I received a phone call from a recruiter saying they were interested in hiring me for the Software Dev QA Engineer position. Over the process, the recruiters were very supportive and tried their best to prepare me for the exam and interview.

A week later I took an online exam which consisted of aptitude questions, Linux command questions, a routing question, and 2 database questions. I had 1 hour to do the exam and I barely finished on time.

The following week I was scheduled for an interview with the team lead and 3 other team members. When asked about what to expect from the interview, I was told it would be a conversational interview where we would discuss my skills and experience, some of the projects I worked on, my knowledge about the company and its products, and talk a little bit about my technical skills such as scripting and basic routing protocols.

The interviewers did not seem very interested in hearing about my experiences and the types of projects I've worked on, as they were more focused on my technical knowledge. I even showed them my portfolio and tried to explain my roles and tasks, but they told me not to go into too much detail and just give a brief summary. In all honesty, I think the team was looking for someone who could speak their language so that they could easily communicate, as they were discussing things in their language during the interview and had difficulty trying to explain the questions to me.

Q1. What is the difference between a router, switch, and bridge?

Q2. How would you count the lines in a file that contain the following pattern?

1. The pattern must be in { }.
2. Within the { }, there can only be alphabets and spaces.
3. There should be at least 1 character within the { }. (This question was later simplified to finding a pattern such as "abc")

Q3. There is an internal network behind a firewall using NAT. A host from the internal network sends out a request using UDP to an external server and waits for 10 seconds. The external server takes 7 seconds to send a response which never reaches the internal host. Why doesn't the response reach the internal host?

Q4. There is an internal network with 2 hosts behind a firewall using NAT. An internal host 1 sends out UDP requests to an external server. How does the server know to respond to host 1 and not host 2 if the internal IP addresses are not shown due to NAT?

Q5. There is a clock. The hour hand takes 24 hours to do 1 full circle while the minute hand takes 60 minutes to do 1 full circle. The time is 10:20. What is the angle between the 2 hands precisely?

Q6. If Wireshark was not installed on a host, what other tools would you use for packet capturing?