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Comment by papsosouid | Hacker News Reader

>when I type in a URL in my browser's address bar, press Enter, and then the page appears, tell me what happened technically in as low level as possible

I hope you word it much better than that. You certainly do not want to hear what happens in as low level detail as possible. You would be there for hours if I were to actually answer that. As posed, that question is demanding an answer that explains how pressing a key on a keyboard works, how the operating system handles the input, how it passes it to the program, the details of sockets programming, a lengthy discussion on DNS, ethernet, tcp/ip, switching, routing, etc, etc. Unless that question is intended to see how the interviewee handles being given vague and useless directions, it seems to be quite bad.

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Heh. Yeah I do ask it in that way and I've had a couple interviewees be cheeky and go right down to electrical signals. That's when I can see they have a bit of a sense of humour and aren't nervous. It also breaks the ice. However, I typically interrupt them and go as low as DNS routing packets and its ilk.

The reason I interrupt them when talk about electrical signals starts (or, as you mentioned, typing a key), is that I mainly hire for Web development positions and would like candidates to understand how the Web works. This knowledge is especially important for when things break down. Knowing how electrical signals work would be useful if you had to do hardware, networking, or anything else, but I just want to know that a candidate isn't just creating Web services without realizing that latency exists because of DNS routing and network hops.

Edit: clarity

The problem is that the question is so vague as to put an interviewee on the defensive, requiring that they go down to as deep a level as possible and adding to the stress of the situation. Not to mention that the last time I saw that question in an interview it was on a written quiz that appeared to be xeroxed from a daisy-wheel printed page.

As we've seen repeatedly here on HN, interviewers often ask about things that do not pertain to the job itself. Therefore it's actually a pretty aggressive phrasing of a question meant to elicit the information you require, so I don't think you can necessarily chalk it up to a sense of humor.

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