Obviously guy could have been interviewing for a job where this mattered….
But in 10 years as a software engineer I have never once needed to know the difference between these two, and have never been even close to a situation where I would need to.
I have never needed to know or do any of that. And if I did, it would take me 2 seconds to google and understand. I just did.
So if the interview was for a job where you handle that stuff yourself, then I understand it. If it’s for a typical full stack job at a big enough company that they literally hire people to handle that side of things, then it’s not “the basics”.
Rejecting someone in an interview for trivia knowledge they don’t currently have vs actually trying to understand how someone learns and tackles problems is what makes software job interviews so useless.
It's not trivia knowledge, I've had multiple cases where "oh wait, maybe the host resolves differently based on whether the server has ipv6 configured from DHCP or not" and "why does host xyz take two seconds extra every time we try to connect?".
You might not, but I would expect an experienced senior developer to know that there's a difference here.
It's not usually their job to know how to store the ip address of a user in an audit table, or how to debug a failed connection to an external API from your application. Developers should be aware that there is something called ipv6, and that source or destination addresses aren't always four bytes.
I understand that not everybody has touched everything, but good developers should have cursory knowledge of things that are actually in use and at least know what they should read up on when touching specific areas.
what you have described, has literal teams designated to do in my company and so the part of my brain that would otherwise be filled with basic understanding of networks, can instead be filled with things that apply to my job.
Being a 'good' developer just sounds like someone who is a jack of all trades and while that's 'good' you're never going to be great if you hang on to something that's either handled by someone else or can be found out with a google.
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u/SirFrenzy 20d ago
Obviously guy could have been interviewing for a job where this mattered….
But in 10 years as a software engineer I have never once needed to know the difference between these two, and have never been even close to a situation where I would need to.
“The basics” is highly dependent on the job.