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!