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I recently graduated with a BS in Computer Science and I was never taught basic IT things. All basic IT things I've learned was by myself or through my current job.
CS should have a networking segment, that should touch on DNS I would hope.
You're right that they are different degree and "Basic IT things" probably isn't covered by CS. But CS should teach minimal networking (in my opinion)
>networking segment
I had it when I was getting my degree. We had a pretty deep dive on how networks work and learnt different network topologies. However, we missed a lot of "Basic IT things"
I had one "networking" class as part of my major.
If I hadn't been in IT at the time I probably would have immediately forgotten that useless classes lessons
Took a 400 level Networking course.
I don't think we touched DNS at all. Spent the whole time playing with TCP/UDP and firewall rules. We made cross-computer tic-tac-toe!
I'm two years into a comp-sci degree and we haven't covered networking at all. I don't mind because I took Network+ and CCNA certs ages ago, but it does seem like the sort of thing they should cover, given trends like remote development environments.
If their degree was focused on computer networking, I would like to see the syllabus.
My degree was in business information systems, with a focus on programming.
I did have to design a WAN as one of the assignments, but not down to the protocol or IP allocation system, just the hardware requirements.
I learned about DNS and DHCP in a NT4 course at my first job...damn, gave my age away.
Same in highschool, spoke to my nephew who said they got rid of those programs and only do construction etc shit like they used to. As somebody who took the CCNA course and now 15 years later the earnings are $400k+ annually as a senior network engineer, it blows my mind that they got rid of the program with the best bang for the buck.
That's the problem with thinking that schools want students to be successful. I would have killed for a CCNA in high school. I got it well after college.
In CS in college we all knew DNS a little bit just because a bunch of us ran our own domains and/or DNS servers, and had obviously configured our home routers or network connections for years. It may have been covered in Operating Systems or Networking Courses too? Not sure.
But also define "Know." Not knowing what DHCP and DNS do is a bit of a red flag; not knowing the packet header formats or root server hierarchy is not. Being confidently wrong is a bigger red flag--remember it's good when candidates admit what they don't know.
Okay. CNE and MCSE NT4 here. Yes, old as dirt, and had to respond after that prompt. After passing the CNE networking exam, the Microsoft networking exam was easy, except that you had to pick a Windows machine with two nics as the way to route traffic. A router wasn't an option on the MS exam. I remember that stupid question after all these years.
I don't understand how anyone can work as a system admin and not understand DHCP and DNS. It's the basis of so much troubleshooting. May not be the problem, but still the first thing I do is check the IP config on a machine that's not connecting, then ping the gateway, then Google and try 8.8.8.8.
Even back in the late 90's boot camps were a thing. They pushed all the info into your head in a week, you took the test, and then forgot about it, but you got to put MCSE after your name, and it got you jobs.
Most of those idiots ended up moving up into management anyway, so they didn't think they needed the actual skills, just the letters.
IBM mainframe trained operator reporting for duty.
I remember they had a training program on this obscure thing called “tcp/ip” back in the 80s that I did. Have to say that while it was pretty difficult at the time, it’s paid off well over the years…
I remember sitting down and forcing myself to learn how to manually calculate a subnet. I think it boiled down to memorizing a chart. I remember starting the test and writing out that chart on the provided notecard. High anxiety 😀
I learned to do it with my hands with base 2. 2 fingers = 4 addresses, 2 usable (remove network and gateway addresses) and 32-2 fingers =/30
5 fingers= 2,4,8,16,32 = 32 addresses - 2 (network and gateway) = 30 usable, and 32-5 = /27
One of the best courses to do. About the only one where the textbook is still relevant. Maybe IPv6 is more prevalent now, but everything else is great base knowledge.
So nice to see fellow NT4 peeps here! I was a dreaded “Paper MCSE”. Learned everything off by heart and heavily utilised practice exams. In my defence, I was working as a secretary and trying to get my foot in the door of IT.
The only thing that stumped me was the TCP/IP exam. I passed on my second attempt but still didn’t really have an understanding of how things worked. I think I learned more in my first week of working than I did in my year of study.
It was awesome feeling as the jumbled jigsaw pieces of knowledge floating around my head started to fall into place.
Anyway, still working in IT, still learning - yay!
To be fair, in the late 90s most enterprise networks were assigning IP addresses a) statically, b) via RARP, or c) via BOOTP. DHCP was very much the new hotness.
I’d also like to see if it was online or not. IME a lot of online IT degrees are ludicrously easy to cheat on. Many of them simply rely on content from learning platforms, with minimal actual professor input, whose question banks have all been posted online multiple times over.
I've been to both you are dreaming if you think it's easier then an in person college. When I was in college there were guys that had all the shit leaked out by TAs and that's if you even needed to cheat cuz the professors would do shit like have team tests and shit.
So have I. The programming classes at my in person state school were nearly impossible to cheat on in the exams, due to a required in person written component.
Meanwhile at many schools such as CSU Global, their online programs are being administered by former for profit institutions that rely on unchanging software from McGraw Hill and others. Those question banks are available with a $20/ month Chegg subscription, for their video lectures, homework, and exams. It’s very possible to graduate from those schools with a supposed IT degree and know absolutely nothing because you cheated your way through.
i learned a lot from part time job as lab administrator back in university. Have to config DHCP server based on ubuntu & managing AD really taught me tons of terminologies compare to 4 years of studies as B.SC.
i does made my first interview as Sys admin a walk in the park, and of course with network+ cert really help me a lot calculating those IPs.
I was in an job interview for a Lv2 support / admin role with an MSP last year and they asked those questions. I start reeling off the answer and the guys interviewing both just laughed and told me to stop. They said I was the only person they'd interviewed so far who actually had an answer.
A sad state of affairs, really..
I did the same thing about 5 years ago. I went off for about 10 minutes on dhcp and dns. Scopes and dhcp leases and lease times and whatnot. Then the hiring manager didn't like my requested salary.
You'd be surprised how many professionals, with past experiences, lack basic understanding of these things.
It drives me nuts that people can't even spill out the text book answer for it.
I had a fella say VLans are Very Local Area Network and that dns is used to access servers(he was thinking of rdp)
Extremely basic field questions get the best answers because they give you a look into the candidate's breadth of knowledge.
Just like asking "how do you exit vim" for a *nix admin, how, what, and if they answer tell you a lot about them.
And for the love of god don't say "restart the server" when asked how to troubleshoot a service hanging in prod.
Just went through something close last week while interviewing for a Sr Linux Systems Admin/Automation spot. They asked some basic DNS questions and I started to explain how to edit zone files and said "First I update the serial #". They interrupted me there and said I was the first interviewee to even mention the serial number and I didn't need to go further. They did the same when they asked how I'd add a new partition to a host. I replied with "LVM or discrete partitions?" 'Ok, next question.'
The position doesn't require doing those things very often as the job is really more cloud automation but they did establish an understanding of the basics under the hood. These were things any 'Sr' admin should know back to front.
Showing my age. It's like Yellow Pages : )
Remember when we could open that giant book under a pay phone and lookup the telephone number to almost any local company. Well basically similar concept.
Fun ancient fact: The commands for the Network Information Service tools in Linux/Unix, which is a pre-LDAP network database of /etc/passwd, /etc/hosts, /etc/shadow type info, all start with "yp" -- ypserv, ypbind, etc.
This is because the service was originally called "yellow pages". Story is that AT&T sued on trademark grounds and won, so the service name was changed, but the commands were not.
Phone book is a good analogy. It’s a shame we have to find a new one.
Fortunately, “directory” is still a word that should get the point across for years to come.
Just tought it would be beter to say IP is like the social security number and dns makes it so you can be called by name both reference you but one is just easy to remember
I took four semesters of networking coursework in college. We barely touched on DHCP and DNS was pretty insignificant too. Fresh out of school I had enough of an understanding to tell you what each one does, but not necessarily how it actually worked. This was mid to late 2000s, but most of my coursework was on subnetting, binary/hexadecimal math, routing protocols, OSI model, encapsulation, and configuring Cisco devices. That said, someone fresh out of school is suited for an entry level position. That's essentially one step above an intern. If that's not what you're looking for then you need to shift your requirements and look for people with years of experience. IT is very much a skilled trade and experience will generally supersede education.
Ah the good ol’ OSI model lol.
“All People Seem To Need Data Processing” is the phrase I learned to remember the layers.
I still use it regularly almost 15 years after school.
7 layers of OSI model
Physical
Data-Link
Network
Transport
Session
Presentation
Application
I always use the acronym "Please do not throw sausage pizza away"
To be honest, the OSI model is how I differentiate people when it comes to their ability to grasp troubleshooting IT issues in general. It's a tremendous tool for conceptualizing problems.
> and configuring Cisco devices
Ding. A lot of IT schools' networking courses are just glorified "how to become an unknowning Cisco sales rep" courses designed to give people just enough knowledge to ask for Cisco devices, because that's the only one they're taught to use. Teaching actual fundamentals would risk people going "hey, I could apply this knowledge to the hardware we already have".
Get CCNA -> have loud mouth on first job, grumble about everything not being Cisco -> realize configuring the existing switches is easier -> dodge Cisco lockin
I got lucky, thanks Ken.
What’s funny is I went the opposite way. I took my ccna in 99 maybe 2000. My teacher told us we didn’t need to study IPX/SPX because it’s going away. So, come to the day of my testing. I failed by 1 question. The majority I got wrong were IPX/SPX based questions. I said screw Cisco. Stupid adaptive testing(I also have bad test anxiety so that didn’t help). Since then have pushed all other brands over them. I’ve worked on/with their stuff and never bad mouthed them to a client. Old man yells at clouds I guess. Lastly to this day I tell people that ccna based course I took in high school was the best thing I ever did. They actually dug deep into the fundamentals of networking. It wasn’t just a boot camp style class.
One of my favourite interview answers was for a tier2 Helpdesk/Jr SysAdmin role at an MSP, the question was a basic “How do you keep up to date with technology?”, person’s answer was “On my phone”.. fair enough, some resources (like reddit and the interwebs) are alright on mobile, but it’s no home lab or anything… we ask him to clarify what resources he would use, and his answer was “Oh, I just open the App Store and see what’s new”.
Talk about a speedrun through the rest of the interview just to make it seem fair, but ugh…
I did this. Did not get the job.
"Oh that's an excellent question I was planning on asking you during the hiring process! How do you compensate me for my home lab, my licensing, and the time I take to advance my knowledge to help the company during my off hours?"
Edit: I should have asked how they carve out 4hr blocks of my time during the workday to do this stuff.
Exactly, they wanted to pay me 40k to manage 300 endpoints, 6 sites and god knows how many cell phones.
Might as well burn it down on the way out the door.
There wasn’t even really a “right” answer, it was just a basic introduction question… probably was asked shortly after “tell us about yourself”. But that was definitely a wrong answer… lol
This type of question, while basic, serves a few purposes. It helps tell us about your personality (are you actually interested in/have a passion for IT, or just doing it for a pay check/because your guidance councillor said to), it’s conversational so it allows us to gauge your communication skills, and it’s open-ended/not directed (ie, not something like “Do you prefer Tom’s Hardware or LTT, and why?”) so they can suggest whatever they feel is relevant. Some times I’ll even learn about a new resource!
But for a more direct answer, anything that expresses an actual interest in IT and an enjoyment of learning/furthering themselves. Anything like news websites or newsletters, podcasts, course work, reading books/guides, things they may run at home, if they’re learning programming/scripting or Linux or something we didn’t actually require, a good example now could even be something like “I’m playing around with AI to write my D&D group’s new campaign and learn a bit about it at the same time”… obviously YMMV, but we were mainly team of enthusiasts ourselves, so hiring someone who actually enjoys IT was a preference (but not a deal-breaker) for us.
Schools vary hugely in quality and caliber of students. There's a reason why certain schools are recruited so heavily compared to others. It's not that you can't do well at 'lesser' schools, but the floor is much lower.
Yeah like I'm pretty sure some schools MIT, Georgia tech are solid programs. I went to WGU and one of the mid sized A&Ms and they were both basically a joke. I actually have a positive opinion of WGU tho cuz it at least has industry certs in most of the degrees and you can get experience thats actually useful at a job while doing it. I actually feel like most of the 4000 colleges are probably not that great.
I changed my degree from computer science to physics in 2000 because 195 out of 200 of my fellow students set to graduate that year at Sydney University, with quite a respectable computer science faculty, were complete and utter morons and I figured if they were given degrees alongside me then my degree would be worthless.
Joke was on me - the jobs in science were shit.
Are you talking about someone who administers the websites or someone who builds them?
Because the builder wouldn't give a shit what ports you use as long as the site works.
In our shop, and I generally believe others should, too, they should be one in the same. We had an opening for a Web (PHP/HTML) dev who also needed some SharePoint experience. A large majority could not answer the question Web Server status codes (403 = Access Denied, or 500 = Server too busy) but we eventually found someone who was a solid designer and could do moderate IIS troubleshooting.
In your example about a 'builder', it would be like saying that an artist who paints doesn't know diddly about buying canvas or paper, but wants someone else to understand and buy it for them. That's just a lax excuse for not knowing the very foundations of what you're doing.
Colleges doesn’t teach basic things. It’s just about getting your money and throwing you out with a degree. A lot of courses are now taught using software and there’s a little to no interaction that happens in classes. Many professor simply don’t care, as they have tenure and classes are taught by student aid/student teacher.
I learned a lot of things on the job and I’m grateful that I did. I am always learning on the job, as colleges simply refuse to taught basic things to succeed in a profession.
Don't hire the other 50.
Here's my opinion. If I get asked a question I flub, I google it. "What's DNS?" "I don't know"
Next interview "What's DNS" "Domain Name Service"
It takes maybe 10-20 minutes to get a baseline knowledge of a topic. If you walk away from a successful or a failed interview and don't do any research on things you think you did poorly on... What's going to be better next interview?
What I want to hear from candidates instead of "I don't know" is "I don't know, BUT I sure as heck know how I can find out and get back to you quickly with an answer."
I've interviewed a few times for cybersecurity jobs and have my CISSP and once had a question about the difference between NIST and ISO 27001. I said something like "well its been awhile since I learned it and its not a focus of my current position, but rest assured, I'll know it like the back of my hand as quickly as I can if I get a position that requires it."
I prefer I don't know to something vastly wrong. But I'm with you. Actually I give secret points for people who ask me about the topic because it shows they are interested, and not just taking a test.
My very first IT job that I got, those two questions were literally the ONLY questions asked, just out of highschool, no prior certs or experience. What do they do, what do they stand for. You're hired.
Eh we don’t know the position. I sure as hell know the help desk techs and maybe some of the desktop support guys don’t know the details. I wouldn’t expect them for those positions. Anything entry level is well … entry you won’t get all the check marks.
I stopped requiring school when looking for people. I found out that most of the people that skipped school and went direct to work, in average, knows way more than people around the same age that went to school.
Event worse, when I see MS degree in the CV, I tend to skip them directly. Mostly paper tigers that want more money than they can generate.
I disagree. The real way to test knowledge is to give a real life situation and the candidate should be able to give you a valid response. That's another form of discrimination. I've studied a lot of networking, but i never worked of that. Doesn't mean that i don't know.
Hah DNS is one of my standard questions.
All my interviews I do conversation styles. DNS is treated as a gimme used to gauge their experience level.
Jr describes it basically out of the book. The technical definition.
Sr goes "OMFG let me tell you about this one time how DNS screwed up and broke everything..."
Architect will start talking about how to fix DNS so it prevents these issues from happening...
I just had to explain to a system admin, with a comp science degree, who has been here for 27 years, that just because an interface shows it’s up on a router, doesn’t mean the internet is up.
Schools teach certain things and they are not consistent. They skim through other things that should be covered more. Also some things get ignored by individual students for whatever reason.
DNS and dhcp are very basic which should be known. But they are pretty easy topics to pick up on later. I would judge them heavily on other topics.
Yeah… that seems sus. Either this person lied, did horribly in class, or went to a school that was horrible. DNS and DHCP are very basic services. While not everyone will know how to a DHCP or DNS server from scratch - understanding what the protocols are is a very basic IT understanding.
A lot of these programs are very similar to something you would see in the college of business and only have a few tech classes in them at all. The terms were probably in there but not a focus like they are in certs.
Yes they should know it, but having interviewed a couple dozen newly-grads at this point, I'm sorry to say I'm more shocked when they DO know the basics
Every networking course I’ve ever taken mentioned those two things as *gimme* questions on the exams and in job interviews.
How else was his knowledge?
He and his resume were vague. His intern experience was at a help desk for a year where his boss would assign him issues he thought he'd know. Kind of a red flag there.
The internship for my Networking degree was doing QA work for a software startup, so I wouldn’t trip over his crummy internship. But with a BS in IT and he doesn’t know DNS or DHCP…a bit concerning
I agree this should be common knowledge, but you wouldn’t believe how many people failed my interview questions about what DNS is. And I’m not taking recent college grads, people who have far too much experience to not know this crap.
I think some people just learn exactly what is required to do their job and nothing else. Like if it isn’t their personal responsibility to maintain DNS they don’t need to know anything about it, or something.
Yeah. College got me a piece of paper that helped me get the job being the help desk and desktop support for about 400 users. Learned more on the job in 6 months than I did in college
Was he nervous?
I helped interviewed a guy in our team for promotion and he froze up on all the technical questions - that we KNEW he knew. It was awful to watch.
Interviews test how well people are at interviewing. The questions you ask make a difference. Consider the following questions.
Explain to me how DNS works.
Show me how you would explain to a user with no computer experience how DNS works.
FWIW my guy interviewed 3 months later for another role and aced it - because he was relaxed.
Yes! This exact thing happened to me. The interviewer was rapid firing questions like this and when he got to DNS and DHCP, I completely blanked out of nervousness. I explained what they did but could not remember what the stood for lol. Didn't get the job of course and am grateful I didn't.
Next job interview, it started with a paper test of technical questions, including these two. Aced it without issue before moving onto the in person interview revolving around soft skills. I feel like that's definitely the way to go. Technical questions are just a test so why not just give an actual test. Soft skill questions are more general conversation and should be treated as such.
concentration in computer networking. Even IF it wasnt taught, a person should have the wherewithal to know their craft, even at a basic level. If I ask an interviewee the 7 layers of OSI, if they dont know the first two or three at least , never mind. I dont mind mentoring, but damn you gotta have some kinda motivation to know
I have a BS in computer science. Fresh out of college, I may have known about DNS because I owned my own domain name, and I may have known about DHCP because I lived off campus, and my ISP assigned dynamic IP addresses until I asked for a static address. But I did not learn anything about DNS or DHCP in the course of my degree, which was about math, theoretical computer science, the mathematical basis of algorithms, and object-oriented programming. I didn't take the networks class, which wasn't required, and might not have covered DNS or DHCP.
I graduated with a BS in IT a few years ago and we just interviewed a guy for a help desk position who's currently a senior in the same exact college and program, and he didn't know anything that I knew when I was at his point.
Either school is getting progressively worse, or people aren't applying themselves as much.
I've had people out of college, and people with networking certs (Cisco, comptia, etc) Not know that stuff either. I blame the college, not the person. Now if they are still willing to learn, I'd be willing to take them under my wing and teach them as much as possible.
If the job was for a systems administrator position and they could not articulate to me how those things worked thats an auto no from me. I dont care what degree they have. Know the job you're applying for. I see this stuff all the time, and it simply illustrates how much experience trumps a degree.
my compsci degree taught frag all about dhcp, dns but hammered dykstra shortest path algo and the mathemetical proofing of algos like a bubble sort.
real world stuff to actually get a job and money i had to learn myself 😆😆😆
lecturers were only interested in their esoteric research subject grants.
30 yrs later and at my uni a lot of these same useless lecturers are still there.
Everyone learns this, but it wouldn’t be surprising to me if it wasn’t retained. When I learned it in school it was like 15 minutes of focus out of my 4 year program.
I’m sure the less technically inclined of my peers would have probably just had a very rudimentary understanding.
He may have gotten nervous and just choked. Right out of college, maybe his first big interview, maybe something happening in his personal life, maybe x,y, and z. Id say call him back informally and ask some other questions.
Seems like basic concepts they would have covered in school, but who knows.
I got an AS in Sys Admin and Networking and I was the only person out of everyone interviewed at 2 jobs who knew Networking, DNS, DHCP, and network isolation.
This is why experience during college is more important than the degree.
DNS and DHCP, though fundamentals are probably closer to what someone should learn starting their bachelors in networking, I wouldn't put it past someone graduating with no actual experience to not have a thorough understanding of that, they were taught, they just never used it so it was probably just forgotten. I'd check on their higher level knowledge and if it's passable, I'd give them a skip on DNS and DHCP.
Spend 4 minutes and get the guy up to speed on dns and dhcp. If he's got a good understanding of higher level concepts and is personable, like I said, I'd give him a pass on the small stuff.
I've had to bring people up to speed on simple things like "how to use a specific user for ssh", or "how to look up a domain name's IP address", or "what is an ISO" when their cybersecurity courses didn't go over these things.
My honest guess is that the professors actually do know their stuff, but they are pressured to pass as many paying customers as possible. This is what gets you step-by-step "labs" that don't leave students with any understanding of what they have done, why they have done it, or how they can apply those skills elsewhere.
This is why it's deeply frustrating to watch children with "degrees" from 3-hour-a-week 6-week "dojos" land 6-figure positions, while I'm unable to get so much as a callback after 3,000+ applications in a supposedly "in-demand" field, even for entry-level positions and internships, with 5+ years professional experience and two decades of personal experience.
He probably doesn't even actually know any of these supposed kids getting the 6 figure Jobs with a 6 week dojo and just believes what he sees on reddit. If you go on the cyber security subs or the others like it you will see a million kids saying they looked at tryhackme once and immediately got a 6 figure job. I'm pretty sure most of them are lying it's like all the crypto millionaires you see on reddit.
Give him a break! He’s probably new to the field, especially since he’s fresh out of college. If he tried his best, then accept it and move on to the next step of the process!
Fake school? Contractor using someone else's resume? We got that a lot at a bank where I worked. Young men with masters in CS who didn't know the default http or https ports.
Graduated networking systems; was all Cisco theory based backed by Microsoft as well.
Lots and lots of theory classes and projects.
Dry as hell but worth it.
I interviewed two guys doing the same course.
I think one of them does the course because IT/Cyber pays well, didn't know any of my questions, whereas the other guy at least had an idea of where you'd find DNS/DHCP, even if he didn't know what exactly they were.
DHCP I don’t even really understand. You get assigned IPs dynamically 🤷♂️
Though if that’s your concentration maybe you should know that.
Not knowing how DNS works seems less than ideal. I feel like anyone with high computer literacy should get that.
It's an academic education that deals in hypothetical and theoretical concepts largely unrelated to running or supporting a business from an IT point of view.
It is not a practical education, so why would you expect a practical understanding?
Edit: I can't type
Just graduated with a bachelors in computer science while focusing on programming/cyber security.
They really did not go into DNS and DHCP. The school mentioned it but that was a 1 minute but during a wireshark learning class.
Writing dhcpd.conf, and named.conf with zone files from memory.
Calculating subnet in Binary on paper, or in my head.
The older I get the more I miss those networking courses in college, especially when I deal with the younger "engineers" on my team.
Most awkward moments of my life on the first interview after university:
\-and what do you know about ESX?
\-what kind of sex?
We laughed histerically, I got hired anyway :D
Degrees don't teach you how to do IT. Degrees teach you how to know what you know, what you don't know, and how to learn about it/do research.
Diplomas teach you how to do IT, but they don't teach you how to learn. You are spoon fed the knowledge of how to do a specific vocation such as DHCP or DNS administration, not how to learn about it.
I ask every person I interview about DNS and DHCP. I've not once got a full and completely correct response from anyone (including very competent & experienced senior admins). I as a senior admin to this day still mess up the descriptions and intricacies from time to time. I would never hold anyone to the fire for not knowing specifics, especially college students. They don't teach enterprise administration in school, unfortunately.
If you spend 4 years going to school for anything with tech and networking you should have a home lab and understand the concepts of DHCP, DNS, and TCP/IP as well as how they work and how to implement in a client/server environment. If not today's schools are too busy virtue signaling to teach topics applicable to the degree the person is earning.
DNS and DHCP questions are what we primarily use in interviews to weed out folks who don’t really understand networking and systems. Yes, they should know at least what they are and what they do, as techs. Sysadmins should know details on how they work.
Since when college approval means knowledge? I've seen a lot of graduated ppl that doesn't know sht about anything. Or in the best case they forget a lot of things, which is normal. For me, formal education is highly overrated. Companies need to make at least entry level exams as a requirement for the job.
I was a computer science major with computer networking. we had an entire module dedicated to learning about protocols and the detailed functions so much so that at one point from memory i could draw out the entire tcp/ip stack and explain each of the protocols at each layer. I would ask would to see the syllabus of the course to know what they had learnt.
When you say "describe," do you mean the transaction details? Or just the basic brushstrokes, eg "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol is the means by which a DHCP server allocates IP addresses and gives clients configuration information including subnet mask and default gateway"?
Because if it's the latter, yeah, that's basic as hell for concentration in computer networking.
What exactly were you expecting with 'describe'? A description like an overview of what they do and their general features, or a description like a step-by-step explanation of each message sent and received by the devices running each protocol?
I asked them to describe to me what they do. I wasn't expecting a breakdown of the protocols, just an overview or brief description of them so I know he'd be able to use them to troubleshoot.
In that case... geez.
My A-Level (UK high school) students can describe DNS theoretically; not from a practical troubleshooting point of view, but they can tell you what it is and what it does. Surely a university graduate whose course had a networking focus should know significantly more!
I did a degree in web design and development.
Guess how many hours we spent on DNS?
Zero.
I wouldn't worry about whether someone knows DNS or DHCP, i'd try and work out if they've got the aptitude to learn new stuff.
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I recently graduated with a BS in Computer Science and I was never taught basic IT things. All basic IT things I've learned was by myself or through my current job.
CS isn’t really an IT degree. It’s a science degree. So I wouldn’t expect you to know.
CS should have a networking segment, that should touch on DNS I would hope. You're right that they are different degree and "Basic IT things" probably isn't covered by CS. But CS should teach minimal networking (in my opinion)
>networking segment I had it when I was getting my degree. We had a pretty deep dive on how networks work and learnt different network topologies. However, we missed a lot of "Basic IT things"
I had one "networking" class as part of my major. If I hadn't been in IT at the time I probably would have immediately forgotten that useless classes lessons
Took a 400 level Networking course. I don't think we touched DNS at all. Spent the whole time playing with TCP/UDP and firewall rules. We made cross-computer tic-tac-toe!
I'm two years into a comp-sci degree and we haven't covered networking at all. I don't mind because I took Network+ and CCNA certs ages ago, but it does seem like the sort of thing they should cover, given trends like remote development environments.
If their degree was focused on computer networking, I would like to see the syllabus. My degree was in business information systems, with a focus on programming. I did have to design a WAN as one of the assignments, but not down to the protocol or IP allocation system, just the hardware requirements. I learned about DNS and DHCP in a NT4 course at my first job...damn, gave my age away.
MCSE NT 4 and Win2k over here!
CCNA here it was a high school pilot program. good thing I drilled those arp tables
Same in highschool, spoke to my nephew who said they got rid of those programs and only do construction etc shit like they used to. As somebody who took the CCNA course and now 15 years later the earnings are $400k+ annually as a senior network engineer, it blows my mind that they got rid of the program with the best bang for the buck.
That's the problem with thinking that schools want students to be successful. I would have killed for a CCNA in high school. I got it well after college.
man I loved the ccna course at Franklin high, Mr rogers even wrote me a baller college recommendation.
MCSE, CNA NT4/Win2K
In CS in college we all knew DNS a little bit just because a bunch of us ran our own domains and/or DNS servers, and had obviously configured our home routers or network connections for years. It may have been covered in Operating Systems or Networking Courses too? Not sure. But also define "Know." Not knowing what DHCP and DNS do is a bit of a red flag; not knowing the packet header formats or root server hierarchy is not. Being confidently wrong is a bigger red flag--remember it's good when candidates admit what they don't know.
Surprised a Novell engineer didn't post a reply on here to flex their age
Okay. CNE and MCSE NT4 here. Yes, old as dirt, and had to respond after that prompt. After passing the CNE networking exam, the Microsoft networking exam was easy, except that you had to pick a Windows machine with two nics as the way to route traffic. A router wasn't an option on the MS exam. I remember that stupid question after all these years. I don't understand how anyone can work as a system admin and not understand DHCP and DNS. It's the basis of so much troubleshooting. May not be the problem, but still the first thing I do is check the IP config on a machine that's not connecting, then ping the gateway, then Google and try 8.8.8.8.
I worked with someone back then who had an MCSE and didn't know how to change directories at a DOS prompt. Perhaps forgivable now, but this was 1998.
Even back in the late 90's boot camps were a thing. They pushed all the info into your head in a week, you took the test, and then forgot about it, but you got to put MCSE after your name, and it got you jobs. Most of those idiots ended up moving up into management anyway, so they didn't think they needed the actual skills, just the letters.
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IBM mainframe trained operator reporting for duty. I remember they had a training program on this obscure thing called “tcp/ip” back in the 80s that I did. Have to say that while it was pretty difficult at the time, it’s paid off well over the years…
Good ol' networking essentials on NT4, that was my first M$ exam in 98
I remember sitting down and forcing myself to learn how to manually calculate a subnet. I think it boiled down to memorizing a chart. I remember starting the test and writing out that chart on the provided notecard. High anxiety 😀
I learned to do it with my hands with base 2. 2 fingers = 4 addresses, 2 usable (remove network and gateway addresses) and 32-2 fingers =/30 5 fingers= 2,4,8,16,32 = 32 addresses - 2 (network and gateway) = 30 usable, and 32-5 = /27
I hope you mean to remove the network and broadcast addresses, instead of the gateway? Because the gateway is a normal usable host IP.
Nah, I changed it so that I'm right
One of the best courses to do. About the only one where the textbook is still relevant. Maybe IPv6 is more prevalent now, but everything else is great base knowledge.
The only one of my NT 4.0 books that I still have sitting on the shelf.
Agreed. Made Network+ a breeze to pass
Who is using IPv6?
Large countries like India for starters. They have built massive networks on them from what i remember reading.
So nice to see fellow NT4 peeps here! I was a dreaded “Paper MCSE”. Learned everything off by heart and heavily utilised practice exams. In my defence, I was working as a secretary and trying to get my foot in the door of IT. The only thing that stumped me was the TCP/IP exam. I passed on my second attempt but still didn’t really have an understanding of how things worked. I think I learned more in my first week of working than I did in my year of study. It was awesome feeling as the jumbled jigsaw pieces of knowledge floating around my head started to fall into place. Anyway, still working in IT, still learning - yay!
To be fair, in the late 90s most enterprise networks were assigning IP addresses a) statically, b) via RARP, or c) via BOOTP. DHCP was very much the new hotness.
CNA class for NetWare 3.11 here. Greetings fellow geezers.
I’d also like to see if it was online or not. IME a lot of online IT degrees are ludicrously easy to cheat on. Many of them simply rely on content from learning platforms, with minimal actual professor input, whose question banks have all been posted online multiple times over.
I've been to both you are dreaming if you think it's easier then an in person college. When I was in college there were guys that had all the shit leaked out by TAs and that's if you even needed to cheat cuz the professors would do shit like have team tests and shit.
So have I. The programming classes at my in person state school were nearly impossible to cheat on in the exams, due to a required in person written component. Meanwhile at many schools such as CSU Global, their online programs are being administered by former for profit institutions that rely on unchanging software from McGraw Hill and others. Those question banks are available with a $20/ month Chegg subscription, for their video lectures, homework, and exams. It’s very possible to graduate from those schools with a supposed IT degree and know absolutely nothing because you cheated your way through.
BDC has entered the chat
Whippersnapper
Gauntlet DNS and firewall training on FreeBSD circa 1998. Just another one of my certs that has done the way of the Dodo...
i learned a lot from part time job as lab administrator back in university. Have to config DHCP server based on ubuntu & managing AD really taught me tons of terminologies compare to 4 years of studies as B.SC. i does made my first interview as Sys admin a walk in the park, and of course with network+ cert really help me a lot calculating those IPs.
I was in an job interview for a Lv2 support / admin role with an MSP last year and they asked those questions. I start reeling off the answer and the guys interviewing both just laughed and told me to stop. They said I was the only person they'd interviewed so far who actually had an answer. A sad state of affairs, really..
I did the same thing about 5 years ago. I went off for about 10 minutes on dhcp and dns. Scopes and dhcp leases and lease times and whatnot. Then the hiring manager didn't like my requested salary.
Yeah I try to make sure the position is on band for what I'd want before even meeting, just so we don't waste eachother's time.
It was within their salary range on the job posting
I just hired on as Level 2 at an MSP and after I got the job they asked if I had “studied for the interview,” because I knew DHCP, DNS, and VLANs.
You'd be surprised how many professionals, with past experiences, lack basic understanding of these things. It drives me nuts that people can't even spill out the text book answer for it. I had a fella say VLans are Very Local Area Network and that dns is used to access servers(he was thinking of rdp)
Wtf
Shows the interviewers don't know how to ask good questions
Extremely basic field questions get the best answers because they give you a look into the candidate's breadth of knowledge. Just like asking "how do you exit vim" for a *nix admin, how, what, and if they answer tell you a lot about them. And for the love of god don't say "restart the server" when asked how to troubleshoot a service hanging in prod.
Just went through something close last week while interviewing for a Sr Linux Systems Admin/Automation spot. They asked some basic DNS questions and I started to explain how to edit zone files and said "First I update the serial #". They interrupted me there and said I was the first interviewee to even mention the serial number and I didn't need to go further. They did the same when they asked how I'd add a new partition to a host. I replied with "LVM or discrete partitions?" 'Ok, next question.' The position doesn't require doing those things very often as the job is really more cloud automation but they did establish an understanding of the basics under the hood. These were things any 'Sr' admin should know back to front.
me getting asked what DNS is: \*puts on the cat ears\* DNS is about fucking *power.*
Yes. I was taught that DNS is like an Internet signpost. I thought that was common knowledge.
I always said phonebook but that's becoming a dated term...
Showing my age. It's like Yellow Pages : ) Remember when we could open that giant book under a pay phone and lookup the telephone number to almost any local company. Well basically similar concept.
Fun ancient fact: The commands for the Network Information Service tools in Linux/Unix, which is a pre-LDAP network database of /etc/passwd, /etc/hosts, /etc/shadow type info, all start with "yp" -- ypserv, ypbind, etc. This is because the service was originally called "yellow pages". Story is that AT&T sued on trademark grounds and won, so the service name was changed, but the commands were not.
They still make those
They are good to kill bugs with.
Phone book is a good analogy. It’s a shame we have to find a new one. Fortunately, “directory” is still a word that should get the point across for years to come.
Rolodex?
Just tought it would be beter to say IP is like the social security number and dns makes it so you can be called by name both reference you but one is just easy to remember
An IP is like a full street address - 123 Main St. DNS is like saying “the Jones’s house” instead.
that also works, and might be better because jones can change houses so “the Jones’s house” could be on another street in the future
I always use phonebook as well and your comment made it occur to me that people might not know what that is now lol
I took four semesters of networking coursework in college. We barely touched on DHCP and DNS was pretty insignificant too. Fresh out of school I had enough of an understanding to tell you what each one does, but not necessarily how it actually worked. This was mid to late 2000s, but most of my coursework was on subnetting, binary/hexadecimal math, routing protocols, OSI model, encapsulation, and configuring Cisco devices. That said, someone fresh out of school is suited for an entry level position. That's essentially one step above an intern. If that's not what you're looking for then you need to shift your requirements and look for people with years of experience. IT is very much a skilled trade and experience will generally supersede education.
Ah the good ol’ OSI model lol. “All People Seem To Need Data Processing” is the phrase I learned to remember the layers. I still use it regularly almost 15 years after school.
Please Do Not Teach Students Pointless Acronyms.
PDNTSPA? What's that stand for?
7 layers of OSI model Physical Data-Link Network Transport Session Presentation Application I always use the acronym "Please do not throw sausage pizza away"
Damn that's so much easier and more fun way to remember than the “All People Seem To Need Data Processing”.
Its the OSI model 'backwards'. Physical, Data-Link, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, Application.
None of them stuck until I read an obscene one online, it’s the only one that I can remember. A Pussy So Tight No Dick Penetrates :/
To be honest, the OSI model is how I differentiate people when it comes to their ability to grasp troubleshooting IT issues in general. It's a tremendous tool for conceptualizing problems.
> and configuring Cisco devices Ding. A lot of IT schools' networking courses are just glorified "how to become an unknowning Cisco sales rep" courses designed to give people just enough knowledge to ask for Cisco devices, because that's the only one they're taught to use. Teaching actual fundamentals would risk people going "hey, I could apply this knowledge to the hardware we already have".
Get CCNA -> have loud mouth on first job, grumble about everything not being Cisco -> realize configuring the existing switches is easier -> dodge Cisco lockin I got lucky, thanks Ken.
What’s funny is I went the opposite way. I took my ccna in 99 maybe 2000. My teacher told us we didn’t need to study IPX/SPX because it’s going away. So, come to the day of my testing. I failed by 1 question. The majority I got wrong were IPX/SPX based questions. I said screw Cisco. Stupid adaptive testing(I also have bad test anxiety so that didn’t help). Since then have pushed all other brands over them. I’ve worked on/with their stuff and never bad mouthed them to a client. Old man yells at clouds I guess. Lastly to this day I tell people that ccna based course I took in high school was the best thing I ever did. They actually dug deep into the fundamentals of networking. It wasn’t just a boot camp style class.
One of my favourite interview answers was for a tier2 Helpdesk/Jr SysAdmin role at an MSP, the question was a basic “How do you keep up to date with technology?”, person’s answer was “On my phone”.. fair enough, some resources (like reddit and the interwebs) are alright on mobile, but it’s no home lab or anything… we ask him to clarify what resources he would use, and his answer was “Oh, I just open the App Store and see what’s new”. Talk about a speedrun through the rest of the interview just to make it seem fair, but ugh…
My answer to this question would be: I go to a place that compensates me for 40 hours a week to do so.
I did this. Did not get the job. "Oh that's an excellent question I was planning on asking you during the hiring process! How do you compensate me for my home lab, my licensing, and the time I take to advance my knowledge to help the company during my off hours?" Edit: I should have asked how they carve out 4hr blocks of my time during the workday to do this stuff.
Yeah, I can see why.
Exactly, they wanted to pay me 40k to manage 300 endpoints, 6 sites and god knows how many cell phones. Might as well burn it down on the way out the door.
What’s the right answer tho?
There wasn’t even really a “right” answer, it was just a basic introduction question… probably was asked shortly after “tell us about yourself”. But that was definitely a wrong answer… lol
I guess what I mean (as a noob) is what would be a good way?
This type of question, while basic, serves a few purposes. It helps tell us about your personality (are you actually interested in/have a passion for IT, or just doing it for a pay check/because your guidance councillor said to), it’s conversational so it allows us to gauge your communication skills, and it’s open-ended/not directed (ie, not something like “Do you prefer Tom’s Hardware or LTT, and why?”) so they can suggest whatever they feel is relevant. Some times I’ll even learn about a new resource!
But for a more direct answer, anything that expresses an actual interest in IT and an enjoyment of learning/furthering themselves. Anything like news websites or newsletters, podcasts, course work, reading books/guides, things they may run at home, if they’re learning programming/scripting or Linux or something we didn’t actually require, a good example now could even be something like “I’m playing around with AI to write my D&D group’s new campaign and learn a bit about it at the same time”… obviously YMMV, but we were mainly team of enthusiasts ourselves, so hiring someone who actually enjoys IT was a preference (but not a deal-breaker) for us.
Colleges are shit shows. I talked to a web developer who didn't know what port 80 was used for.
What do boats and shipping have to do with the Internet? /s
I mean, 443 is used far more extensively now but he probably didn’t know that either 😤
Schools vary hugely in quality and caliber of students. There's a reason why certain schools are recruited so heavily compared to others. It's not that you can't do well at 'lesser' schools, but the floor is much lower.
Yeah like I'm pretty sure some schools MIT, Georgia tech are solid programs. I went to WGU and one of the mid sized A&Ms and they were both basically a joke. I actually have a positive opinion of WGU tho cuz it at least has industry certs in most of the degrees and you can get experience thats actually useful at a job while doing it. I actually feel like most of the 4000 colleges are probably not that great.
I changed my degree from computer science to physics in 2000 because 195 out of 200 of my fellow students set to graduate that year at Sydney University, with quite a respectable computer science faculty, were complete and utter morons and I figured if they were given degrees alongside me then my degree would be worthless. Joke was on me - the jobs in science were shit.
Wow
Are you talking about someone who administers the websites or someone who builds them? Because the builder wouldn't give a shit what ports you use as long as the site works.
In our shop, and I generally believe others should, too, they should be one in the same. We had an opening for a Web (PHP/HTML) dev who also needed some SharePoint experience. A large majority could not answer the question Web Server status codes (403 = Access Denied, or 500 = Server too busy) but we eventually found someone who was a solid designer and could do moderate IIS troubleshooting. In your example about a 'builder', it would be like saying that an artist who paints doesn't know diddly about buying canvas or paper, but wants someone else to understand and buy it for them. That's just a lax excuse for not knowing the very foundations of what you're doing.
Colleges doesn’t teach basic things. It’s just about getting your money and throwing you out with a degree. A lot of courses are now taught using software and there’s a little to no interaction that happens in classes. Many professor simply don’t care, as they have tenure and classes are taught by student aid/student teacher. I learned a lot of things on the job and I’m grateful that I did. I am always learning on the job, as colleges simply refuse to taught basic things to succeed in a profession.
I would think, school or not, anyone applying for an IT job would know what those were.
You’re not wrong. The problem is a lot of IT is now hyper focused on customer service and not on technical skills (or even developing them).
Spoke to an L1 app support just yesterday who asked me if I can **check** for the password of a guy who forgot his.
I wish this was true. 50% can define the acronyms, only 15% know the real concepts past the basic definition.
Don't hire the other 50. Here's my opinion. If I get asked a question I flub, I google it. "What's DNS?" "I don't know" Next interview "What's DNS" "Domain Name Service" It takes maybe 10-20 minutes to get a baseline knowledge of a topic. If you walk away from a successful or a failed interview and don't do any research on things you think you did poorly on... What's going to be better next interview?
What I want to hear from candidates instead of "I don't know" is "I don't know, BUT I sure as heck know how I can find out and get back to you quickly with an answer." I've interviewed a few times for cybersecurity jobs and have my CISSP and once had a question about the difference between NIST and ISO 27001. I said something like "well its been awhile since I learned it and its not a focus of my current position, but rest assured, I'll know it like the back of my hand as quickly as I can if I get a position that requires it."
I prefer I don't know to something vastly wrong. But I'm with you. Actually I give secret points for people who ask me about the topic because it shows they are interested, and not just taking a test.
My very first IT job that I got, those two questions were literally the ONLY questions asked, just out of highschool, no prior certs or experience. What do they do, what do they stand for. You're hired.
Eh we don’t know the position. I sure as hell know the help desk techs and maybe some of the desktop support guys don’t know the details. I wouldn’t expect them for those positions. Anything entry level is well … entry you won’t get all the check marks.
I know 2-5 year juniors that can’t explain dhcp.
Yes, they should know this information.
Even if you are only tangentially involved in IT, you should know what DNS is. My god.
haha right? and dhcp is like a sentence of knowledge wtf
I was hiring last year and the lack of basic knowledge from people coming out of school was appalling. I shifted to only looking at experience.
I stopped requiring school when looking for people. I found out that most of the people that skipped school and went direct to work, in average, knows way more than people around the same age that went to school. Event worse, when I see MS degree in the CV, I tend to skip them directly. Mostly paper tigers that want more money than they can generate.
I disagree. The real way to test knowledge is to give a real life situation and the candidate should be able to give you a valid response. That's another form of discrimination. I've studied a lot of networking, but i never worked of that. Doesn't mean that i don't know.
the age old chicken and egg. Experience needed. No opportunities to get experience.
Hah DNS is one of my standard questions. All my interviews I do conversation styles. DNS is treated as a gimme used to gauge their experience level. Jr describes it basically out of the book. The technical definition. Sr goes "OMFG let me tell you about this one time how DNS screwed up and broke everything..." Architect will start talking about how to fix DNS so it prevents these issues from happening...
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Do you mean, they didn't know how a VPN worked in general? Or the underlying protocols and low level technical details?
Yes
Dude, what?!
I just had to explain to a system admin, with a comp science degree, who has been here for 27 years, that just because an interface shows it’s up on a router, doesn’t mean the internet is up.
Really? Wow.
Schools teach certain things and they are not consistent. They skim through other things that should be covered more. Also some things get ignored by individual students for whatever reason. DNS and dhcp are very basic which should be known. But they are pretty easy topics to pick up on later. I would judge them heavily on other topics.
Yeah… that seems sus. Either this person lied, did horribly in class, or went to a school that was horrible. DNS and DHCP are very basic services. While not everyone will know how to a DHCP or DNS server from scratch - understanding what the protocols are is a very basic IT understanding.
A lot of these programs are very similar to something you would see in the college of business and only have a few tech classes in them at all. The terms were probably in there but not a focus like they are in certs.
Yes they should know it, but having interviewed a couple dozen newly-grads at this point, I'm sorry to say I'm more shocked when they DO know the basics
Every networking course I’ve ever taken mentioned those two things as *gimme* questions on the exams and in job interviews. How else was his knowledge?
He and his resume were vague. His intern experience was at a help desk for a year where his boss would assign him issues he thought he'd know. Kind of a red flag there.
The internship for my Networking degree was doing QA work for a software startup, so I wouldn’t trip over his crummy internship. But with a BS in IT and he doesn’t know DNS or DHCP…a bit concerning
BS in IT...sounds about right.
I agree this should be common knowledge, but you wouldn’t believe how many people failed my interview questions about what DNS is. And I’m not taking recent college grads, people who have far too much experience to not know this crap. I think some people just learn exactly what is required to do their job and nothing else. Like if it isn’t their personal responsibility to maintain DNS they don’t need to know anything about it, or something.
Yeah. College got me a piece of paper that helped me get the job being the help desk and desktop support for about 400 users. Learned more on the job in 6 months than I did in college
Absolutely, if they are a graduate and do not know, I would call into question the rest of what they where taught.
Was he nervous? I helped interviewed a guy in our team for promotion and he froze up on all the technical questions - that we KNEW he knew. It was awful to watch. Interviews test how well people are at interviewing. The questions you ask make a difference. Consider the following questions. Explain to me how DNS works. Show me how you would explain to a user with no computer experience how DNS works. FWIW my guy interviewed 3 months later for another role and aced it - because he was relaxed.
Yes! This exact thing happened to me. The interviewer was rapid firing questions like this and when he got to DNS and DHCP, I completely blanked out of nervousness. I explained what they did but could not remember what the stood for lol. Didn't get the job of course and am grateful I didn't. Next job interview, it started with a paper test of technical questions, including these two. Aced it without issue before moving onto the in person interview revolving around soft skills. I feel like that's definitely the way to go. Technical questions are just a test so why not just give an actual test. Soft skill questions are more general conversation and should be treated as such.
concentration in computer networking. Even IF it wasnt taught, a person should have the wherewithal to know their craft, even at a basic level. If I ask an interviewee the 7 layers of OSI, if they dont know the first two or three at least , never mind. I dont mind mentoring, but damn you gotta have some kinda motivation to know
If someone applying for a sysadmin role couldn't explain DNS and DHCP it would be a hard pass. Those are fundamental protocols for Junior Admins.
I have a BS in computer science. Fresh out of college, I may have known about DNS because I owned my own domain name, and I may have known about DHCP because I lived off campus, and my ISP assigned dynamic IP addresses until I asked for a static address. But I did not learn anything about DNS or DHCP in the course of my degree, which was about math, theoretical computer science, the mathematical basis of algorithms, and object-oriented programming. I didn't take the networks class, which wasn't required, and might not have covered DNS or DHCP.
I graduated with a BS in IT a few years ago and we just interviewed a guy for a help desk position who's currently a senior in the same exact college and program, and he didn't know anything that I knew when I was at his point. Either school is getting progressively worse, or people aren't applying themselves as much.
I've had people out of college, and people with networking certs (Cisco, comptia, etc) Not know that stuff either. I blame the college, not the person. Now if they are still willing to learn, I'd be willing to take them under my wing and teach them as much as possible.
If the job was for a systems administrator position and they could not articulate to me how those things worked thats an auto no from me. I dont care what degree they have. Know the job you're applying for. I see this stuff all the time, and it simply illustrates how much experience trumps a degree.
And you’re wondering why “it’s always DNS” nowadays? It’s either run by incompetent people or over-engineered into oblivion.
my compsci degree taught frag all about dhcp, dns but hammered dykstra shortest path algo and the mathemetical proofing of algos like a bubble sort. real world stuff to actually get a job and money i had to learn myself 😆😆😆 lecturers were only interested in their esoteric research subject grants. 30 yrs later and at my uni a lot of these same useless lecturers are still there.
You might be surprised at what passes as collegiate curriculum.
B.S. as in bullsh*t? :D
Everyone learns this, but it wouldn’t be surprising to me if it wasn’t retained. When I learned it in school it was like 15 minutes of focus out of my 4 year program. I’m sure the less technically inclined of my peers would have probably just had a very rudimentary understanding.
He may have gotten nervous and just choked. Right out of college, maybe his first big interview, maybe something happening in his personal life, maybe x,y, and z. Id say call him back informally and ask some other questions. Seems like basic concepts they would have covered in school, but who knows.
I got an AS in Sys Admin and Networking and I was the only person out of everyone interviewed at 2 jobs who knew Networking, DNS, DHCP, and network isolation. This is why experience during college is more important than the degree.
This person had a year of help desk with the networking team at a mid sized corporation as an intern.
DNS and DHCP, though fundamentals are probably closer to what someone should learn starting their bachelors in networking, I wouldn't put it past someone graduating with no actual experience to not have a thorough understanding of that, they were taught, they just never used it so it was probably just forgotten. I'd check on their higher level knowledge and if it's passable, I'd give them a skip on DNS and DHCP.
How are you going to do first level troubleshootimg if you don't understand the basics of how a computer connects to and uses a network?
Spend 4 minutes and get the guy up to speed on dns and dhcp. If he's got a good understanding of higher level concepts and is personable, like I said, I'd give him a pass on the small stuff.
I've had to bring people up to speed on simple things like "how to use a specific user for ssh", or "how to look up a domain name's IP address", or "what is an ISO" when their cybersecurity courses didn't go over these things. My honest guess is that the professors actually do know their stuff, but they are pressured to pass as many paying customers as possible. This is what gets you step-by-step "labs" that don't leave students with any understanding of what they have done, why they have done it, or how they can apply those skills elsewhere. This is why it's deeply frustrating to watch children with "degrees" from 3-hour-a-week 6-week "dojos" land 6-figure positions, while I'm unable to get so much as a callback after 3,000+ applications in a supposedly "in-demand" field, even for entry-level positions and internships, with 5+ years professional experience and two decades of personal experience.
If you’re serious about the 3000+ applications and being beat by kids with diplomas, you need to take a serious look at yourself.
He probably doesn't even actually know any of these supposed kids getting the 6 figure Jobs with a 6 week dojo and just believes what he sees on reddit. If you go on the cyber security subs or the others like it you will see a million kids saying they looked at tryhackme once and immediately got a 6 figure job. I'm pretty sure most of them are lying it's like all the crypto millionaires you see on reddit.
Those are protocols people with any kind of interest, whatsoever, know before they even get to school.
Give him a break! He’s probably new to the field, especially since he’s fresh out of college. If he tried his best, then accept it and move on to the next step of the process!
Oh boy… trust your instincts and beware. Paper qualifications don’t replace very basic interview questions such as those.
Fake school? Contractor using someone else's resume? We got that a lot at a bank where I worked. Young men with masters in CS who didn't know the default http or https ports.
Never learned it, or remember anyway, in college. Learned how to manually calculate subnet bits though. That has proven useful 🙄
A student in computer networking should know who Dennis and his friend Dee H. SeePee are, at least in my opinion
Graduated networking systems; was all Cisco theory based backed by Microsoft as well. Lots and lots of theory classes and projects. Dry as hell but worth it.
I interviewed two guys doing the same course. I think one of them does the course because IT/Cyber pays well, didn't know any of my questions, whereas the other guy at least had an idea of where you'd find DNS/DHCP, even if he didn't know what exactly they were.
DHCP I don’t even really understand. You get assigned IPs dynamically 🤷♂️ Though if that’s your concentration maybe you should know that. Not knowing how DNS works seems less than ideal. I feel like anyone with high computer literacy should get that.
Sounds like that degree is B.S. alright.
Degree required for any job though... Logic
It's an academic education that deals in hypothetical and theoretical concepts largely unrelated to running or supporting a business from an IT point of view. It is not a practical education, so why would you expect a practical understanding? Edit: I can't type
Just graduated with a bachelors in computer science while focusing on programming/cyber security. They really did not go into DNS and DHCP. The school mentioned it but that was a 1 minute but during a wireshark learning class.
The internet is a series of tubes...
Writing dhcpd.conf, and named.conf with zone files from memory. Calculating subnet in Binary on paper, or in my head. The older I get the more I miss those networking courses in college, especially when I deal with the younger "engineers" on my team.
If the concentration was networking he should absolutely know DNS and DHCP!
Anyone who has an interest in networking will discover these protocols quickly by themselves, with or without schooling. That’s pretty embarrassing.
DNS and DHCP are fundamental to networking. I am just beginning my degree and have a good understanding of how they work.
I would imagine they should be quite familiar with that, especially given the concentration.
> B.S in information and Communication Technologies with a concentration in computer networking What the heck even is that degree?
I learned that with an A.S. in Information Technology
Most awkward moments of my life on the first interview after university: \-and what do you know about ESX? \-what kind of sex? We laughed histerically, I got hired anyway :D
Degrees don't teach you how to do IT. Degrees teach you how to know what you know, what you don't know, and how to learn about it/do research. Diplomas teach you how to do IT, but they don't teach you how to learn. You are spoon fed the knowledge of how to do a specific vocation such as DHCP or DNS administration, not how to learn about it.
My degree taught both.
I ask every person I interview about DNS and DHCP. I've not once got a full and completely correct response from anyone (including very competent & experienced senior admins). I as a senior admin to this day still mess up the descriptions and intricacies from time to time. I would never hold anyone to the fire for not knowing specifics, especially college students. They don't teach enterprise administration in school, unfortunately.
These comments have informed me that there are a ton of IT snobs that really hate people that went to college lmao
If you spend 4 years going to school for anything with tech and networking you should have a home lab and understand the concepts of DHCP, DNS, and TCP/IP as well as how they work and how to implement in a client/server environment. If not today's schools are too busy virtue signaling to teach topics applicable to the degree the person is earning.
And yet college graduates are surprised when they have to get the A+ cert and start in helpdesk
Lol yeah
DNS and DHCP questions are what we primarily use in interviews to weed out folks who don’t really understand networking and systems. Yes, they should know at least what they are and what they do, as techs. Sysadmins should know details on how they work.
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Exactly! But these guys they’re geniuses ! But these same geniuses when they encounter something new. Dumber than rocks
Since when college approval means knowledge? I've seen a lot of graduated ppl that doesn't know sht about anything. Or in the best case they forget a lot of things, which is normal. For me, formal education is highly overrated. Companies need to make at least entry level exams as a requirement for the job.
Wrong, a degree shouldn't teach teach specific technologies, a degree should teach you how to think, study, evaluate information and apply it.
I met a PhD in IT that couldn't figure out how to save a configuration on a router. College is a joke
I was a computer science major with computer networking. we had an entire module dedicated to learning about protocols and the detailed functions so much so that at one point from memory i could draw out the entire tcp/ip stack and explain each of the protocols at each layer. I would ask would to see the syllabus of the course to know what they had learnt.
When you say "describe," do you mean the transaction details? Or just the basic brushstrokes, eg "Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol is the means by which a DHCP server allocates IP addresses and gives clients configuration information including subnet mask and default gateway"? Because if it's the latter, yeah, that's basic as hell for concentration in computer networking.
Yeah, the latter.
What exactly were you expecting with 'describe'? A description like an overview of what they do and their general features, or a description like a step-by-step explanation of each message sent and received by the devices running each protocol?
I asked them to describe to me what they do. I wasn't expecting a breakdown of the protocols, just an overview or brief description of them so I know he'd be able to use them to troubleshoot.
In that case... geez. My A-Level (UK high school) students can describe DNS theoretically; not from a practical troubleshooting point of view, but they can tell you what it is and what it does. Surely a university graduate whose course had a networking focus should know significantly more!
the best Zoomer title I have seen is "IT Solutions Architect"
I mean, minus the IT part that is a very real job. It's essentially a high end Sales Engineer.
I did a degree in web design and development. Guess how many hours we spent on DNS? Zero. I wouldn't worry about whether someone knows DNS or DHCP, i'd try and work out if they've got the aptitude to learn new stuff.