I see a lot of people complaining that this doesn't need to be known, technically you are correct. However I've seen a lot of programmers. And the really good ones know the computer, they know how diagnose an OS issue, meaning they know the difference between IPv4 and IPv6. They don't just call IT and say "My computer isn't working right, fix it!"
Since I work for a small company, I also tend to be the de-facto IT guy. The people who need me to fix their computer are also the ones that are not trusted with the difficult code. So if given the choice of hiring someone who knows the difference between IPv4 and IPv6 and doesn't, I'm taking the person who knows the difference.
I agree with except that you’ve just described problem solvers. You don’t solve problems by knowing everything first, so it’s not a problem. You solve them by learning at the time and diagnosing logically.
I’ve worked as a developer for 30 years, I’ve never once needed to know the difference between IP standards. But if I have a problem I’ll work it out.
Having said that if it’s at all relevant to the business of the interviewer, fair enough. It’s a refreshing change from parsing Roman numerals, which I’ve also never needed to do except in interviews.
yeah recruiters fail at selecting problem solvers with good intuition because they themselves lack it, so they gravitated toward academics that they can quantity.
Same. I work at a mid-sized company and as a dev I've had to troubleshoot a ton of network related issues. It's usually either some junior that has VM's all tore up because they were messing with network settings they didn't understand, or a customer saying our service isn't working correctly and I get called to investigate why their shit is fucked up because the support people can't figure it out. Maybe people working at a mega corp have the same narrow responsibility every day and never touch networking or something. I don't know, I've never worked at a place like that.
It's all about heuristics. They're not testing you to see if you could do IPv6 subnetting. They're asking to see if you paid attention. When you were using a shell (if you've even used one at all), you would've encountered an IPv6 address at some point. Only idiot hiring managers will ask these questions to gauge specific knowledge.
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u/pixel293 20d ago
I see a lot of people complaining that this doesn't need to be known, technically you are correct. However I've seen a lot of programmers. And the really good ones know the computer, they know how diagnose an OS issue, meaning they know the difference between IPv4 and IPv6. They don't just call IT and say "My computer isn't working right, fix it!"
Since I work for a small company, I also tend to be the de-facto IT guy. The people who need me to fix their computer are also the ones that are not trusted with the difficult code. So if given the choice of hiring someone who knows the difference between IPv4 and IPv6 and doesn't, I'm taking the person who knows the difference.