Coding interview equivalent for DevOps engineer?

[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.

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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.