I had a screening interview with one of Akamai's veteran recruiters (outdated with technology). To schedule an interview, he did not read my email properly (poorly detail-oriented recruiter). He did not call me at the agreed schedule time and gave an excuse: it happened to him for the first time in his 21 years of career. This is not a great excuse for a recruiter.

Well, he finally interviewed me after one week. He started his questions: "Tell me about your project where you faced the biggest challenge." Though it's a good question, before asking anything, he must have explained the role and responsibilities of the company. Even though I had pretty good knowledge of "what Akamai does, how they started, their customers, servers, and products," I had some questions I thought I would ask, but he skipped that conversation.

His second question was: "Tell me what happens when you enter a website name in a browser." I explained the full DNS process for this question. Then he said, "Can you explain me something else?" I tried to elaborate on his question and replied, "Are you asking me about REST?" He promptly said, "Yes."

I am pretty sure he doesn't know anything about "what happens when we type a website name in a browser," because if he did, he must have asked me directly about REST or DNS, not with his outdated style of questioning.

Again, he asked me about 3-way handshaking, TCP, UDP. I explained them properly. Well, Mr. Veteran Recruiter, these questions belong to a network engineer rather than a pure software engineer role.

Then he asked me, "What programming language are you comfortable with?" Man, you are hiring a software engineer, not a developer. All rectifiers must understand coding (in any programming language) can be done by anyone, but engineers solve problems; they bring solutions.

One more outdated question. In return, I asked him some tech questions related to Akamai's security products and HA-related questions. He said the HA feature has been sold to another company, so he was kind of running from my questions.

After two weeks, he replied that I do not have enough tech knowledge. Common man, after 4 years as a professional software engineer, this is awkward (I do not have enough tech knowledge).

Folks, if you get a call from such a recruiter who pretends they have a lot of technical knowledge but truly do not know anything, do not waste your time giving an interview. According to me, they are just a waste of time.

Tell me what happens when you enter a website name in a browser.