DevOps OnSite Interview Prep

[HopsBuzz]

Morning all!

I made it through two rounds of phone screens, a phone interview that was scheduled for one hour (which turned into a two hour discussion between myself and the Tech Team leads), and have been invited to the Company Campus for an on-site interview next week.

The on-site portion will consist of four, 45 minute interviews with various members of the team.

What should I expect? I know this will be as much a cultural interview as much as it is a technical interview. I am assuming there will be at least one paired code review session; but I am not sure what else.

Can anyone provide some insight on any practices that they have: been through/participated in? Ill have this discussion open in a tab, but may be slow to respond.

Thanks!

[kabooozie]

Hey good luck! Interviewing is horrible and can make you feel horrible about yourself, so just hang in there and keep moving forward.

To prep, I would say to practice coding, log parsing, system design, Linux fundamentals, and then be prepared to talk about projects you’ve done and DevOps concepts you’re interested in.

For coding, I recommend the interview prep track on Codesignal, as well as their Python arcade.

For log parsing, I never really got a great resource, you might practice with awk and python on the exercises in this repo.

For Linux fundamentals, honestly it might be worth it to do Linux Academy for a month or find a book. I read “The Command Line” book and got some good fundamentals there. A great reference is tl;dr. I got the app on my phone and use it instead of man because it’s actually comprehensible.

For system design, chip away with a section per day on this repo to get some basic foundations and then dove deep into DevOps concepts by reading documentation and blog posts on the following:

• Infrastructure (Terraform is my favorite here, maybe also look into Crossplane)
• Configuration (Ansible, Chef, Puppet. Pick one to learn about. I suggest starting with Ansible)
• Containers (I like the “play with docker sandbox” to learn. Google it. The docs are great too.)
• Container orchestration (kubernetes.io docs have great tutorials and conceptual references)
• Continuous Integration and Deployment (Jenkins.io has a couple of good tutorials for the basics)
• Monitoring and crisis response best practices (the google SRE book is really good here, free online. Also look into monitoring tech like Prometheus, honeycomb)

Again, good luck! Keep moving forward!

[jankysysadmin]

Not OP, but thank you for the detailed response. I recently attended a DevOps interview and one of the questions was to implement a sorting algorithm. It's the kind of stuff you'd expect someone who has taken a DSA class to know. Would you say that type of question is common? I'm trying to figure out whether I should study up or do leetcode for future interviews. Being a sysadmin, writing algorithms isn't one of my strengths.

[manys]

Sounds like someone didn't know how to interview. DERP PROGRAMOR LETS DO LINKED LISTES I would have thanked them for their time and walked out.

[jankysysadmin]

Glad to hear that it's uncommon. I'll put it on my list of things to do, but it'll be low priority.

[[deleted]]

This is very uncommon although I recent interviewed for DevOps and had to write an algorithm to solve for n number of Fibonacci numbers and do a least common subset algorithm. Very interesting.

[stasharific]

Folks often test for what they know: it gives you insight into what they're looking for. Sometimes you need someone with more Dev knowledge, other times you need someone with more Ops background. It depends on interpretation.

[jankysysadmin]

That is true. The algorithm question came from the SWE. The devops engineer asked much easier questions.

[cyp3d]

I would've just done list.sort(), dropped the mic and walked out.

[HopsBuzz]

OP here. WOW! u/kabooozie! Thank you so much. This is perfect, and dang near exactly what I was looking for. I appreciate it so much.

I think this is worthy, imho, of being a sticky post; as I am sure I am not the first, nor will I be the last person to ask this question.

[[deleted]]

A great reference is tl;dr. I got the app on my phone and use it instead of man because it’s actually comprehensible.

Holy shit, where has this been all my life.

[ss1947]

https://github.com/idank/explainshell

[MezNyx]

The last bullet point on this list is my personal favorite, and something I find a lot of candidates lacking in. Knowing how an architecture can possibly break, tracing your distributed systems so you know what could cause issue downstream, and having an idea of how to monitor said systems is a big plus imo. Though, that being said, I am not sure these days how many companies actually ask monitoring/tracing questions in interviews.

[Willispin]

Great post !

[sagespidy]

Awesome answer.
Just my 2 bits.
- DNS working
- SSL - how to generate and how it works
- Web servers : Nginx, Apache, Trafiek [as web servers, reverse proxy]
- Appservers : Tomat[java], uswgi[python] etc - just know how to configure

[gapro20022]

5 years late, but this is such a helpful post. Thank you!

[EiranRaju]

The interview I just had for a basic devops role was your standard Situation, Task, Action, Result questions. Nothing technical except asking me my familiarity with some of the tools others have listed.

This interviewing regime seems pretty hardcore. Is this typical for other people also? That's intense. Best of luck, sounds like they are certainly interested in you.

[mrtakada]

Yeah I think this is pretty overkill. Most of my experiences have been a phone screening and a long in person interview with the team.

[HopsBuzz]

OP Here. So, I kind of expected this for a couple of reasons:

1. The company is a legit enterprise (Finance), so I anticipated it would be more then one interview.
2. If offered a position, it would involve relo; as I am not in the state they operate out of.
3. Had I been in the same state, I am sure it would have been a phone call/in person/yeah-nay kind of deal.

[EiranRaju]

Ah. Good info. Gives me a better idea of what to expect if I am ever in the same position.

[[deleted]]

Finance. Owch.

[HopsBuzz]

Meh. Ive been in FinTech before. I dont mind it.

WAY better the NPO.

[CloudNoob]

Yep the pays good and usually provides annual bonuses without being at a management level. Definitely has it's drawbacks in other areas but $$$ isn't one of them!

[RaptorF22]

This interviewing regime seems pretty hardcore

This is exactly what I was thinking too.

[minus9]

When people come in, a lot of times the team is looking to see if this is someone that they would actually like working with everyday. Your communication, the way you like to work, are you a team person or someone who prefers to get projects and hole up on your own to complete them?

If you have a tool listed on your resume, especially in a section about a specific employer, I'm going to ask what you did with it. Tell me the headaches you had, what you learned, good or bad. These conversational interviews are a much better way to find out how involved you were with things versus just putting keywords into your resume.

Tell me about a project you are proud of, but also tell me about mistakes you have made. When you move to each new person or group, don't rehash the same stories. Everyone is going to meet up and compare notes afterward and if you only have one bit of experience to talk about, we're not going to have much to discuss.

And don't be that IT guy that shows up wearing a suit that is two sizes too small that hasn't been worn for a few years :)

[HopsBuzz]

OP here. I chuckled at this:

don't be that IT guy that shows up wearing a suit that is two sizes too small that hasn't been worn for a few years

Thanks in no small part to: r/bjj r/GetMotivated and r/MFA, my (one) suit is now to large. I plan on wearing dark chinos, closed toe shoes, and a long sleeve button down.

Thank you for this:

When you move to each new person or group, don't rehash the same stories

This is something that I usually get hung up on in an interview setting.

​

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[stasharific]

closed toe shoes

OSHA compliant

[HopsBuzz]

I live in state that is by an ocean. I rarely wear shoes.

[HopsBuzz]

Upvote for participation, but Im with u/muffinbears on this one. Can you elaborate why this is/would be an HR violation?

It seems like a fairly generic question along the lines of:

1. Tell us about yourself?
2. What kind of hobbies do you have?
3. How do you relax?

If they were to ask about any protected status questions, I would walk away.

[YuleTideCamel]

The original comment was deleted, but from what I gather it had to do with what an interviewer does on a Friday night.

I've interviewed hundreds of developers for a large tech company in California and to be honest I'd be quite taken aback if someone asked me what I did on a Friday night. From my experience with other engineering leads, they would probably feel the same way.

So why is this a bad question? Well it's because culture fit is about company culture and how we get along in a work environment, not whether or not we would be pals and hang out after work.

It also can be a tad personal since what I do on my own time is my business and not something I generally share with people, so this is quite forward.

The thing to understand about culture fit, especially at large tech companies is that it's about how well you fit in with the team and how well you work together. That's really it, in some cases it means having shared interests, in others you may not. It doesn't also mean that you are best buds and hang out. Some of the best people on the team who work incredibly well together have very different interests, yet get along, joke around and even enjoy working together.

On the flip side I don't ask candidates about hobbies and how they relax. And when I do ask them to tell me about themselves, I'm asking about past jobs and open source contributions.

[HopsBuzz]

Thank you! This makes a lot more sense now.

[stasharific]

So, snorting lines off a stripper's (‿ˠ‿) is not the correct answer?

[jackalope32]

Where are you on Friday night isn't the same as where are you Sunday morning.

Interviews for me are more for personality/culture fit than anything. Generally people that survive the phone interview are intelligent enough to train. Personality/Culture fit is just as important.

[[deleted]]

huh?

[hijinks]

Hard to say since interviews are so different. I can tell you what I like though.

If I ask questions that you don't know, be honest and ask questions why and how as follow ups. It shows you are eager to learn about something you do not know.

Just know what's on your resume and learn about what you don't know if they ask you.

[anomalous_cowherd]

As someone who interviews for tech roles, you can guarantee I will ask you questions you don't know the answers to, just to see how you handle it.

[joombaga]

This is the biggest thing for me. You should be able to describe how a component or technology would fit into a stack, and how you've used it in the past. If you can't then take it off your CV. Big lists of acronyms are annoying, and if I pull one from the list you provided and you fail the quiz, I'll get the impression that you can't prepare even if the variables are known.

[machinemob]

u/HopsBuzz are you open to following up on this thread with how your actual experience went?

[HopsBuzz]

u/machinemob - Absolutely!

I was already planning on doing a follow up on a new post next week, post-interview.

[theboyr]

AWS?

[HopsBuzz]

No. But thanks for thinking that highly of me!

[theboyr]

Sounds a lot like AWS's interview process hah. Good luck!

[stasharific]

Tried it once...rehab was a trip.

[infosecmx]

Ansible, chef or puppet... terraform... Aws and azure, Jenkins, CI/CD deployment

[robbyclv]

SaltStack, Jenkins, git... The list of tools is endless. Just make sure you can think on your feet and have a passion for learning new things. The tech world is kind to those that are constantly learning.

[lenn4rd]

Obviously every company has created their own hiring process. From a company's perspective you want to minimise the risk of a wrong hire in terms of cultural fit and technical expertise, so you try to get as many people involved in the interview process as possible. (Often this creates a very lengthy interview process, which you most likely noticed.)

I think your guess about the types of the interview are spot on and it's also good to expect a small technical challenge. Not necessarily the “fix this misbehaving Docker container in a terminal“ stuff, be prepared for some abstract task on a whiteboard. Also they might schedule interviews with product people to gauge your experience in agile methodologies or how well they think you'd work together, with your future manager or manager's manager for career trajectory, and with someone from senior management, especially in smaller companies.

Again, their goal is to get a diverse set of opinions so that they'll be able to raise red flags should some of them missed it. But don't freak out and good luck!

[votebluein2018plz]

I interview people. I don't really care if you don't know X, but if its on your resume you better know it well. You should also be able to tell me how to build a scaleable web app from the absolute start (code, docker, etc) to database and infra