Is it just me or is networking really hard?
I sometimes ask the question "how does the internet work?" in interviews. The vague and wrong answers I hear are astonishing.  I'm looking for a basic understanding of the layering of TCP, or RDP, or ICMP (or anything actually) on top of IP. I don't get that level of insight much. The people who do have that insight usually can go deeper -- slow-start, BGP, etc.<p>I wonder if we have a modern version of C.P. Snow's mid-twentieth-century two cultures lament. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures</a>. That's the complaint that educated humanities folks don't know the basics of science.<p>Are we miseducating our so-called "full-stack" engineers by not offering them a basic understanding of telecom?  Or are they not listening?