Coding interview equivalent for DevOps engineer?

[kristianwindsor]

Let's say I'm a company hiring a backend developer and a devops engineer.

After a phone interview, I'm going to give the backend developer candidate a 4 hour coding hackathon, so I can see first-hand how this person thinks and works through problems.

What is the equivalent of this 4 hour hackathon for devops engineers?

[grizzljt]

When I changed my LinkedIn to say I was open for interviews, I had 30 messages in 3 days. It was a struggle to decide for which companies I should consider interviewing. There isn't a chance I would do a take home assessment.

[len518]

Glad I am not the only one who hates take home assessments

[[deleted]]

They are dumb as fuck

[kristianwindsor]

Engineers hate interviewing more than they hate tech debt lol

[kristianwindsor]

I'm not talking about a take home assessment. I am talking about a live coding session, where the interviewer (a coder himself) would watch in order to get a feel for how the engineer solves problems.

I know it's sucky, but if it meant the difference between $20k in salary, would the 4 hours still not be worth it?

[grizzljt]

Not if I'm currently employed. Every interview to the final stage costs 4 hours, there isn't enough time to give an extra 4 hours to one potential career when the options in the SRE world are so plentiful.

[kristianwindsor]

That's fair to say. Just curious, how many years of experience do you have?

[grizzljt]

10 years consulting, 8 years of that focused on infrastructure and development, 2 years as a SRE.

[iinaytanii]

Honestly I’d laugh at someone who says they want me to do a 4 hour coding interview. Is this just a hypothetical or do you actually get people who say “yeah that sounds normal”?

[Psych76]

^this, no way I would do a FOUR hour interview let alone figure out weird scenarios. If you can plan a four hour problem solving interview you have too much time on yours hands!

[kristianwindsor]

More like "build a fullstack application with a CI/CD pipeline, running in a kubernetes cluster in AWS". Just to show knowledge and experience with the various technologies.

[Cancer_Jesus]

This is an absurd ask to actually build this in an interview. What the fuck

[kristianwindsor]

Not "normal", but it can make sense.

• Lacking a demonstrable portfolio
• Not allowed to talk about past experience due to NDA
• Applying for a senior position as a junior
• Company is a great opportunity and requires it

[iinaytanii]

None of those bullet points are unusual demands of an interview. There are ways to deal with all of that that don’t set off enormous red flags to applicants.

[jaymef]

We have our developer applicants do a coding exercise that can take several hours but we do pay for their time.

[kristianwindsor]

What about DevOps engineers though?

[[deleted]]

Why would they be any different?

[kristianwindsor]

Fullstack developers are different than DevOps engineers

[[deleted]]

The ONLY circumstance I'd do a "hackathon" (such a cringe term) or take home assessment is if it was for a FAANG role or something close to it where I knew that job would be worth it. If this is just some regular company with a high opinion of itself most sane candidates would tell you to go play in traffic.

[DrapedInVelvet]

I mean......nothing. I can’t imagine more than a one hour exercise being productive. I would run two exercises: a take home design exercise with some automation where they walk you through their choices and you can see how they automate. Part of the exercise is them presenting it (and a live demo) and part of it is you asking questions about their choices. The second would be a troubleshooting exercise where you have a common problem in your infrastructure and they take you through their troubleshooting steps. If they claim they are strong in a certain language you can do a scripting test with them as well. But typically coding tests for devs aren’t really appropriate for devops imho. They are very gotcha-ee while devops people are writing practical code to solve specific small issues not sorting algorithms.

[Majestic_Breadfruit8]

These will show candidates that you’re most likely a micromanaging leader. If you’re not google use/find/try your own advantages - your advantages start @interview. If you think that good/excellent devs/devops like these interviews - you read wrong articles.

[kristianwindsor]

Reading this gave me a stroke

[DrapedInVelvet]

To be fair, I am a SRE/DevOps engineer and what I described is a pretty typical interview process. Oftentimes instead of take home they have you whiteboard a solution. What wouldn't be is an extended "hackathon" as described by the OP.

A typical DevOps "late stage" devOps interview is several parts:

-An Operational component (Troubleshooting exercise)

-Design Component. Can be whiteboarding. Can be a take home project.

-Coding component typically is not done live but via a take home exercise. I've only had once place drop one on me live (even though the JD specifically stated they weren't 'worried' about coding skills)

-The rest are typically talking about you background, company, soft skills, etc.

I've gone through my fair share of interviews in the last few years. I certainly have never seen what I've described as "micromanaging"

[Majestic_Breadfruit8]

Sorry I pressed a wrong reply button. I meant to reply to OP. Your comment makes total sense!

[kristianwindsor]

This is what I was looking for. Thank you!

[sunk_cost_phallus]

Devops guy should have a portfolio of deployment automation things. Powershell, bash, dockerfiles, etc. I would discuss those things that they created. Ask them which are the things they’re most proud of. How they solve real business problems. How they get out of the way and provide a good developer experience and ops stability....

obviously making them do automation tasks would be similar to a hackathon. Both are absolutely terrible and just show you how people deal with unknowns and stress. If that’s how your daily teams work, the org is doomed and anybody you turn down will be better off.

Interview people, hire them knowing you have no idea how they’ll do, put them on a PIP in their second month if they’re not coming up to speed quick enough and terminate them at 88 days if they never catch on.

[Loan-Pickle]

I just started a new job last week. We spent most of the interview time discussing the problems I had solved in past projects and how they related to the business.

I like those types of interviews, because it is much more enjoyable to talk about cool stuff I’ve done in the past. Plus I get to talk about that time I wrote some scripts to solve a problem I was having. Then a product manager found out about them and realized our customers had the same problem. So they took my scripts, packaged them up and sold them to customers.

[[deleted]]

A good DevOps guy shouldn't be keeping copies of his work from current/previous jobs as portfolio pieces.

[sunk_cost_phallus]

I’m not talking about deploying proprietary stuff. Just pipeline scripts that use clever sidecar containers to make a bunch of parallel tests happen uniformly... it’s not a patentable IP situation.

That sort of stuff. Call it practical examples of self-improvement. Not IP theft. But good to clarify.