We need to stop interviewing Cloud, DevOps, and SRE engineers like we’re hiring backend developers. If the role is about architecture, reliability, observability, scaling, and risk Why are we asking them to reverse-traverse a binary tree? We should be evaluating: How they design resilient systems How they prevent and resolve failures How they automate boring, repetitive work How they communicate under pressure How they make trade-offs when nothing is perfect Your top SRE might not be the flashiest coder in the room. But they might be the one who prevents a $2M outage at 3am. Most real DevOps\SRE code isn’t some elegant CS-masterpiece. It’s the automation that keeps systems alive: Pipelines that build and deploy Scripts that self-heal and recover Jobs that move data and validate it Tools that save hours of manual effort It doesn’t need to be clever. (Well sometimes it might be) It needs to work at scale, in production, under chaos. Hire the people who can keep the business running. Not just the ones who can whiteboard a tree traversal. And in reality the code we write is what we learn from class 101.
Happened upon this post in my feed. Curious what you believe is wrong with looking up the latest ami?
Yes, absolutely. And if another company asks me to destructively change the values of a string of data to manipulate its data just to pass some test.... I'm gonna think y'all are trying to get in trouble by teaching developers its ok to manipulate values that should come from a single source of truth.. the DB.
I completely support this perspective. Interview questions are often not well aligned with the real-world responsibilities. Especially with AI now, code quality is almost a concern of the past.
Those tasks are given to act as proxies for IQ tests. And yes they make no sense. Yet the industry does them because Google hires really strong comp sci / sw eng’s and gives everyone the same gauntlet of leetcode questions so they do it too.
torn between "celebrate" and "support" reactions, honestly 🤔
100% agreed. Same goes for Security Engineers. Just because we have the “Engineer” in our profile title doesn’t mean we write code every single second. 90% of the time, it’s building and improving security automation scripts, secure architecture reviews, working with our engineering partners to implement secure code, and so on. We are not part of the few that push PRs on the daily…we are enforcers. I wish more companies would recognize this and really stop wasting our time during technical interviews.
I think we should interview all software engineers on those questions. They are what matters. If we want to traverse a tree, we can look it up simply. We can't simply look up communication, it requires practice. Making trade-offs requires experience.
So my fifth to tenth articles would be the right type of test? https://github.com/InfiniteConsult/FromFirstPrinciples/tree/main/articles
I have often wondered what is the point of asking an SRE to implement DFS in an interview. Please show me where in my day-to-day work as an SRE I am going to be using this.
Curious............ what was the worst interview question you’ve seen for DevOps\SRE?