Some boring network engineering interview questions and how to replace them with smarter ones

ABSTRACT In this 30-minute session we will be reviewing the top 5 banal network engineering interview questions that are most commonly asked but yield little resul …

ABSTRACT In this 30-minute session we will be reviewing the top 5 banal network engineering interview questions that are most commonly asked but yield little results. Have you as an interviewer ever attended a job interview or a phone screen and wondered how to get more value out of the typical “Tell me about differences between TCP and UDP” question? How many times have you heard the world reliable in response while deep down you knew quite well that the candidate probably had no idea what it meant in real world? How to turn this and similar clichéd questions into more meaningful but still short scenarios that could give you better insights into the candidates’ potentials, beyond their interview day memory? In this presentation we will take on such well-known questions and turn them into what can be used to draw definite conclusions on the candidates’ critical abilities such as thinking big and outside the box or being creative and inventive. We will also demonstrate how to add a follow up question to each case depending on what level or position we are hiring for. Going back to our earlier example, If you share the feelings with us and despise the “Tell me about differences between TCP and UDP” thing, in this session we will display the benefits of a better alternative: “Let’s design an end to end seismic alarm system for a mission critical building and have it talk to remote servers in a data center using TCP or UDP”. While any answer cannot escape of having both pros and cons yet we believe in cases like this, in addition to simply gauging their memory you can measure their ability to think outside the box. You will also enable them to choose what they believe is the most efficient and then walk you through the drawbacks of their own design. Hold on, did you like their soft skills and thought process? Yes it was there too.