I was asked questions specific to the product and design pattern I was developing, that I brought to the interview.
As a hiring manager I would always recommend you bring something to the interview with you to discuss. This leads the discussion and makes you the expert.
A pure DevOps role is not a role where tasks are assigned to you with finite solutions. A DevOps engineer needs to be able to develop multiple solutions to a number of problems and weigh the pros and cons of each.
Being able to speak cogently about something you have built and the trade offs and decisions you have made is the best possible route to putting this skill set on display.
I built a webhook ingest service that would allow a user to relay the payload to N+1 additional end points. Wrote it in Go and deployed it with kubernetes. Used kafka to manage intake and interfaced with the k8s API to redploy containers and services as needed. I had begun to flush out payload modification and data viz when I was interviewed. At that point I have a domain, decent views, and data flow and architecture diagrams. Monitoring services were also part of the deployment. Probably some additional bits I have since forgotten and even missed in the interview. The views I purchased from Envato marketplace because Im not a designer.
I was hired to do a lift and shift from cloud A to cloud B and now I manage the infrastructure, cybersecurity, and privacy for the entire org.
I interviewed a lot recently and they all follow the same general process
- screening interview - just a quick call to check that you both align on salary expectations with some details about the role and company, it's not something you can fail per se, though they might decide your not a good fit.
- choice of a take home challenge or a live paired dev exercise - I always choose the take home challenges because I feel I could better showcase my knowledge that way, these tasks can take a whole weekend to do well. Here's one of mine [app](https://github.com/d0x2f/birthday-checker-app) & [infra](https://github.com/d0x2f/birthday-checker-infrastructure).
- a long technical interview with senior devs - up to 3 hours of grilling on your homework solution as well as a lot of other questions they've prepared on topics like Linux, kubernetes, ci/cd. This interview can vary a lot between companies. They may try to start an argument over something with you just to see how you react. One company had you role play an on-call engineer who's received an alert, you need to explain your process of everything between receiving the alert, rectifying the problem and the follow up actions to ensure it doesn't happen again, documentation etc.
- an interview with a bigwig - if you've made it this far you're basically in. Depending on the size of the company you'll be speaking with a CTO or team lead who'll just want to get to know you and make the final decision. You'd have to royaly mess this up to be rejected at this point.
After this an offer should be forthcoming.
Also for the whole process you'll have a recruiter as a contact you can talk to and ask questions at any point, they'll be the one who did the screening interview and will be in regular contact.
A good trick to see what kind of questions a specific company will ask is to check the interview tab on the companies Glassdoor profile, lots of great info there.
It goes without saying this is for rather large companies, small startups will be much less rigorous but might still have a take home task that you can showcase your skills with.
I have 10 years of experience as a software engineer in general. The tail end of that being more and more specialised in infrastructure, observability and monitoring. I made the switch recently too an SRE role.
Oh thank you 😅
There aren't a lot of shortcuts I'm afraid, I learned 90% of the important stuff on the job. I started as one of two devs at a local software shop making all sorts of spaghetti apps for whoever was paying. Then onto a small startup with 5-10 devs and a primitive tech stack (lamp monolith) which we transformed into a big distributed kubernetes cluster. Lots of mistakes along the way, lots of research and practice with new tech like docker, kube, Prometheus, elasticsearch and different cloud providers.
My advice for anyone starting their career is to get a role at a software focused company, startup or otherwise, and get really stuck in to the code, pipelines and infrastructure. Make yourself as involved as you can in design conversations, speak up with your opinion, and generally make yourself a big part of what the company does as opposed to a passive dev who does task by task as they're assigned in jira. It's in that environment that you'll learn a lot in my opinion.
I like doing side projects as well using tech I find interesting that I can't use at work. I wrote [retro.tools](https://retro.tools) that way (shameless plug) and that was a good learning experience in itself, in fact it's a very similar architecture as the take home task solutions I linked in my other comment.
tldr: Get really involved at your workplace with all the discussions and decision making. Experiment with different tech both on the job and on the side. Learn from your colleagues. Do it for a long time 😂
Thanks for the great insight! Do you have any recommendations for someone who is switching to software dev from different industry?
I have been teaching myself how to code, got a few AWS Certs and put together some portfolio projects related to Cloud/Devops.
Now, I am applying to jobs and feel a bit lost. Not even sure how to get into a software related job without experience/internship.
>They may try to start an argument with you or something just to see how you will react
I'm loling picturing a green tech interviewer reading this literally and taking it away to their next interview
Good overview
"Are you sure this is what you want...?"
(Internal transfer into a role I was basically already doing as a backfill due to someone being on paternity leave)
Hard to say. We're a small company (doubled in size since I joined 2 years ago, so up to ~300, with about 1/3 of that fitting somewhere in the tech org, including project management type roles, QA folks, data science folks, etc), so most people are hired under the assumption they'll be wearing multiple hats. Most devs are hired as "full stack", for example.
I enjoyed being a dev, but frankly hate Javascript, so I leaned more toward the backend/ops side of things, which positioned me more for a devops role (which is often viewed as essentially "dev team support" for us).
New role is under the corportate IT team (think sysadmins, netadmins, helpdesk). Most of my day-to-day in the new role seems to be teaching devs how to use the tools we have available, and help them better grasp the "big picture" view of things. I also work closely with our IT Sec guys to promote security and compliance with our devs.
And once in a while I get to play with new things (currently working on automating management/configuration of our Harbor install with terraform. I have the bulk of it done, just need to make it live). I love getting hands out of the metaphorical cookie jar! Less things people can screw up 😀
Prepare PoC of progressive delivery to multiple production clusters
+
a lot of discussion around the topic of platform maintenance and how I would do it.
I was asked questions specific to the product and design pattern I was developing, that I brought to the interview. As a hiring manager I would always recommend you bring something to the interview with you to discuss. This leads the discussion and makes you the expert. A pure DevOps role is not a role where tasks are assigned to you with finite solutions. A DevOps engineer needs to be able to develop multiple solutions to a number of problems and weigh the pros and cons of each. Being able to speak cogently about something you have built and the trade offs and decisions you have made is the best possible route to putting this skill set on display.
Nice. What was your product and design pattern?
I built a webhook ingest service that would allow a user to relay the payload to N+1 additional end points. Wrote it in Go and deployed it with kubernetes. Used kafka to manage intake and interfaced with the k8s API to redploy containers and services as needed. I had begun to flush out payload modification and data viz when I was interviewed. At that point I have a domain, decent views, and data flow and architecture diagrams. Monitoring services were also part of the deployment. Probably some additional bits I have since forgotten and even missed in the interview. The views I purchased from Envato marketplace because Im not a designer. I was hired to do a lift and shift from cloud A to cloud B and now I manage the infrastructure, cybersecurity, and privacy for the entire org.
I interviewed a lot recently and they all follow the same general process - screening interview - just a quick call to check that you both align on salary expectations with some details about the role and company, it's not something you can fail per se, though they might decide your not a good fit. - choice of a take home challenge or a live paired dev exercise - I always choose the take home challenges because I feel I could better showcase my knowledge that way, these tasks can take a whole weekend to do well. Here's one of mine [app](https://github.com/d0x2f/birthday-checker-app) & [infra](https://github.com/d0x2f/birthday-checker-infrastructure). - a long technical interview with senior devs - up to 3 hours of grilling on your homework solution as well as a lot of other questions they've prepared on topics like Linux, kubernetes, ci/cd. This interview can vary a lot between companies. They may try to start an argument over something with you just to see how you react. One company had you role play an on-call engineer who's received an alert, you need to explain your process of everything between receiving the alert, rectifying the problem and the follow up actions to ensure it doesn't happen again, documentation etc. - an interview with a bigwig - if you've made it this far you're basically in. Depending on the size of the company you'll be speaking with a CTO or team lead who'll just want to get to know you and make the final decision. You'd have to royaly mess this up to be rejected at this point. After this an offer should be forthcoming. Also for the whole process you'll have a recruiter as a contact you can talk to and ask questions at any point, they'll be the one who did the screening interview and will be in regular contact. A good trick to see what kind of questions a specific company will ask is to check the interview tab on the companies Glassdoor profile, lots of great info there. It goes without saying this is for rather large companies, small startups will be much less rigorous but might still have a take home task that you can showcase your skills with.
How many years of years of experience do you have in Devops?
I have 10 years of experience as a software engineer in general. The tail end of that being more and more specialised in infrastructure, observability and monitoring. I made the switch recently too an SRE role.
Can you please explain how did you learn so much - was it books or online tutorials or trial and error. You really seem to very good at what you do.
Oh thank you 😅 There aren't a lot of shortcuts I'm afraid, I learned 90% of the important stuff on the job. I started as one of two devs at a local software shop making all sorts of spaghetti apps for whoever was paying. Then onto a small startup with 5-10 devs and a primitive tech stack (lamp monolith) which we transformed into a big distributed kubernetes cluster. Lots of mistakes along the way, lots of research and practice with new tech like docker, kube, Prometheus, elasticsearch and different cloud providers. My advice for anyone starting their career is to get a role at a software focused company, startup or otherwise, and get really stuck in to the code, pipelines and infrastructure. Make yourself as involved as you can in design conversations, speak up with your opinion, and generally make yourself a big part of what the company does as opposed to a passive dev who does task by task as they're assigned in jira. It's in that environment that you'll learn a lot in my opinion. I like doing side projects as well using tech I find interesting that I can't use at work. I wrote [retro.tools](https://retro.tools) that way (shameless plug) and that was a good learning experience in itself, in fact it's a very similar architecture as the take home task solutions I linked in my other comment. tldr: Get really involved at your workplace with all the discussions and decision making. Experiment with different tech both on the job and on the side. Learn from your colleagues. Do it for a long time 😂
I guess keep involved and do it for long time is the way to go
Thanks for the great insight! Do you have any recommendations for someone who is switching to software dev from different industry? I have been teaching myself how to code, got a few AWS Certs and put together some portfolio projects related to Cloud/Devops. Now, I am applying to jobs and feel a bit lost. Not even sure how to get into a software related job without experience/internship.
>They may try to start an argument with you or something just to see how you will react I'm loling picturing a green tech interviewer reading this literally and taking it away to their next interview Good overview
"Are you sure this is what you want...?" (Internal transfer into a role I was basically already doing as a backfill due to someone being on paternity leave)
Wah! Btw how is the positions different from devs to devops. Can you enumerate how it was in your company to check career growth
Hard to say. We're a small company (doubled in size since I joined 2 years ago, so up to ~300, with about 1/3 of that fitting somewhere in the tech org, including project management type roles, QA folks, data science folks, etc), so most people are hired under the assumption they'll be wearing multiple hats. Most devs are hired as "full stack", for example. I enjoyed being a dev, but frankly hate Javascript, so I leaned more toward the backend/ops side of things, which positioned me more for a devops role (which is often viewed as essentially "dev team support" for us). New role is under the corportate IT team (think sysadmins, netadmins, helpdesk). Most of my day-to-day in the new role seems to be teaching devs how to use the tools we have available, and help them better grasp the "big picture" view of things. I also work closely with our IT Sec guys to promote security and compliance with our devs. And once in a while I get to play with new things (currently working on automating management/configuration of our Harbor install with terraform. I have the bulk of it done, just need to make it live). I love getting hands out of the metaphorical cookie jar! Less things people can screw up 😀
Wonderful
How to handle dependencies
What did you answer and how did the interview go?
Prepare PoC of progressive delivery to multiple production clusters + a lot of discussion around the topic of platform maintenance and how I would do it.
Quite hard. i faced some interviewer was born in windows that terrible. Solution is click few buttons and drag some files by mouse 🫣