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> 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.

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The messages contains a lot more than the flags though so those bytes aren't enough and he didn't mention SYN-ACK.

They'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".

Those 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.

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