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Comment by everforward | Hacker News Reader

This.

My other favorite is very open-ended questions. I mostly do ops-y interviews, and my favorite question is "what happens when you type 'curl https://google.com' in a terminal and hit enter?"

The question is so broad there isn't a "correct" answer to Google, and it crosses enough domains that any article they find is going to be too long to skim. Then I ask them to really zero in on some aspect of it they feel comfortable with and give detail. What syscalls happen to start up curl? How does the OS know how to communicate with the local router? What's the entire flow to translate "google.com" to an IP?

It's also just fascinating to see which parts candidates latch on to. I had one person spend like 30 minutes just talking about TLS and PKI. Another person delved into kernel packet handling for a while.

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That's what I do (instead of curl, with a browser).

MANY super cool convos spun out of this question (interviewed around 60 people). One of them never actually got to the network request part bc we went DEEP into event handlers in a GUI etc. Another candidate was all over the place with key exchange protocols and what and how can go wrong.

I usually don't ask further questions to "corner" them, let them go into any of the details they want.

Ah, I am so happy I am not the only one who invented this interview method :-)

This is a popular question, turns out.

https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when

Thanks for this. Looks like it's going deep into "client side".

Thing about "Google.com" (I used Facebook/Gmail) is that when server side stuff is of interest (as it was for this cloud engineer job), then I also want to hear about geo DNS, reverse proxies, LBs, CDNs, eventual consistency, distributed storage, etc, all the complexity that is happening once that cat video appears in the browser.

Then again we can go back to JS, CSS, JIT and others' space

This is the most common question for screening non-ICs like EM, TPM at Amazon.

I have a "greenfield" scenario I ask SRE candidates. I give them unlimited time, resources and money to build whatever systems they want to ensure that code is production ready before it goes to prod. The only constraint is that they will be the only person who ever has a pager, 24x7x365. Tell me how you make that work with high confidence that your life won't be ruined. It's not verbatim but that's the gist. So many paths to explore and I think it does a great job of leveling people.

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