The standard tech-company interview (I've had a lot of these over the years, and conducted many of them myself at former employers).

First, a recruiter talks with you on the phone to confirm that you're human.

Then, there's a first round of technical questions; in my case, these were Unix-, networking-, and systems-focused.

In person, they ask you some standard Unix questions, and there's some coding on the board.

Maybe there are one or two questions that are real curveballs and require some real digging to answer them, but Akamai's interview questions are not nearly the hardest I've ever been given. The hardest I've ever been given were from Google, where they continually escalate the difficulty of the questions to test your limits.

Akamai's interviewers were good, but sort of middle-manager-y. I didn't get the sense that the group I was speaking with felt as though they were the élites.

Why might you use SMTP to get large (multi-gig) line-oriented text-based logs from one machine to another?