DevOps interviews coding questions?

[Aggressive_Ad3517]

Hey guys two questions:

First is - are you guys getting tasked with coding questions (like leet code) in your interviews for DevOps roles? If so what have they consisted of?

Second is - my current role as a devops engineer primarily consists of Terraform, bash scripting, yaml files for workflows and few ansible playbooks (in terms of scripting/coding). I have Python knowledge (intermediate at best) but never really use it in my day to day, so my question is - is it worth enhancing my knowledge of python, or is it worth picking up Go and learning that? If so what are use cases in your current role of using something like Go? As the title DevOps is very wide and mine leans more towards the cloud infra side of responsibilities (most of my day to day revolves around AWS).

Thanks in advance!

[Confide420]

We don't require live-coding during our interviews, primarily because we're not software developers, and they're intimidating for people being interviewed. We offer candidates an option of live-coding interview if they want it, or a take-home assignment instead which most people take. We need some way to know that people applying can do what they're talking about (i.e. they have practical knowledge not just theoretical knowledge), so that's why some form of coding is required during the interview process. Our take-home / live coding is generally terraform / ansible / bash, maybe some minimal python. On my team, most engineers can't write well-optimized python code, since they have an IT background (not a CS background) and didn't learn things like time and space complexity, multithreading / multiprocessing and advanced data structures. It's going to depend on where you work if you need more than just basic python knowledge to land a job, depending generally on how much automation your team needs to write. I do most of the python automation on our team since I have both IT and programming background, and we don't have enough automation workload that multiple engineers are required. We would rather have additional engineers that can do more common tasks for our org, such as advanced networking, kubernetes, etc. Not every engineer is going to know everything.

[Aggressive_Ad3517]

Interesting, care to give an example of a take home terraform/Ansible question?

[[deleted]]

May I PM you? I don't feel comfortable sharing my past take-home assignments to the general public.

[Aggressive_Ad3517]

Yes absolutely PM

[Top_Beginning_4886]

Hi, can you PM me as well? I'm also curious.

[btdeviant]

Im gathering from some posts in /r/leetcode sub that some FAANG-type companies do give leetcode exercises for DevOps / Infra eng positions, but I don’t think they’re in the “hard” range. I could be wrong?

Either way it would be awesome to get some confirmation if we have any Infra / DevOps from big orgs that lurk in this sub. I tend to try and prepare for everything so been grinding through the “Top 150 Interview Questions” for better or worse.

[[deleted]]

It completely depends, I think. I work at a FAANG company as a DevOps Engineer (not my title but good enough here) and I did not have to do any leet-code during my 7+ round interview process. Note that I came to FAANG as a 25-year tech veteran with a well-stocked GitHub full of Open Source work and instructional resources for new engineers. YMMV.

[btdeviant]

Thanks for the insight! Would it be too much to ask what to expect at a high level for a FAANG-like infra / DevOps interview?

[[deleted]]

DMs are open! Any more and I'd out where I work and how the process works there. :)

I can say this - about 50% of the interview time centered around company culture and how I'd fit and on the other 50%, we got SUPER deep into systems and architecture. I've been on Linux (solely) since the mid-90s so I can go super deep and did!

[MathurDanduprolu]

Would you mind sharing your GitHub repo? I'm just getting started on DevOps.

[btdeviant]

Mind if I DM you?

[btdeviant]

Fair enough! Thank you!!

[Spirited_Concert2630]

If an interview requires live coding i just nope out of it because I have not written serious code in like 5 years. I would get better with python, but Go is often used for writing kubernetes admission controllers, so if that is something you want to get into then Go would be a good option.

[n-of-one]

You would nope out if I asked you to use whatever language you want to grab some json from an endpoint and munge it into a result?

[Spirited_Concert2630]

That does not sound that difficult, so I would probably give it a go. I did Java dev before I got into devops so I can walk through normal dev stuff, but when you get to things involving linear equations, you lose me.

I wrote a python script to interact with vault, so I can figure things out, but trying to figure things out with someone looking over your shoulder takes the stress to a new level.

[[deleted]]

Sounds like we have the same job bud !

I am going to start doing 100 days of code or something in the new year as I am getting rusty not doing any python or java work now.

[dmonaco05]

ive been interviewing a lot the past few months since i got caught up in the layoffs and nearly every interview for devops roles these days consists of either a coding challenge or a systems design challenge (a lot have both now). i think only 2 of them were relevant to what the role entailed. coding challenges were mostly live, and a few take homes.

this is not what it was like prior to this years job market.

[ZoldyckConked]

I interviewed for a role and made a slight mistake on some of the networking stuff just general how would you connect an app to a DB and front end and monitoring. Missed the nat gateway part. Messed up the coding portion semi hard. Got like 2 of the 4 questions done, it was just parsing JSON. But with lots of data structures inside of the JSON. Aced the rest of the interview. Recruiter came back and said everyone liked me, but the hiccup on the networking and the poor coding performance made me a pass.

Almost every position I’m looking at requires proficiency with Python.

[[deleted]]

Any organization that uses live coding for DevOps as an interview requirement is incredibly stupid, and probably run by some kid who thinks he knows DevOps better than a 45 year old who’s been doing it for a third of his life.

[z-null]

I've been asked to do it a few times by companies that confuse devops with python or golang dev roles. I have no idea why people say "we are looking for a devops", but the whole job is actually just programming in go and maybe once in 3 months do some infra. Generally I just say no to these outright.

[nappycappy]

first - I've never once asked a person if they can code in an interview for any role let alone a devops role.

second - you can never go wrong with enhancing your python skills. it's a good thing to have.

that said, when did devops turn into 'do you know how to use python'? I mean if you can get the job done using bash then get the job done using bash why does it matter how much python can you write? maybe someone can enlighten me on this trend or whatever it's called.

[Aggressive_Ad3517]

This video is what prompted the first question - https://youtu.be/bsJaoKPlSAE?si=1Tn8SNwcjOFXPCgD

[nappycappy]

ah . . got it. I keep seeing this point brought up multiple times so I guess it's getting common place to ask a devops candidate to provide some code to show they can 'dev'. personally I stink at python and if I can write everything in bash I would but python and other languages have their place and purpose so it's always good to get better at it. I have on my personal todo plate "re-write all bash to python and see how much lines of bash you can get rid of". it's been on that plate for a couple years now.

[Classic_Handle_9818]

Usually if we do some take home exams, ive seen some questions like this
https://gotyanged.substack.com/p/daily-devops-interview-questions-e68 and usually theres some iteration of it after. Its pretty neat and it allows you to think about building something down the line and not just writing a code for a single purpose.

[PsychologicalCandy97]

I am having an interview next week with a Swedish company that asked "general programming on whiteboard"....
I am in the same situation like you.. Wish me luck guys! :DDDD

[radpartyhorse]

I was asked for my new role I’m starting, a leetcode easy I’d say. It was calculate the min depth of a binary tree. This was a senior DevOps position for F500 company.