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Interview

The interviewer will have the upper hand in that they already know the questions.

Process

The process will change drastically depending on where you go -- local, gov't, large corpo, etc.

In general, they're broken up into a few distinct parts.

Networking is always easier to just go talk to someone and get a direct reference.

  • Standard Reachout / Cold Call

There will be recruiters on LinkedIn that will reach out -- they have a strong incentive to hire. They get paid upon how well their recruits get placed.

Hiring managers whose objective is to hire only people who are a good fit for the company.

  • ATS (if used) will ingest resume and make sure the correct keywords exist.

    • Varies drastically from cheap keyword filters to large LLM ATS.
    • So, the resume must be "not too fancy."

  • Once you get through, you will get to the recruiters.

    • They make sure if they line up a phone screen, you're a real person and you're not gonna bomb it.

  • Then you'll get to a phone screen.

    • Rapid-fire questions.
    • 45 mins to assess you to determine if you're worth the time.
    • Hectic and chaotic. Determines if you're a good fit.
    • Someimtes very technical questions but also behavioral questions.
    • If you don't know, try to evade but also say "I don't know" and say how you'd learn.
    • TIP: EXPAND UPON THE TECHNICAL QUESTIONS
    • Then, do we send this person into the interview loop?
    • Could be a one-shot deal. May be put into do not recycle for a year or years.
    • Be thoughtful when applying to company you want to work at. Make sure you know your stuff.
    • You may be put in a pile that they pull from for other posistions
    • You may get homework (online assessment).
      • "don't use LLMs, do this thing"
      • E.g., Hacker Inc. -- They'll assess your performance and your approach to problems.

  • You've made it through the phone screen: You get to the interview loop.

    • You talk to like 5 different people (counted as a single interview).
    • You'll get assessed by experts.
    • Coding questions, networking questions, etc.
    • Roles can be on rails: Millions of applicants, lots of data about what a good engineer looks like. They'll have "what's a good answer look like, bad answer?" etc.
    • You'll get questions that maybe fit the role. Some of these guys won't even look at the resume.
    • They are the ones who will recommend positions.
    • Every interviewer approaches this differently. There's usually a time constraint for them.

  • Discussion of pay/packages, NDAs, etc. The offer.

    • Best to find a hiring manager and get advice -- how to get the best offer, negotiate expenses, etc.

Linux Positions

  • Software Development Engineer (SDE)

    • Works in software. Not coding -- developing software (arch/design)
    • Reqs: Being able to design software. "Build a basic e-commerce website"
    • Not just coding, how things work together -- tradeoffs/decisions.
    • Internal tool vs Off-the-shelf (what are the tradeoffs?)

  • Support Engineer (SupEng)

    • The widest arching one. Everything in the sink could be a support engineer.
    • Systems are running on Linux. You'll have some tangential linux stuff.
    • Probably be running troubleshooting.
    • First line of defense (customer stuff, SOPs, runbooks)
    • A bit of helpdesk, but a great foot-in-the-door. Make improvements and automate stuff to get things done and move up the ladder to SysEng

  • Systems Engineer (SysEng)

    • Wide. Might have a SysEng/DevOps/SRE
    • Expectation: OS fundamentals.
    • Maybe even help write runbooks and SOPs
    • Help provision things
    • Expectation varies widely with company (same with DevOps/SysAdmin)
    • 60k to several 100ks
    • Scripting/automation knowledge, and then sysadmin knowledge
    • Reduce toil and identify it.

  • Systems Development Engineer (SysDev)

    • Building internal tooling for teams.
    • Working more with the infra side.
    • Maybe in charge of building hybrid cloud, building on-prem infra
    • Greater pay
    • Questions about automation, and platform-specific questions (azure, oracle, etc.)
    • Specific languages are used here by companies

  • Platform Engineer

    • Also b uild internal tooling
    • Create internal tooling
    • Guides direction of the company in terms of tech

  • Site Reliabilty Engineer (SRE)

    • Reliability engineer.
    • Helps make things mroe reliable.
    • Reduce toil.

  • DevOps Engineer (DevOps)

    • Combines Development with Operations
    • Sometimes called SecDevOps

  • Systems Administrator (SysAdmin)

  • Network Engineer (NetEng)

    • Boundary support
    • OS and Vendor specific sometimes.
    • The CLI will likely be specific to the vendor

  • Cloud Engineer

    • Could be everything under the sun.
    • You need to know the cloud. But it could be helpdesk, it could be platform engineer.
    • Sometimes can be paid like 30k, or 6 figures.
    • Dive deeply into the details of what they're asking for.
    • This is the wildcard job.

SRE, SysAdmin, DevOps, SysEng. Reduce toil and identify it.

Hiring managers will use existing requirements for job postings if they're "mostly the same."

If it says 'Preferred' or 'Additional', consider those optional. 100% apply.
If they say you need a CCNA under BASIC or REQUIRED qualifications, you need a CCNA.

For these positions, there will be overlap in most of these positions.

A sysadmin will be expected to have some scripting, cloud, etc. skills.

The expectations will be: You have some fundamental knowledge/experience and you can learn.

e.g., What's the difference between Spark arch and x86?

DON'T LIE.

Use an analog and guess what the question means. Follow up with "This is how I'd learn about this thing" (e.g., bootcamp, LLM, spend time with docs)

Explain your process for learning things.

If you just say "I don't know", that's not good. Say "I don't know," but also say "I don't know, but I'd do to learn" or "I know this adjacent technology and this is how I'd do it with that technology".

Dig into job reqs that you may be slightly weak in (e.g., they mention containers, dig into Docker or Podman).
Have a cheat sheet ready and cram beforehand (ports, services, OSI layer, etc).

  • Layered approach
    • Use --help first. Doesn't use AI tokens.
    • Then man pages.
    • Then maybe turn to LLM.

"What if I don't know?" - Explain how you'd learn about it - Explain if you don't know a lot about containers, I'm taking a cert in this right now - Try not to use that same phrase throughout the interview - Show that you've finished one of those things or followed through. - Mention the time you finished your RHCSA - Explain smth you've actually done

Behavioral Questions / Leadership Principles (LP)

  • Do not underestimate the importance of behavioral questions.
    • Don't discount these quetsions -- come up with a few different examples,
    • Avoid using the same example over several loops/interviews

If you have a brain freeze and screwed up a few questions -- if you have awesome behavioral responses/examples, you could still get the job (but down a level)

If you have mid behavioral questions and mid tech skills, you probably wont' get hired.

Ask interviewer if they feel comfortable pasting questions IN TEXT -- being able to see those is a game changer.

They will prefer LP (leadership principles) skills/stories

Tell me about a time where you wish you had done better on a project or goal. What was the project/goal? And knowing what you know now, how would you approach that same project or goal?

  • Systemd service (GH Backup)
  • Admin Course project (Dynamic DHCP discovery monitoring setup)

Tell me about a time where you had a difficult customer interaction?

What was the situation? How did you handle it? What was the outcome?