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Questions I ask in SRE interviews

Logan McDonald on March 03, 2019

SRE, or Site Reliability Engineer{ing}, is a software discipline that applies software engineering to infrastructure and operations. Other SRE-like...
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setagana

This is a fantastic list, not just for the questions themselves but what kind of discussion you're hoping to have off the back of them.

Would you be interested in doing a followup post of what kind of questions are asked of you? With SRE being such an emergent discipline, I'm curious what employers are expecting from their new hires.

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Logan McDonald

That's a great idea! I could do a post about questions I ask when interviewing SRE candidates for our team, for sure.

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Kang-Li Cheng

Would love to read a post on that!

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vorsprung • Edited

The question I always ask is: what is the balance in your team between toil and planned improvement work?

I don't want to work somewhere where I am wading through burning tyres every morning

A couple of places I've interviewed for so-called SRE jobs lately weren't interested in SRE practices. They just wanted a Terraform or Kubernetes person. SRE is just like Devops now. Most places see it as a job title to fit into their current, unreformed processes

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Molly Struve (she/her)

LOVE this!!! As a newly minted SRE Lead I am starting to think about these things and how we recruit people. Your post gave me a lot to think about! Thanks!

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Jonathan Irvin

Very well-written article about the things we don't know we can ask in interviews.

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Meabed

That’s awesome :) thanks for sharing

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Catapult CX

This is so interesting thanks for sharing - we are currently looking for an #SRE expert to join our team, so these questions might come in handy. Agree with others below - it would be equally interesting to hear what candidates ask in your experience :)

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Robin Cher

Excellent points , and it also served as a note to reflect on how my team can do SRE better.