I just made an interview for a Devops position, for a bit of context I’m transitioning from a development background. I was asked only for specific commands and configs and literally no design questions, thing I would usually just google.

Is this normal? Because it was the most bizarre interview I’ve had.

Oh my friend if you thought SWE interviewed were all made up and the questions don’t matter wait til you see some of the other shit that goes on in devops and SRE interviews beyond what you just experienced.

For every fizzbuzz test given to coders there like 5 “create a k8s infrastructure or helm chart for a microservice” test given to us ops people.

And you know what I send them? A pre made GitHub repo I created specifically for job interview “assessments” and set to private, fork when needed that spins up a static website application that when you browse to the url says “your technical assessment is shit”.

@ComputerToucher that’s actually a pretty smart thing to do, sad to hear it’s a widespread practice tho

Indeed. On the one hand I completely understand the want and need to vet out people coming to work for you, on the other hand take home assignments are not the way to do it IMO.

Best assessments I had were over zoom, pair programming style, open ended, casual and conversational.

You know, the way you’d actually expect to work daily with these people?

Good luck to you though!

@ComputerToucher maybe, I don’t mind a short homework if you ask me, you don’t have the pressure of someone watching you but still gives you enough freedom to research and test stuff, the bad thing is that it’s easy to fuck up and send a week long homework.

@eptsousa One of those “different strokes/different folks” moments I suppose.

For me I’m at the point of feeling that having someone watching along isn’t *preferred* (at least not daily, for an interview it’s fine) but I don’t necessarily mind it either. More chances to find out from someone else how I can get find out where I can better and skill up (of course that’s not always a guarantee the person you’re paired with is the kind of person who can even help with that, but nonetheless I always appreciate a second pair of eyes on what I’m doing)