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