This well illustrates the problem with "CS Trivia" style interviewing. It's billed as "exploring your background and how you think, not quizzing you for specific answers," but almost always devolves into an adversarial ego-measuring contest to see who can recite the most trivia from memory.
Much of of the content is minutiae that a working software engineer doesn't ever need to know and would just look up in the rare case where they did (how many bytes in a MAC address? Seriously?).
It's particularly bad when, as here, the candidate knows more than the interviewer does. The interviewee gives exact, nuanced answers while the interviewer only knows approximately correct answers that don't quite match. The interviewer then feels that their ego is vulnerable, that they are facing a serious potential competitor for social status at the company. They then summarily reject the candidate's correct answers as a defense mechnaism.
Much of of the content is minutiae that a working software engineer doesn't ever need to know and would just look up in the rare case where they did (how many bytes in a MAC address? Seriously?).
It's particularly bad when, as here, the candidate knows more than the interviewer does. The interviewee gives exact, nuanced answers while the interviewer only knows approximately correct answers that don't quite match. The interviewer then feels that their ego is vulnerable, that they are facing a serious potential competitor for social status at the company. They then summarily reject the candidate's correct answers as a defense mechnaism.