That's a horrible question for a non-technical HR person to pose to a
candidate - It's impossible for the candidate to ask clarifying
questions to make sure they understand what you are looking for, plus
you may have a strong candidate who gets it wrong (for whatever reason),
but if they were talking to a technical person you would realize they
were 99% of the way there. What if they said "it would cause the
generation of port-unreachable ICMP packets to cease, and applications
may hang until they timeout"? Not the answer you're looking for, but not
wrong either.
I leave HR to their standard screening stuff, and do the technical part
myself. Less chance to skip over a good candidate, even if it takes a
bit longer in the whole process.
On 7/5/12 1:02 PM, William Herrin wrote:
Hi folks,
I gave my HR folks a screening question to ask candidates for an IP
expert position. I've gotten some "unexpected" answers, so I want to
do a sanity check and make sure I'm not asking something unreasonable.
And by "unexpected" I don't mean naively incorrect answers, I mean
oh-my-God-how-did-you-get-that-cisco-certification answers.
The question was:
You implement a firewall on which you block all ICMP packets. What
part of the TCP protocol (not IP in general, TCP specifically)
malfunctions as a result?
My questions for you are:
1. As an expert who follows NANOG, do you know the answer? Or is this
question too hard?
2. Is the question too vague? Is there a clearer way to word it?
3. Is there a better screening question I could pass to HR to ask and
check the candidate's response against the supplied answer?
Thanks,
Bill Herrin
