It might be frustrating for you personally because you know so much that you could talk for hours about what happens, from keyboard interrupts to DNS to HTTP(s) and what-have-you, but in the absence of a personal recommendation, interviewers have to operate under the assumption that any and all claims of knowledge/experience/skill are suspect. I have interviewed people who claimed to have "deep algorithm design experience" who could not articulate what a set is, "network experts" who hadn't heard of NAT, and several "top graduates from a respected CS program" who froze when asked to talk about some basic tree operation.
If you'd responded to the question with the shocked response above, I'd probably have said "don't worry about it, let's pick X and Y" and mentally marked you as having knocked the question out of the park.
I can't stress enough how little the average applicant knows, regardless of how long they've been in the industry. It's helpful to have these questions as some sort of filter if you're looking to hire into a more-senior role, because many people either lie or obliviously overestimate their skills.
That said, if I was interviewing for a junior position and they bombed the question, I'd probably just make a mental note to buy them a copy of TCP/IP Illustrated when they came onboard or something.
Agree, and it's an opportunity for the candidate to demonstration their knowledge on whatever level they think is appropriate.
Interviewing is not about just showing you know x, y, z, it's largely a demonstration of your ability to communicate.
And the weaker candidates tend to get hung up on this question as being 'too simple' or confused about what level of detail they need to be supplying. Umm, look at the job description, tailor your answer, inform the panel you can elaborate further on something you're strong with, but avoid waffling on about irrelevant (to the position) technical detail. That's a bad thing in my book.
I think crucially, good candidates know what they don't know and have no problem communicating that. Weaker candidates feel pressure to "know everything" (impossible) and the moment they open their mouth with vague or incorrect responses, they become a risk if employed because when confronted professionally with something they don't know much about, they are more likely to try and wing it rather that stop and fill their knowledge gap or seek assistance from colleagues.
Yes, the communication aspect of it is huge as well. You might well be posed vaguely defined questions all the time in your work. If you get upset and/or are unable to start picking out the most important aspects of a question, that's a problem.
If you'd responded to the question with the shocked response above, I'd probably have said "don't worry about it, let's pick X and Y" and mentally marked you as having knocked the question out of the park.
I can't stress enough how little the average applicant knows, regardless of how long they've been in the industry. It's helpful to have these questions as some sort of filter if you're looking to hire into a more-senior role, because many people either lie or obliviously overestimate their skills.
That said, if I was interviewing for a junior position and they bombed the question, I'd probably just make a mental note to buy them a copy of TCP/IP Illustrated when they came onboard or something.