For SRE, DNS is a relatively common issue to troubleshoot. Something silently fails in a deploy, someone went mucking around with DNS by hand when they shouldn't have, your local resolver might just be borked.
Specifically for us, since we are a SaaS provider with new customer environments in their own VPCs every week, DNS is something we touch regularly. We touch it waaay more by hand than we should, but that is one of many processes I am fixing and automating to remove the cognitive load and human errors.
You are right that it could be a client issue, but when candidates start down that path and won't let it go, I tell them to pretend they're on a residential internet connection, no corporate shenanigans of any type.
I also expect them to know how to rule out their local machine quickly (they can always run nslookup xyz.actualdomain.com 8.8.8.8). I intentionally use real problems I have encountered so that the scenario is something they can expect to fix(not usually all at once).
I'll probably do a revision on the process next week with a terraform deployment to build the scenario out automatically for each interview. I'll be asking candidates to send me a ssh pubkey before the interview. I need to get another AWS sub-account too so I can issue credentials for the candidate and literally give them the keys and let them drive instead of me.
Specifically for us, since we are a SaaS provider with new customer environments in their own VPCs every week, DNS is something we touch regularly. We touch it waaay more by hand than we should, but that is one of many processes I am fixing and automating to remove the cognitive load and human errors.
You are right that it could be a client issue, but when candidates start down that path and won't let it go, I tell them to pretend they're on a residential internet connection, no corporate shenanigans of any type.
I also expect them to know how to rule out their local machine quickly (they can always run nslookup xyz.actualdomain.com 8.8.8.8). I intentionally use real problems I have encountered so that the scenario is something they can expect to fix(not usually all at once).
I'll probably do a revision on the process next week with a terraform deployment to build the scenario out automatically for each interview. I'll be asking candidates to send me a ssh pubkey before the interview. I need to get another AWS sub-account too so I can issue credentials for the candidate and literally give them the keys and let them drive instead of me.