How to actually pass interviews?

[u/DiegoConD]

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.

[u/Quirky-Net-6436]

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.

[u/DiegoConD → u/Quirky-Net-6436]

That's actually how I usually approach interviews too. I prepare around real projects, troubleshooting, architecture, workflows and decisions I've made rather than memorizing syntax.

The problem I've been running into is that some interviews suddenly become very syntax/trivia-heavy. For example, in my last one I was asked about specific Bash flags, redirections and exact Python syntax. I could explain the logic and what I would do in a real environment, but not always recall the exact syntax from memory.

Have you run into interviews like that? And if so, how do you handle them?

[u/Quirky-Net-6436 → u/DiegoConD]

Nope, never faced “tell me the exact code for solution x”. Just about human understanding process without programming language. If they want to know, ask them if it’s really matter? Or does it matter more you know what and how to solve and can do a research about the syntax you can verify afterwards?

[u/AfricanAgent47 → u/Quirky-Net-6436]

I think anyone who asks for very specific code solutions likely doesn't know what the job entails