
Ask HN: How do you interview candidates for a DevOps (systems engineering) role? - BishoyDemian
Hi HN, I was wondering how is everyone else interviewing candidates for similar roles? any online resources you use for filtering the candidates? and any sources you use for interview questions?<p>I&#x27;m currently hiring for a similar position and wondering how to make the filtering process more effective using online tools similar to development roles, where there are online tests that are currently used by some companies.
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trelliscoded
I'm trying to find a devops role, and the interviews I've had are all over the
map. As far as I can tell, the closest thing to a devops filter is a SRE
filter. A lot of the necessary skills are the same between the two roles, but
SREs are more webapp oriented and devops is often internal enterprise work
which might or might not include web apps.

The problem is that there's no single definition for devops. Aside from
involving automation, companies all mean different things when they say
devops. Some companies want to migrate to CI/CD type deployments for their
webapp, some want to move to DSC instead of RDPing into everything because
they just grew to 1000 Windows machines, and some want to deploy OpenStack
because VMware wants to renew their contract at 2x the price. There's no
single interview process which can reliably predict a successful hire for all
of these examples.

If I were trying to hire for such a role, I wouldn't do whiteboard interviews
or look at their github page or any of that. I'd look for _flexibility_ in
their career history. The ideal candidate would have two of SWE, system admin,
or network administration roles on their resume on a variety of platforms (or
all three, like me.) Then there's the security aspect intersecting all of
those, and finding someone who's done real whitehat work on top of that is
just impossible to hire for.

Like it or not, devops tooling is in a constant state of flux. Regardless of
what you're running now, you want someone who can adapt to changing business
circumstances on the fly with the best technology they can find. It's not
uncommon for the chosen solution to be something no one in the whole company
has ever worked with before. You want someone who adapts quickly and learns
fast.

As far as interviewing goes, the more mature companies I've interviewed at
have had me do multi-hour projects (usually involving Hashicorp products) in a
virtual container somewhere. Let them use man pages, autocompletion, etc. Look
over their shoulder and have them explain their thought process out loud. Have
the candidate do the same things they're going to get paid to do if they're
hired. Why would you want to filter them any other way?

Less mature companies do whiteboard interviews about things that you'll never
do on the job, usually involving recursion or binary trees. I think the idea
is that they're using that as a proxy for general intelligence or CS
knowledge, but that doesn't matter if you're trying to add vswitch redundancy
throughout your clusters and slinging ruby and XML around all day.

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JSeymourATL
> any online resources you use for filtering the candidates?

Check out Melbourne based Vieple, video interviewing platform >
[https://vieple.com/employers/](https://vieple.com/employers/)

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kim0
Have them automate the deployment of a little something is a good start!

