
What happens when you type Google.com into your browser and press enter? - sourabhkt
https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when
======
cobookman
I hate this interview question. This question however would be a great intro
to CS/CMPE in university, "What happens when you type google.com into your
browser and press enter....well you'll be able to answer `most` of that by the
end of your PHD Dissertation."

~~~
adamnemecek
Why? It's so much better than the standard white board questions.

~~~
glhaynes
Agreed. It'd be terrible if it were being used to look for a "right" answer,
but as a means of getting someone to talk about systems and processes so you
can get a glimpse of their approach to things, I feel like it's really handy.

------
hatty
Open issue for NSA deep packet inspection. No skipping!
[https://github.com/alex/what-happens-
when/issues/34](https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when/issues/34)

------
brebla
You go to google.com, right? Nailed it.

~~~
CPLX
I see a future for you in the executive suite.

~~~
stuxnet79
He's got upper management written all over him. Now ... back to these TPS
reports.

------
lazyant
Just by quick browsing I see missing a lot of network and server-side: what if
name server doesn't have domain record, routing protocols (BGP), what happens
when request hits Google on their side, there's load balancer for sure -how do
they work-, there's probably CDN -how do they work, anycast etc-, there's HTTP
to HTTPS redirect...

~~~
jedberg
Make some pull requests to fix it then. :)

~~~
lazyant
yes I do that a lot (throw the stone and hide the hand)

------
wepple
This would be even cooler if you could expand a specific branch and continue
going into further and further detail. IMO the TLS section would be one of the
most interesting pieces, but it gets near-zero attention.

------
benstein
Cliche, but I've found this to be an amazing interview question for
nontechnical positions. You learn quickly how much someone can hand wave and
bullshit. If they are too cocky and can't say "I don't know", that's great to
suss out up front. If it's for a sales role, maybe that's a good thing.

------
DavideNL
Regarding the DNS lookup, i recently noticed Chromium (OS X latest versions)
connects to Google's public DNS servers a lot, even though i have a (working)
local DNS server defined in /etc/resolv.conf :/

------
bogomipz
This is another one of those cliche questions along with "how do you build a
URL shortener" and "what is a process" etc., that demonstrates a complete lack
of originality of the interviewer. "Oh I have an interview, let me google some
_good_ questions. Seriously is there a list somewhere of these for lazy
interviewers?

~~~
ceoloide
Why would originality be a concern, if the question is good and cannot be
"prepared in advance"? I believe that the question is not meant to be asked
without follow-ups, or deep dives in specific areas (maybe asking the
candidate where they want to focus next). I agree that if the question is
asked without entering a two-way discussion, then it's useless.

In the interest of a constructive discussion, why do you believe that a URL
shortener is a bad interview question?

------
orph
Still my favorite interview question ever.

------
kyled
Would you really answer this way? Maybe they are trying to test communication
skills, ie tell me what's only relevant. Can you imagine if you gave this
answer to a product manager for a browser? Context people....

~~~
Piskvorrr
Here's your context, good sir: This is, for intensive porpoises, a page trying
to go into as much detail as possible on a very mundane task. No, Actual
People (tm) would not answer that way - but going deeper down the stack than
usual is considered a form of geek amusement.

~~~
WickyNilliams
OT: Did you intentionally write "intensive porpoises" instead of "intents and
purposes"? I can't work out if it was a sublte joke or genuine mistake. The
mental image of intensive porpoises is hilarious

~~~
Piskvorrr
Good catch, I have indeed done so on purpose. My other favorite phrase to
sneak into technical writing is "[this and this] needs to be done that way for
hysterical raisins". Barely anyone notices.

------
auggierose
I think these days Google.com is served as a web-application, so that adds
some complexity to the whole question, for example, did you enter Google.com
before? (probably, yes :-))

------
Torgo
Google interview question, nailed it. Keep wrecking these.

------
doug1001
no need to speculate about this one; Jen from "IT Crowd" gave this dire
warning during a presentation to the executive staff meeting
([http://tinyurl.com/zsfuutd](http://tinyurl.com/zsfuutd)):
"You...Can...Break...The...Internet."

------
xs
As an interviewer, I love this question, but I don't have very good luck with
it. My goal is for them to find the area they know the most about and tell me
about it extreme detail. But the answer I always get is very short and broad,
and never dives into anything. I will probably modify the question to just ask
about how the TCP/IP portion works, or just ask about how the HTML rendering
portion works.

~~~
cjcenizal
Yep, I find it to be a terrible proxy for the question, "Which parts of the
HTTP request-response cycle interest you?" Please, please, please, if that is
your question, just simply ask that question. It gives the interviewee the
opportunity to steer the conversation in a useful direction (especially if the
answer is "Well, I'm not really interested in the details of that, but let me
tell you what I am interested in..." which would not be possible with the
original question, without sounding rude).

The problem with the original question is that it masks your true question and
makes it really difficult to understand what the discussion is about. If
someone is used to answering questions succinctly, directly, and usefully
(which are valuable traits in a productive engineering environment) then it's
really difficult to formulate a clear answer on the spot, regardless of your
depth of knowledge. The best response is probably the question, "Exactly which
part are you interested in, and in relation to what kinds of problems?"

------
ryandetzel
I was asked this once and I guess I failed. Dodged that bullet. ;)

------
kafkaesq
_The "g" key is pressed_

That's nice, but you forgot to explain how electrical circuits work. Which
ideally would have begun with with a rigorous statement of Kirchhoff's laws
(and in particular how these are generalizations of Ohm's law, and corollaries
of Maxwell's equations in the low-frequency limit).

We were also hoping to see you demonstrate at least a basic understanding of
how modern semiconductors work, to a point where we could feel confident that
you were at least reasonably conversant in the underlying language of solid
state physics. If you really wanted to get our attention, you would have asked
for extra time at the whiteboard to derive at least, say, the 1-soliton
solution to the wave equation, and used the first few terms of the expansion
series to obtain both elementary conserved quantities and additional non-
trivial quantities using the invariance and multiplier approach based on the
well-known result that the Euler-Lagrange operator annihilates to total
divergence.

That is, you _could have_. But you didn't.

We thank you for taking the time to discuss this opportunity with us; but mind
you, when we said we were looking for candidates with "strong CS
fundamentals", we meant it. So unfortunately we'll be moving forward with
other candidates, and we wish you the best of luck with your job search.

------
oarsinsync
Essentially making this an even more telling interview question when someone
is unable to answer it. Thanks!

~~~
gtk40
If you gave this amount of detail during an interview, you would have one
frustrated interviewer and not much time for anything else.

~~~
oarsinsync
"What happens.... and give as much detail as you can" is how I phrase it. If
the candidate tried to give this much detail, I'd stop them, congratulate them
on their ability to Google, put a positive mark next to that and move on. Or
not, as I've detected they're effectively plagiarising someone else's work.
Depends on how far they go with it I suppose. It could go either way!

That said, if I let them completely hijack the interview, I'm failing as an
interviewer. They're also failing as an interviewer, if they're actually
willing to waste the entire time answering the question in full in that way,
rather than recognising that the interview process is a two way street.

Either way, all this does is change the range of acceptable answers. Being
aware this information has been collected in such a useful way is the
important part. So again, Thanks!

~~~
taneq
> Or not, as I've detected they're effectively plagiarising someone else's
> work.

Ideally, if you're testing ability to research rather than domain-specific
knowledge, they'd just send you a link to a really good explanation. No sense
reinventing the wheel.

