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Comment by mwfj | Hacker News Reader

This can be generalised. It is also one of my favorite ways of doing developer interviews. Do they have a working/in-depth knowledge of what keeps the inter webs running? So many people have never ventured out of their main competence bubble, and that bubble can be quite small (but focused, I suppose).

For all I know, they believe everything is kept together with the help of magic. I guess I don't trust people who don't have a natural urge to understand at least the most basic things of our foundations.

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I used to thing this way before I realized it's just an arbitrary hoop you make people jump through. To you, people understanding TCP might be what you claim is a basic foundation. However, it's just about as arbitrary as asking people to explain 802.11 RTS/CTS or clos switch fabrics, which are both equally as important to delivering day-to-day network traffic. Additionally, they both can come up as things you need to understand when trying to optimize jitter/latency in sensitive local network traffic applications.

Don't judge people based on which components of networks they happened to take an interest in and dive into.

On the other extreme, I've seen people ask why is that IP address divided by 16? (10.0.0.0/16)

And then you have to explain to them that it's divided by 2^16...

I learned a lot about TCP (including delayed acks), the basics of 802.11, and the basics of switching fabrics in my undergrad networking class, so I wouldn't say it's totally unrealistic for someone to talk a little about those topics, depending on the role.

Part of the "problem" is that networks (even networks that span the globe) are too reliable these days. If a developer is developing network services, all they see is an input stream and an output stream. And that's all that matters 99% of the time. But add 0.1% loss, and all hell breaks lose because people don't understand the implications and rules governing the underlying protocols.

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