplugged and idle.
Spivak 9y ago
No idea but I'll submit myself for counting. I replaced my provider's router with some Unifi gear and am running DHCP/DNS/Storage/Backups/Misc. off a small server running KVM. I would be excited to talk about my lab in an interview.
arca_vorago 9y ago
Who even uses the provided router? Docsis is a horrible spec and basically a perma-backdoor, use your own cable modem if you can manage it with your isp, turn off everything and pass through to your own edge firewall, and keep the WiFi router separate, preferably on a DMZ.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Who cares if the ISP controls the router? They control my connection to the Internet anyway. I just assume my LAN is untrustworthy, and authenticate & encrypt everything inside it.

yardie 9y ago

I wish someone had asked me about my homelab. Trying to run a homelab from a sailboat presented some very unique challenges (power, no physical internet) and opportunities (low interference, environmental data). While most homelabbers are hacking on pfsense or other networking tools I was hacking our boats NMEA sensor network.

owenversteeg 9y ago
Another HN liveaboard! But I have a feeling your boat was a larger boat with lots of people living aboard from your wording. What did you end up doing with the homelab/sensor network?
- yardie 9y ago
  It was a great life. Now we're domesticated bluewater sailors waiting to take off again. It was a 38ft catamaran. So there were boats larger than us and many more smaller than us. For us it was the right size, comfortably took a family of 3 (+2 crew) across the Med and Atlantic. The network was pretty tightly integrated into the boat, a mix of Seatalkng, RS485 and RS232. All connected to my PC through wifi. Sadly, my homelab suffered from saltwater exposure and high humidity. My Mikrotik router and LR wifi antenna stayed with me. Since coming back stateside I've replaced most of my gear with Azure, IFTTT, and Alexa. 3 things we didn't have access to while sailing.

tptacek 9y ago

Interesting! I mostly focus on whether they're capable of performing the functions of the job I'm hiring for.

to3m 9y ago
I hope this isn't unusual. I like to think I'm at least OK at software development, but my home network consists of a wifi router that I bought in late 2005 from PC World.
- twic 9y ago
  Ah, someone who doesn't feel the need to overcomplicate things. When can you start?
- tlrobinson 9y ago
  While I don’t believe advanced home networking is a good indicator of software engineering skills, I’d at least hope you occasionally check for firmware updates/vulnerabilities and replace it if the manufacturer stopped supporting it. Consumer routers (especially from that era) aren't known for good security (drive-by pharming etc).
kindfellow92 9y ago
This is a sarcastic snarky underhanded jab at his interviewing style and doesn’t contribute constructively to this discussion. Please dang/sctb can you flag down this comment?
- to3m 9y ago
  Well, you're quite right, but I disagree that it's a problem. Snark, sarcasm and underhanded jabs are absolutely valid rhetorical techniques; and, if you don't like them, there are plenty of good responses in kind, that will reflect on you far better than if simply tell on them to teacher. In case you were having difficult guessing, I'm minded to agree with tptacek. (And not just because of my sibling comment, in which I admit that my home network is indistinguishable from that of a 90 year old technophobe who got his not-daft-but-still-technically-ignorant grandson to set it up for him.) Is the interviewee's home network, assuming they even have one, really relevant? If they're going to be setting up a network for you, wouldn't you rather they had experience doing something significant on a professional basis, not just setting something up at home? If they're going to be doing something else, what relevance does any of this have?

bluedino 9y ago

At this point in the interview, I make up a story involving a FreeBSD box doing the firewall duties and segregated guest network, failover to 4G hotspot, caching proxy, fancy graphs and logs...and also pretend to be a little embarrassed about it.

jaryd 9y ago

I love this -- thank you for the tip. I'll start using this immediately :)

toast0 9y ago

I was asked this before, and I enjoyed sharing my network; I'm not sure how it related to what I was hired for. Perhaps debugging my home network provided tcpdump experience, which is always handy for a job with networking. It also lead up to a load balancing discussion which was interesting. I'm now good friends with that interviewer, but I'm still not too sure it's a good question. Maybe it's useful for 'can this person describe something complex they worked on' with lots of places to dig into 'how much low level networking knowledge does this person have,' but a large number of my peers use the WiFi that comes with the modem from their ISP, and don't even realize they're doing everything wrong.

cthalupa 9y ago

Asking about home labs/home networking runs the risk of being a very discriminatory question if you take the negative as a mark against the question. I highly recommend not asking about it. Particularly, it is discriminatory in that it penalizes people based on their home situation, both from a time and financial perspective. People with children, especially single parents, are often not in positions to actively maintain a home lab or complex home network, due to time constraints. Others just might not have the inclination, and it doesn't say anything at all about their ability to perform the job. Even if you're not going to take the lack of a home lab as a negative, it can throw a candidate off - candidates are very conditioned to feel that a hard no to an interview questions is going to be taken as a mark against them, and this is going to effect their ability to answer other questions as effectively. A much better question is to ask how someone approaches learning new technologies or keeping up with the changes in technology in general. For some people that will be work related, for some it will be home labs, and is an important skill regardless of how much time you have available. People with home labs will almost universally talk about it, and you can get the same discussion with them, without risking discriminating against people that have to keep their skills sharp through other methods. It's also more likely to be directly relevant to the skills related to the job, rather than random projects that might be tech related but not relevant to the position being interviewed for.

dvdgsng 9y ago
This statement is so generic, you could replace "home labs/home networking" with literally anything.
- cthalupa 9y ago
  Not literally anything - but things outside of work. In which case, yes, it still all applies. You should focus on the things required for the job. Not what people do in their free time.
  - ericd 9y ago
    The reality is that spending your free time on job-related stuff is likely correlated with improved job-related skills, though. It's not a correlation of 1 obviously, but it's probably not 0 either, so it is relevant.

Q6T46nT668w6i3m 9y ago

My answer is a phone with a cellular plan. Would I get extra points for my minimalism?