That's what a CPU snorts before it goes to catch the bus.

maybe you shouldnt be interviewing people for specific terminology. People can learn. Experienced competent people can definitely learn. Maybe they know the concept, but not the term. Maybe they need a little guidance about what you want out of the question. Do you want them to know "cache line" the phrase? or do you want them to understand memory structure? etc...

> maybe you shouldnt be interviewing people for specific terminology. People can learn. Experienced competent people can definitely learn.

I generally agree, but "cache line" is a pretty low bar though, no? I'm a web developer with no formal CS background and I've known what a cache-line is since the first year I started to learn to code. Every textbook on my shelf that even tangentially relates to the kind of work embedded devs do makes reference to cache-lines, and god knows how many articles I've read over the years.

Training people from what is probably nothing is a pretty big bet on the part of a team and employer...

We all look up super simple stuff we learned in year one of engineering school. I'm not sure I would call reading a little "training". I just think interviewing should be a little more forgiving. Interviewers like to gate keep a little with little gotchas in an environment that is completely different than day to day work.

> We all look up super simple stuff we learned in year one of engineering school. I'm not sure I would call reading a little "training". I just think interviewing should be a little more forgiving. Interviewers like to gate keep a little with little gotchas in an environment that is completely different than day to day work.

I don't disagree with any of this, I just think there's a certain "base" of knowledge for certain jobs that needs to be so well understood that it's automatic. For an embedded engineers I think "cache line" is part of that base in much the same way I would consider it a hard requirement for any incoming frontend web-developer to know what the DOM is.

Somewhat disagree, depending on the embedded subset. Lots of MCUs don't have any cache, so they don't have any cache lines. If you're programming some sort of embedded Linux system you'll have a more powerful processor and almost certainly have cache.

So if you're hiring for MCU work (bare metal or RTOS) the concept of a cache line isn't important. If you're hiring for application processor work (often Linux), it's very important.