> You can't learn about someone's capabilities by putting them on the spot with trivia questions.
But that's not the point of these questions. These questions are a 5-10min phone pre-screen before getting to the actual interviews. They test if the candidate has experience in a given field, not if they can search for information or what are the precise bounds of their capabilities.
It's trivia, but it's trivia that is a reasonably high confidence proxy for experience in e.g. network programming/design (resp. other fields). If someone claims they have networking experience and don't know SYN/SYN-ACK/ACK it's in my opinion a large red flag.
These screens pass people who can answer trivia but who can't effectively code, and they reject people who have a gift for solving engineering problems with code but who can't answer trivia questions when put on the spot.
The ostensible reason they get deployed (I say "ostensible" because we all know that in reality the on-site interview consists of the same stupid kinds of questions) is to keep the employer from wasting time conducting more sophisticated interviews for candidates who have no hope of passing. But that's dumb for at least two big reasons:
* The filters obviously reject candidates who would do well on more serious challenges --- worse, they do it insidiously, because you can't tell that they're rejecting good people, only that you're seeing fewer bozos, which makes them look like they work. In reality, a new norm has arisen where the most qualified candidates get to skip these processes entirely, because we all know they're a crap-shoot and don't want to lose good people.
* Properly administered work sample challenges actually take less employer time than these stupid trivia screens do. That means there's literally no purpose to the trivia screens whatsoever; they do nothing but harm.
In my last comment, I just wrote off the top of my head a sketch for a work sample test that addresses the same concern as the dumb TCP/IP trivia quiz from the original post. It took me I think something like 30 seconds to come up with it. Think about how you'd score that (remember: the bar here is "must be more predictive than that dumb trivia question"). I'm thinking something along the lines of "run the code and see if it opens a new TCP connection".
Assuming your team has enough sophistication to build work sample challenges like this, try to justify the trivia interviews. I think you can't.
> These screens pass people who can answer trivia but who can't effectively code, and they reject people who have a gift for solving engineering problems with code but who can't answer trivia questions when put on the spot.
SRE's are hired to fix outages and other problems asap, knowing trivia is very important then since at that point you might be losing a million dollars per second.
But that's not the point of these questions. These questions are a 5-10min phone pre-screen before getting to the actual interviews. They test if the candidate has experience in a given field, not if they can search for information or what are the precise bounds of their capabilities.
It's trivia, but it's trivia that is a reasonably high confidence proxy for experience in e.g. network programming/design (resp. other fields). If someone claims they have networking experience and don't know SYN/SYN-ACK/ACK it's in my opinion a large red flag.