I often ask people I interview what their home network looks like and what their visions are. This often open doors to both inner motivation and thoughts you don't find elsewhere in an ordinary tech interview.
Asking about home labs/home networking runs the risk of being a very discriminatory question if you take the negative as a mark against the question. I highly recommend not asking about it.
Particularly, it is discriminatory in that it penalizes people based on their home situation, both from a time and financial perspective. People with children, especially single parents, are often not in positions to actively maintain a home lab or complex home network, due to time constraints.
Others just might not have the inclination, and it doesn't say anything at all about their ability to perform the job.
Even if you're not going to take the lack of a home lab as a negative, it can throw a candidate off - candidates are very conditioned to feel that a hard no to an interview questions is going to be taken as a mark against them, and this is going to effect their ability to answer other questions as effectively.
A much better question is to ask how someone approaches learning new technologies or keeping up with the changes in technology in general. For some people that will be work related, for some it will be home labs, and is an important skill regardless of how much time you have available. People with home labs will almost universally talk about it, and you can get the same discussion with them, without risking discriminating against people that have to keep their skills sharp through other methods. It's also more likely to be directly relevant to the skills related to the job, rather than random projects that might be tech related but not relevant to the position being interviewed for.
I was interviewing someone who one their CV had no real qualifications for the role they were applying for (sysadmin, this was back in 2012) Basically they were a social worker for both young and old in spain (this was a UK position)
However they were reasonably promising on the test, so as part of the "getting to know you" part of the interview we went over where they got their knowledge. Home labs, ebay, second had stuff. Do I expect _everyone_ to have a home lab? fuck no. Do I explicitly ask about them? no.
I must take issue with discriminatory, the whole point of an interview is to discriminate against people who are not capable of the job role.
What you are talking about is social bias, and that frankly has nothing really to do with home labs, and a lot to do with people being arseholes.
The reality is that spending your free time on job-related stuff is likely correlated with improved job-related skills, though. It's not a correlation of 1 obviously, but it's probably not 0 either, so it is relevant.
Except that studies show reduced capacity to work after a certain number of hours. Does doing the equivalent activity to "work" at home count against those hours? I don't know the answer there.
We do know that diversity increases the effectiveness and problem solving ability of a team - at worst, getting a bunch of people that have home labs is actively detrimental to this, and at best does nothing to improve it.
There's limited time available in interviews, and you're probably better suited asking relevant questions.
(And from a personal perspective, asking about home lab details would benefit me. I've got ten gig fiber throughout the house and close to a terabyte of RAM consumed by my VMs... But none of that is realistically making me a better employee)
Interesting, I'm not sure if it counts against one's ability to work, but it seems like it might, since it's a similar activity. And you're right that other activities can also yield helpful skills.
I agree that competency testing, especially project based, is better. The only reason I'd ask about their off time is to get a sense of what they like and better getting to know what kinds of projects they might gravitate to, given the choice.
I hope this isn't unusual. I like to think I'm at least OK at software development, but my home network consists of a wifi router that I bought in late 2005 from PC World.
While I don’t believe advanced home networking is a good indicator of software engineering skills, I’d at least hope you occasionally check for firmware updates/vulnerabilities and replace it if the manufacturer stopped supporting it. Consumer routers (especially from that era) aren't known for good security (drive-by pharming etc).
Very few of the job functions we rely on in my space can be reasonably handled in 45 minutes. Resultantly, every interview question is indirect. We either reduce problems to what we hope are aggregate indicators (e.g. coding questions) with little to no certainty that we've correctly aggregated the skillset, use fast-search limit test questions that can spook candidates, or resort to fuzzy indicators that end up serving as pet questions.
For me, I check for things like accurate self assessment and subtle asshole cues, but largely indirectly, since everybody lies...
One response is, no you can’t. Technical interviews almost always devolve into proxy questions & those proxy questions rarely actually test for what the interviewer thinks they do.
“Tell me about your home network” is one of the odder proxy questions I’ve seen, having spent a lot of time looking at this problem.
What I’ve recommended for years is to replace technical interviews with take home work sample tests. Those also have their downsides and have recently gotten a bad name because of how poorly many people execute them, but replacing your interview process with them almost always leads to better results in my experience.
Well, you're quite right, but I disagree that it's a problem. Snark, sarcasm and underhanded jabs are absolutely valid rhetorical techniques; and, if you don't like them, there are plenty of good responses in kind, that will reflect on you far better than if simply tell on them to teacher.
In case you were having difficult guessing, I'm minded to agree with tptacek. (And not just because of my sibling comment, in which I admit that my home network is indistinguishable from that of a 90 year old technophobe who got his not-daft-but-still-technically-ignorant grandson to set it up for him.) Is the interviewee's home network, assuming they even have one, really relevant?
If they're going to be setting up a network for you, wouldn't you rather they had experience doing something significant on a professional basis, not just setting something up at home?
If they're going to be doing something else, what relevance does any of this have?
It was underhanded because you were giving a compliment but meant it to be an insult. Your reply here is willful ignorance and it’s done with malicious intent.
The fact that you are being defended shows that HN is a echo chamber that ultimately supports bullies like you even if they break the rules.
On the other it’s fine if you agree with tptacek’s intent but you were more clear and civil with your point. Tptacek’s comment comes off as pretentious and insulting, and doesn’t promote good faith discussion.
It's strange you're so familiar with the forum's norms and guidelines and would yet start a completely off-topic, pointless meta-subthread. Those are much worse than tptacek's fairly tame response. If you disagree with the comment, you can downvote or if you feel it's that terrible, you can flag it so it gets moderator attention. If those options aren't available yet for your account, you can just participate a little longer until they are.
I wish someone had asked me about my homelab. Trying to run a homelab from a sailboat presented some very unique challenges (power, no physical internet) and opportunities (low interference, environmental data). While most homelabbers are hacking on pfsense or other networking tools I was hacking our boats NMEA sensor network.
Another HN liveaboard! But I have a feeling your boat was a larger boat with lots of people living aboard from your wording. What did you end up doing with the homelab/sensor network?
It was a great life. Now we're domesticated bluewater sailors waiting to take off again. It was a 38ft catamaran. So there were boats larger than us and many more smaller than us. For us it was the right size, comfortably took a family of 3 (+2 crew) across the Med and Atlantic.
The network was pretty tightly integrated into the boat, a mix of Seatalkng, RS485 and RS232. All connected to my PC through wifi. Sadly, my homelab suffered from saltwater exposure and high humidity. My Mikrotik router and LR wifi antenna stayed with me. Since coming back stateside I've replaced most of my gear with Azure, IFTTT, and Alexa. 3 things we didn't have access to while sailing.
At this point in the interview, I make up a story involving a FreeBSD box doing the firewall duties and segregated guest network, failover to 4G hotspot, caching proxy, fancy graphs and logs...and also pretend to be a little embarrassed about it.
Who even uses the provided router? Docsis is a horrible spec and basically a perma-backdoor, use your own cable modem if you can manage it with your isp, turn off everything and pass through to your own edge firewall, and keep the WiFi router separate, preferably on a DMZ.
Who cares if the ISP controls the router? They control my connection to the Internet anyway. I just assume my LAN is untrustworthy, and authenticate & encrypt everything inside it.
No idea but I'll submit myself for counting. I replaced my provider's router with some Unifi gear and am running DHCP/DNS/Storage/Backups/Misc. off a small server running KVM. I would be excited to talk about my lab in an interview.
I was asked this before, and I enjoyed sharing my network; I'm not sure how it related to what I was hired for. Perhaps debugging my home network provided tcpdump experience, which is always handy for a job with networking. It also lead up to a load balancing discussion which was interesting. I'm now good friends with that interviewer, but I'm still not too sure it's a good question.
Maybe it's useful for 'can this person describe something complex they worked on' with lots of places to dig into 'how much low level networking knowledge does this person have,' but a large number of my peers use the WiFi that comes with the modem from their ISP, and don't even realize they're doing everything wrong.
