Packet captures as interview artifacts

Interviewers who run networks rarely want adjectives. They want evidence: what you measured, what you ruled out, and what you would try next with a time limit. We ask learners to pair every major lab with a short capture file and a legend naming the interfaces involved. In the Wireless Site Survey Sprint, that habit transfers directly — RSSI plots without context age poorly; annotated screenshots do not. We are careful not to promise job outcomes. What we do promise is a repeatable method: hypothesis, capture, filter, compare against baseline, document. If your capture contradicts your theory, you update the theory — that story alone carries weight. If you are shy about sharing employer data, use our synthetic traces. They are anonymized but structurally messy, which is closer to reality than textbook examples.