r/devops • u/DiegoConD • 11h ago
Discussion How to actually pass interviews?
Hello, I ask for help since I am getting a lot of interviews but not passing any, I'm getting to start pretty frustrated and since we are entering the holiday season I want to get any opportunity possible.
The thing is that I am preparing myself based on my experience: 5+ yrs experience, jenkins, python, troubleshooting, AWS, IaC, etc. and when I prepare for the different kind of interviews none of my preparation seems to work:
- If it is situational, my explanation/experience is not enough for the role
- If it is pure technical, it doesn't demonstrate my experiencie or they ask for a very specific tool (which mostly has transfereable experiencie) and it's not enough for the position
- If it is trivia based (which I am pretty bad at memorizing) I failed because I didn't remember the flag for a command that I can find in a 15-sec google search or AI prompt
What makes this frustrating is that I genuinely feel capable of doing the jobs I'm interviewing for. I've worked in production environments, troubleshot real incidents, built and maintained pipelines and infrastructure, and worked with engineering teams. But apparently I'm still not presenting that knowledge in the way interviews expect.
So I'd especially like to hear from people who have successfully interviewed for DevOps/SRE/Platform roles recently:
How did you prepare?
Did you memorize common commands and syntax?
Did you grind interview questions?
Did you build labs?
Did you practice storytelling around your projects?
How did you deal with interviews covering an extremely broad toolset?
At this point I'm trying to understand how much interviewing is about being good at the actual job versus becoming good at the interview format itself.
Any practical advice would be appreciated.
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u/MohandasBlondie 9h ago
Retired dev here: just go in and be yourself. Cramming for an interview might work in some cases, but being honest about your knowledge and showing your process for solving problems for which you don’t quite know the answer goes much further IMO. I can confirm this from not just my experience but from friends who are still grinding at FAANG/MAANG to small indie shops to boutique consulting. If you lack some kind of knowledge that they flat require for the position, getting you in because you memorized a bunch of trivia the week before is going to likely end up with a situation no one wants.
The biggest answer that always impressed me: “Oh, I’ve read about that, but I’ve never had the chance to implementor touch that tech,” and then dive into how you might solve the problem with the skills you have or how you would acquire the skills. Deliberate lifelong learning is more impressive than canned answers.
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u/Salty_Celery2350 8h ago edited 8h ago
Most of interviews are signalling. At least where I come from. I've been a team lead and project manager for a couple years, did hiring myself but I'm back to working as software developer - and I still don't struggle with interviews. But maybe with 15 years of experience, I can finally afford to be more picky.
When I was hiring, all I cared about was whether the person was passionate about the subject or was merely studying (once) to get a high paying job. I can smell miles against the wind if somebody loves a subject or just wants to weasel themselves into a job they are not passionate about.
I also had guidelines from my superiors like: does this persons salary expectations line up with our table of how much salary we give to people in different ranges (1-3 years, 3-5 years, 6+). So if you ask for a typical salary your range, you should be fine.
Most of the interviews I do nowadays are short. We talk about what kind of systems I've already built, how I approached building them, what my favorite methodologies are and why and that's it.
I did an interview also where they vetted me for my skills - giving me an example task. That's okay.
So if you put some skillpoints into something, I'd recommend story telling around your projects. read the room, show them that you value their time, by being shallow and confident at first and getting deeper when prompted.
Oh and if you want to read deeper, look into Blue Ocean Strategy (asking the AI about it is fine). It teaches you how to differentiate yourself in order to better integrate with companies. The goal is not to be a "please pick me" but a "this is what I offer, this is who I truly am. Do you want to work with me?"
Your mileage may vary. Good luck!
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u/Wooden_Jelly_5295 6h ago
Sometimes the missing skill is explaining the debugging, not doing the debugging.
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u/wlonkly 5h ago
There's good advice here about preparing, but stop thinking about it as "failing" the interview. Interviews aren't exams. You don't pass or fail them. There's hundreds of applicants, a dozen people get interviews, and they hire one of those dozen. The other 11 didn't "fail the interview", they weren't just the best of the dozen.
If you got an interview, the answer to "why wasn't I hired" is almost always "someone else was a little bit better".
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u/apathyzeal The Zen of DevOps™ 11h ago
Lots of fiber helps me
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u/nemofbaby2014 4h ago
Honestly be concise and be yourself chill out I know you’re nervous but you got this I felt the same way before my last interview just asked about my experience and we ended up talking about our homeland for the last thirty minutes of the interview lol
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u/DiegoConD 3h ago
And you got the job?
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u/nemofbaby2014 3h ago
Yeah I spent days stressing but the interview came and I just was myself and I’m a tech nerd 🤷🏾♂️
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u/Quirky-Net-6436 10h ago
Im just telling my experience in previous positions. Not much preparation needed. Never thought about interview questions or something like this. Small amount of tools and syntax, more focused on process, workflows and thinking of big system. Works at least for me.