I wouldn't expect this joke to make someone feel stupid if they know what UDP is, so it feels like it was a safe bet

Yeah, but that’s not what this was.

Interviewer asked about thing then does not get joke about most basic property of thing. Either the interviewer is incredibly incompetent or incapable of getting a joke.

It’s a weird situation even for a job interview. (& I’ve been on job interviews that can only be described as tribunals with 8 judges grilling you simultaneously.)

Hey man, it's not my fault other people are stupid.

Tcp and udp are to sum it up, internet messaging protocols. UDP specifically is when you send a message over without guaranteeing your message was received. TCP on the otherhand is more like a handshake where you send a message and expect a response back.

The joke is basically UDP=I dont know if you would get it

Yeah I believe i remember roughly the explanation I gave to the interviewer.

TCP basically takes the time to confirm every detail actually was recieved, used in almost all situations in networking where accuracy is critical.

UDP is basically when speed is the more important than everything being perfect, (we were on a zoom call), Like say this video call, if the background gets blurry or a few frames drop or even my face distorts for a few seconds, that would be less of an inconvenience to us than if the network took the time and made sure to transmit every frame exactly as the camera picks it up, at the cost of an extra 10 seconds of lag in the call.

There's pretty basic UDP, that sends without confirming receiving. And instead of fixing it, they just slapped another protocol, TCP, on top of it.

With only UDP, you don't know, if you get it.

Since Pavlow is so famous you see often the dogs depicted as cute and someone ringing a bell. Not as fixated pepsin machines. At least in the past that was my mental image. Might be a me problem.

FWIW I used to hang out with behavioral psychology grad students, who were in the Skinnerian tradition of operant conditioning research. They mostly worked with pigeons, and to transport the birds they used juice pitchers with a few air holes cut into the bottom. I asked them once how they got the birds into the pitchers and they laughed and showed me: they would just open the bird's cage and hold the pitcher up and the birds would dive head-first into the pitcher, sometimes knocking themselves out in the process.

As part of the research protocol, the birds were kept on a diet that included about 80% of their normal caloric intake; the rest of their food was provided by the reinforcements of the experiments themselves (this was done to maximize the reinforcement effect of the rewards). So those birds were way the fuck into those experiments. To add to that, these students were all behavioral pharmacologists, so in addition to getting food reinforcement the birds were also getting drugs like cocaine and heroin.

BTW a lot of people confuse the operant conditioning research with the people who put animals into cages and shock them. This is definitely not what BF Skinner was all about. In fact he wrote books on the subject of how punishment is a bad thing for all animals (including humans and pigeons).