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Comment by spps11 | Hacker News Reader

i feel this question correlates more with the generation of the SWE more than anything.

expecting current gen SWEs to talk about network layer protocols while answering this is kinda the same as expecting 1990s SWEs to include wire physics and dispersion statistics in their answer to this question.

Depth alone isn't always a good indicator. We have to move on from some of the low level stuff at some point and it is okay for engineers to know in detail about things that have been solved long back.

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Surely that depends what your hiring them for?

The nice thing about the website load question is that it touches every part of the stack. You could talk for an hour about rendering on screen at the OS level, or network protocols, or server stuff, or web client stuff, or data center stuff, or …

Really to answer the question in its full entirety would be the equivalent of that “Everything that goes into a pencil” essay. You could build an entire college curriculum just out of that question.

> that “Everything that goes into a pencil” essay

which one! I tried googling this but without quotes it gives me clickbait and with quotes it only points to this comment. :(

I, Pencil

thank you!!

I think it's fine to ask a web developer how web pages are served.

If they can talk about network layer protocols, then that tells you something. If the next candidate's understanding stops at knitting libraries together, then that's also notable.

Even if it's not a discriminating factor in hiring, it still helps you flesh out the candidate.

That's the beauty. I could care less if my backend JS candidate knows anything about Ethernet frames, but I damn well expect h3 and async discussion.

But my devops guy? He better be talking about CDN, cavhing, WAF.

Do you prompt them? Expecting them to talk about CDN and WAF seems unfair, those go beyond the definition of the web.

For a senior role? no. They should be asking you how deep you want to go. And you should be the one stopping them for time. If your SRE/DevOps can't wax poetic about the deep deep details, how are they going to get you out of the ditch when production goes down at 11am on a Tuesday, or 11pm on a Saturday

I’d expect an SRE to know about all that.

> CDN and WAF seems unfair, those go beyond the definition of the web

Current web is full of WAFs and CDNs, devops should know that they exist at the very least.

what is h3?

HTTP/3

Why should "current generation" SWEs know about network protocols? We live in a more networked world, not less.

Oops! Bad, meaning-reversing omission: I mean "not know".

100% a generation thing.

Been around long enough so I've written my own CSS framework, server-side framework, web browser, web server, sent bits over Ethernet, written assembler, programmed a FPGA, built circuits, AND have a electrical engineering degree... and YET, _ABSOLUTELY NONE_ of this is useful _99%_ of the time.

So meh. If I want you to do frontend, I will ask you frontend questions. Hopefully you can go deep on a11y and that's what I care about.

(But the 1% of the time when I can precisely step through a whole stack is also fun.)

Exactly, someone who can answer where media queries fall in terms of loading priorities for FE (when hiring for that.)

Electrical engineering is a whole nother thing!

Hence the differences in the level of schooling. Graduating a coding boot camp for using React vs years of engineering school. Why are the interviewers are confused on this is the unsane thing.

Yes, I would drop the “in excruciating detail” and “everything”. The level of detail the interviewee starts at or goes down to by default is also informative.

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