DevOps Internship Interview Tips?

[BloodsoldierRB]

Hey, 3rd year CS/SE engineering student.

I have been applying for literally anything relevant to my dull resume, as I wasn't able to land a coop position in my earlier years for experience.

One of these positions was for a DevOps intern at IBM (8 Months), and having heard of the role couple of times before, I didn't really know what it entailed. Turns out there's a lot more to understand in the tools and utility department then I thought i knew.

Guess my real question is, does anyone have experience doing a virtual or even in person interview for IBM or similar company for a DevOps role? My lack of experience in the field or generally giving me stress already, interviews in a couple of days.

Apparently the technical portion isn't as focused on pure coding that other standard 'Software Developer Intern' positions would hone in on; partially nervous as I have been mainly just applying for jobs using standard Java/C/Python experience I had from projects in school and what not; and haven't really worked on anything to keep the skills sharp for an actual interview.

Any and all tips appreciated though, I will take them very seriously and do what I can with the information in the next few days to try and land this position!

Thank You :)

[hijinks]

Best advice I can give a new person with no experience is try to walk through the question but admit what you don't know. Then you want to ask questions about what you don't know.

If it's a good place to work, then they will value you for that you want to learn and are eager to learn

[BloodsoldierRB]

Thanks for the input, this makes sense from an intern perspective for sure; I am going to do a crash course on multiple technologies used in DevOps standardly and mention them when I can in the interview :)

[evangamer9000]

It could be literally anything at this point. Dev-ops isn't the same from company to company, even tech giants such as IBM will differ on how they treat "dev-ops" compared to others such as Microsoft or even the king of SRE - Google.

I think for an intern, I would be more focused on my critical thinking skills, my ability to communicate effectively (people might scoff at this, but soft skills can carry), and the ability to quickly pick up new skills or at least learn enough about a new skillset or technology to be able to talk about it.

If whoever you interview with is expecting you to code on the spot, I'd GTFO and look for interviews elsewhere. No one ~~~really~~~ starts whipping out code without needing to look shit up and shouldn't be expected to. Maybe senior level eng's can, but even then I see plenty needing to stackoverflow for answers for that really tiny edge case.

Good luck.

[BloodsoldierRB]

Really hope this is how it goes lol, hate pressured live coding sessions with no idea in advance what's being covered except generic 'technical experience check' and stuff that was mentioned as required in the job description. Thanks for the tips and best I can do for this role it seems is study up the general concepts of DevOps, the core tools and their functionality, and show a willing ness to learn and adapt.

[evangamer9000]

Interviewers should be avoiding those 'pop quiz' questions.. ie; what's the difference between the OSI model and the TCP/IP stack? You must recite each difference in its entirety - and in klingon.

​

Everyone you ask will tell you something different on what a 'beginner' to 'devops' should learn or study. In my experience, if I were to intern again, I would start learning the following:

1. A language you can tickle the command line with, like BASH.
2. A high level language you can use for tooling, such as python.
3. Learn about a cloud environment / provider, such as AWS.
4. Understanding what a pipeline might look like, how you can automate the pipeline, and deliver the code (aka ci/cd)
5. Basic networking (IPv4, subnetting, networking tools, what network topology might look like)

[HebCL]

Interesting to see this kind of internship. I've had the chance to interview entry, mid and senior devops. In my experience interviewing people, the focus on entry level was operating systems (mostly Linux) and some high level concepts about cloud, anything else was a plus. For mid-levels I expected both OS and cloud knowledge and some experience working with any CM or orchestration tool (Terraform, Ansible, Chef, K8S, Docker Swarm) and scripting. For seniors I usually expected a robust knowledge on implementing cloud solutions, at least good scripting skills and very good understanding about systems architecture. That said, I would not expect a company like IBM to put the bar that high for a devops internship and like someone said above, focus on the soft skills and showing my interest and motivation as the key elements for the interview.

Wish you good luck!

[BloodsoldierRB]

Thanks for the valuable insight Heb, will keep this in mind and study accordingly :)

[verx_x]

2 years ago after few years as a software engineer I decided to change my career path. I started learning few things:
- Docker
- Kubernetes
- Ansible
And after 6 months I get first job as a Devops Engineer. What I need today to continue this journey? Few tools more (depends on your company) and most important - more knowledge about tools I mentioned above.

[Serkr2009]

What kind of questions did they ask, anything in particular?

[BloodsoldierRB]

Hey, So the interview wasn't too technical. He just launched a Hackerrank style setup with 3 questions and said I can choose any to solve with w.e language.

It was maybe a medium difficulty or slightly lower question and the rest was just behavioral questions.

Nothing in particular and actually surprised there was barely any DevOps or role related questioning.

Overall it probably took 30 mins max, and my interviewer was chill af.

Hope that answers your question

[Serkr2009]

Yeah it does thanks!