logoalt Hacker News

noncomltoday at 9:19 PM2 repliesview on HN

“ Cut-through vs Store-and-Forward”

I had a Google interview collapse because the last interviewer was a Principle Engineer who just couldn’t accept that a switch will ever forward a frame before reading in full and checking the FCS.

I was too much of an idiot to go along with it and instead ended up having an argument with him.


Replies

inigyoutoday at 9:45 PM

Cut-through is applicable in a minority of scenarios which are sometimes common. The majority of switches, especially the ones that support any advanced features at all, can't use it. Even when you can use it, you still can't use it all the time because of port conflicts.

As far as advanced features go, even adding and removing VLAN tags is a headache in a cut-through switch.

random__ducktoday at 9:36 PM

Sounds like they could have used you on that team. Bad luck, but it at least you can walk away proud knowing it was not an issue with your technical skills. :)