FYI, I didn’t pass.
I interviewed for a L4 Production Engineer (aka SRE). The interview process went smoothly and probably the best I’ve experienced. A recruiter reached out and after passing “that” initial phone call interview, they provide you access to an internal interview portal. They have everything from practice questions, review material, guides, and more. While you’ll still need outside sources (at least I did), it’s a great start. They even let you select/change your availability through the portal.
The first technical interview was 2 parts, 1 leetcode style interview and 1 troubleshooting. The leetcode style interview had two questions. I’d say they were easy/medium (leaning more towards easy). I only wrote pseudo code for the first, walked through it, and the interviewer said I didn’t have to code it. Same for the second question. The second question I noticed I was running out of time so I wrote it more “code” less pseudo, but not what I’d consider “actual” code. However, I feel like I passed (obviously they don’t tell you so who knows).
The second part, the troubleshooting, is where I think I failed. I prepared, but it went different than expected. The tl;dr; I’d say is that I wasn’t acting like an “owner” enough.
But in summary, I was expecting them to tell me “you’re seeing this issue, how would you tackle it?”, but instead it went like “here’s a system you now own, go”. I was supposed to find any issues. And in this particular case, the users were reporting issues in the forum section of this “website”. There were no obvious errors in any of the system parts (cpu, ram, hdd, etc) so I said “I’d leave it alone for now and wait for anything to change” (don’t touch it if it ain’t broken). It was only later that I was like, “ok I guess I’ll poke around the site and see what I could find” that I found the users complaining.
I did find the issue, but ran out of time before I could resolve it. So that’s why I feel I didn’t pass. Overall, good experience, will talk what I learned and try harder (be less passive) next time.