Today some more light-hearted content. This is a list of actual questions I was asked by an actual technical CEO during an an actual interview for a SRE role several months ago. Needless to say, I was so put off by this interview that I withdrew from consideration.
- Do you use an iPhone, or Android?
- When you take a photo with your mobile, and upload the image, what format is the image in?
- Why not PNG or TIFF or BMP?
- That image contains metadata, such as the camera model, and date. How is that stored?
- How does your phone know your location?
- How does a cell phone tower know its location?
- Imagine you were to dig a hole from your house, straight through the earth, where would you come out?
- Now imagine a fiber optic cable that ran from your house to this point. How long would it take to ping that point?
- You know the speed of light, right?
- What is the circumference of the earth?
- If you were to write a ping program in Go, how would you do it?
- Only programs with root access can send ICMP packets. How would you allow your Go program to do this?
- Do you use Emacs or vim?
- What is the difference between XML, XHTML, and HTML5?
- You know what a GIF is, right?
- An alternative for GIF if you want animation, is Flash. Why isn’t Flash still popular?
- How do you change the color of some text on a web page to yellow?
- What is the RGB color code for yellow?
- How do you add colored elements to a shell command prompt?
- What is the difference between Unicode and UTF-8?
What are your worst interview stories? I’d love to hear!
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