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Jonathan Hall
Jonathan Hall

Posted on • Originally published at jhall.io on

The craziest interview ever

Today some more light-hearted content. This is a list of actual questions I was asked by an actual technical CEO during an an actual interview for a SRE role several months ago. Needless to say, I was so put off by this interview that I withdrew from consideration.

  • Do you use an iPhone, or Android?
  • When you take a photo with your mobile, and upload the image, what format is the image in?
  • Why not PNG or TIFF or BMP?
  • That image contains metadata, such as the camera model, and date. How is that stored?
  • How does your phone know your location?
  • How does a cell phone tower know its location?
  • Imagine you were to dig a hole from your house, straight through the earth, where would you come out?
  • Now imagine a fiber optic cable that ran from your house to this point. How long would it take to ping that point?
  • You know the speed of light, right?
  • What is the circumference of the earth?
  • If you were to write a ping program in Go, how would you do it?
  • Only programs with root access can send ICMP packets. How would you allow your Go program to do this?
  • Do you use Emacs or vim?
  • What is the difference between XML, XHTML, and HTML5?
  • You know what a GIF is, right?
  • An alternative for GIF if you want animation, is Flash. Why isn’t Flash still popular?
  • How do you change the color of some text on a web page to yellow?
  • What is the RGB color code for yellow?
  • How do you add colored elements to a shell command prompt?
  • What is the difference between Unicode and UTF-8?

What are your worst interview stories? I’d love to hear!


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