I was asked the "what syscall returns an inode?" question (and agree with DannyBee that this is extremely similar to my successful SRE screen) and I answered stat() without the clarification because I understood what the screener was doing and the parameters in which she was operating. That context on how phone screens work is missing from this transcript, but it's also unfair to expect that sort of context from a candidate because not every interviewee is familiar with the standard Google style tech interview.

The screener is the wrong person to walk down Pedantry Lane or Hexadecimal Packets Street and that's the sort of thing you save for the actual interview. But yes, I agree that it's shitty that the incentive is to answer for the test instead of the exact truth. (I wasn't extremely supportive of the interviewee once he turned slightly sarcastic and rattled off hexadecimal bytes instead of just saying "SYN" and "ACK," though.)

As an unrelated addendum, I'm intrigued by the following four things:

    1) The author wrote a Web server and framework, G-WAN
    2) I've seen G-WAN advertise itself questionably in the past w/r/t perf
    3) gwan.com is powered by G-WAN
    4) Under Hacker News load, the entire gwan.com domain is hard down

I'm not drawing a conclusion, but it is tempting.