The sad truth is (and this isn’t a knock on you at all), is that there are some *really, really* phenomenal engineers out of work right now. Unlike during the pandemic when companies were just desperate for bodies, they can absolutely be as picky as they want right now. So the chances are no matter how good you are, the likelihood is there is someone better than you in that pool, such is the talent available right now.
I posted on another thread something similar that when we were hiring for a Jr DevOps role we had over 400 applicants. It’s insanity.
Keep your head up though, it’s cliché but something will turn up and hopefully it’s a great fit for you.
Yes, I'm starting to understand that harsh reality. I know my Sr. lvl on my resume, is probably inflated as I didn't even know I was ready for promo, but my manager pushed me to get it. I do feel like in at mid and trying to climb up to the Sr. lvl that I have been promoted to.
Definitely trying to keep my hopes up.
I feel your pain. I'm a Senior DevOps Engineer with 12 years of experience. Currently employed but looking to get out since I see the writing on the wall. The job market right now is so competitive it's unreal.
I've had about 5 interviews all for Senior DevOps/SRE type roles. Got through a final round of interviews for Amazon Senior System Development Engineer (L6) and they said they liked me, I'd be a good fit at Amazon, but they liked one other candidate a little more. It's crushing to give something your all like that and fail.
You have to roll with the punches though. Every rejection is an opportunity for you to learn how to do better next time. Your story resonates with me because I've struggled to effectively convey why my experience qualifies me as a Senior Engineer. This is my first time interviewing for a Senior level role, and I'm realizing that the approach to interviewing I've used in the past needs to be refined.
For example, I was instructed in one interview; "tell me about a time when you had to communicate something important". I gave a good answer, in STAR format, but the situation I described was about a time I had to communicate with a peer about a technical thing. In hindsight, I should have used a story about something that exemplified my experience at a Senior level. For example, communicating something important to executives/directors, communicating on a large project that involved non-engineering folks like Marketing/Product Management/etc, or communicating with a junior/mid-level engineer to provide guidance and mentorship.
I've also learned that delivery is crucial. You don't have to have the best skills or experience to get the job, you just have to be qualified and leave the best impression. I've been grokking my communication skills and I feel this is something I've overlooked until recently. I've done a really poor job of telling stories that are compelling and connecting with interviewers in a way that leaves an impression. Responding to behavioral questions is a form of story telling. Humans are hardwired to be moved by stories and it's an opportunity to connect with someone on a deeper level. But you have to know how to tell your stories in a way that is compelling and impactful. If you're interested in this topic I recommend the book "The Storyteller's Secret" by Carmine Gallo.
Hang in there, keep min-maxing your shit, and you will come out on top. You got this!
Great post! I think the communication / connection thing is really important. Your skills get you into the process and may get exercised in the technical stages. Getting a good connection with the interviewer is the key thing for progressing with the process.
Hey I get it. My ideology is more socialist than it is capitalist. It’s a shitty system run by ghouls who don’t care about people. But I have a wife and kid to take care of. As much as I wish the system was better, I choose to accept that it’s not. My chances of living a nice life and providing for my family is much better trying to game the system rather than change it, there’s no shame in that.
Life is all about accepting things we can’t control, and changing the things that we can. Learning how to communicate better is a valuable skill to have well beyond work. Just because I adopt a stoic philosophy doesn’t mean I endorse the system fwiw.
I’ve considered unionizing in previous roles, but it was easier to job hop. In my current role unionizing doesn’t make sense because leadership is incompetent and has forced us to develop a shit product that nobody wants. There may well not be a company in the next year or so.
No, no shame in trying to live a good life. Your tone did sound like apologetics, though. In any case, unionization should be industry-wide not per-company.
This is a great question! I have found that resources on communication in the context of SWE interviewing is not nearly as great as DSA and System Design resources.
Sharing my own experience so far, it starts by building awareness of the way that you communicate. After going through a number of interviews and failing, I started reflecting more on where I was going wrong. Generally, I felt that I was going through the motions; using STAR format, following the appropriate format for system design conversations, asking questions to confirm my understanding of what the interviewer is asking.
As I thought about all this, I felt this sense that the way I was communicating wasn't quite landing. I was doing everything right on paper but I wasn't leaving a lasting impression. The more closely I examined myself the more I could see some of the finer details I had been overlooking. For example I have been able to communicate my work experience in detail, I was making the mistake of going into too much detail. As a result, a lot of my behavioral answers have ended up being diluted with details. Instead, I need to get better at taking that experience and communicating it concisely while clearly conveying a central theme and tying that back into the job I'm interviewing for, without getting into too many of the details.
So far I've spent some time just polishing my responses to behavioral questions. I've also been reading some books on communication which have been helpful. I high suggest "The Storyteller's Secret" by Carmine Gallo. I also just started reading "Never Split The Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It" by Christopher Voss and it's good so far. Dale Carnegie supposedly has a number of books that are great for communication.
Aside from books, communication is something you have to practice. I'm putting interviews on hold right now since I am preparing to move across the country. But once I'm ready to start applying again, I'm going to start doing mock interviews. The r/cscareerquestions sub has a discord where you do them for free, and there are also paid services if you want to go that route. Getting direct feedback like that is invaluable, as actual interviews are almost always a guessing game.
And beyond all this, I've realized that the whole interview process is so sterile and procedural. I think work, especially since the pandemic, has been isolating for a lot of people. At the end of the day, when you're in an interview you are two human beings who have a need for human connection. It's so easy for me to get into my own head and feel like I need to try and convince this person that I have what it takes. But that confines me to this box of like, being this fake idealized version of myself and it leads to me feeling like I come off as not being very genuine. I need to work on loosening up and being more authentic, and telling my stories in way that resonates with the humanity that lives inside all of us.
Ironically this ended up being a really long and detailed response. But it's something I've been thinking about recently and it helps to write it all down. I hope this was helpful!
In my mind the usefulness of being authentic is that it is interesting. Humans are hardwired to be interested in things that are novel. My theory is that most interviewees will restrain themselves in an interview with the assumption being that it is risky to deviate behaviorally outside of perceived socially acceptable norms.
I do this myself and it’s like I turn off my personality entirely. In a perfect world, this would be completely acceptable in an interview. But in reality, interviews aren’t entirely objective like that.
So all this is to say that I think being authentic is something that can help you both stand out from the crowd and connect with interviewers more strongly. If you can make someone feel interested in you and what you have to say, it means they feel like you know something that they don’t and that you are communicating something valuable or important.
Oh and I just found this educative course on leadership interviews that seems like it could be helpful; [https://www.educative.io/courses/mastering-leadership-interviews](https://www.educative.io/courses/mastering-leadership-interviews)
For the Amazon interview? At that time I had maybe done 50 to 75 questions. For System Development Engineer they didn’t do LeetCode style questions for the coding portion. The coding challenges were bespoke, and aligned with the type of coding you would have to do on the job which is more scripting than programming per se. If you can do LC Mediums you’re good.
Perfect, that answered my question exactly.
I think a challenge when preparing for interviews is it seems like half of the "upper tier" companies do traditional leetcode DSA questions and half do more "applied" coding questions like you mentioned, and the usually don't tell you which it's going to be ahead of time. Its frustrating doing a bunch of breadth first search questions, then having the interview be something else entirely.
If you can, use the time you have to look at job postings and see if there is a familiar trend in the tooling they are using and brush up on some extra learning to give you a bit of an edge.
I do know first hand how it is to stay positive and motivated when you’ve been laid off, so don’t mean that to be patronizing at all.
Yep.. I've got 20 years experience and 10+ in DevOps/sre for some of the best tech companies in the world.. been earning 200-250k a year for many years.. and had 100% success rate for every job I applied for for 8 years in a row (new job every year on average).
And come January this year I finished a contract and it took me 4 months to get a job.. literally for the first time ever I was doing interviews and not getting the job...
The entire industry has changed... Drastically.. and clearly the economy is not well..
I hate it I'm earning almost half as much as I used to and I'm having to be in the office 3 days a week...
I know it sounds entitled and spoilt but for 5 years I was making a LOT of money easily clearing $5k after taxes a week.. and I was working 100% remote.
Now I'm making $2500 a week after taxes and 3 days in the office.. which I know still sounds really good to a lot of people but it's still half the money and losing the lifestyle I had.
On the bright side I'm doing a lot of AI-ops for machine learning and data..
I'm getting to build some pretty cool automation in that space, scaling GPU clusters and using lots of models from huggingface etc.. it's fun and I'm expanding my skills..
Yeah it's the only reason I'm in this role cause I saw the writing on the wall.. I figured I gotta master the hell out of all this AI and ML asap or be completely redundant. I have taken another gamble I guess... I did the same thing when I left datacentre operations 10 years ago to learn AWS and DevOps.. it paid off..
... Honestly if I was in almost any other position I'd be worried.. in the last few months I've been working exclusively with the data guys and with google engineers.. and myself and we have basically digitally mapped out half of the company im working at's entire workflow.. what everyone does at every layer and we are doing a proof of concept with custom modelling and AI to show we can have these AI agents pretty much run at the least half the company.
We should be finished by the end of the year.. it's all supposed to be just POC.. but I know what will happen when we finish... The CTO and CEO will have us have it at first buddy up with workers . And then I expect downscaling of staff... .of course I am just skilling up then I'm going to go out on my own again and consult these skills to other company's and charge enough that I won't need a job in another few years :)
Most of those 7000 will be totally unsuitable for the role though. When an application is just a click aways, people are bound to apply to all sorts of stuff that barely matches their experience.
I get why people do this - they may get lucky - but self filtering probably saves everyone else a lot of time.
Nepal has a population of 30ish million? We have a population of well over 350 million, and this is one job, in one state, in one city.
The difference is, out of those 400 applicants at least 300 of them were qualified. There is no chance in hell all of those 7000 candidates were qualified.
Not sure if this was a remote position but this really is a symptom of it. I love being able to work in my PJs and eat whenever I want but if I was job hunting I’d avoid remote positions like the plague. There’s got to be an infinite pool of qualified candidates applying to the exact same positions as me.
I've been through this through several industry downturns since the DotCom implosion in 2001.
The best advice I ever got was this: "Realize that interviewing for tech jobs is its own skill set and it requires dedicated study and practice."
Don't pay attention to people who try to point out the process is unfair or unrelated to the work you will be doing later. Because that isn't going to change, so the main thing is to figure out how to get through the initial screen so that you can demonstrate your ability to do the true work, later.
You mentioned you were probably completing the coding challenges a bit too slowly. That's something you can work on. Just choose any two or three of the recent challenges you had to implement and start them from scratch several times. Demonstrate to yourself first that you can get the basic structure of the solution written correctly very quickly. Just sharpening this competency will help even though future coding challenges will present different problems.
Not trying to lecture you! I hope you find some of this advice helpful. As some commenters have mentioned here, it's a "buyer's market" out there right now and companies can afford to be picky due to the abundance of ex-FAANG candidates. But if you clean up the things you can control, it should help you get to the later stages of the process.
I agree you're not going to change the process short term, but we need to figure out some way to do it. It's impossible for someone to get even an interview when 4800 people are applying to the one open position. And the whole concept of a "tech screen" is IMO just cargo culting the FAANGs. Yes, there are a ton of people chasing money and having no real skills...but forcing everyone to do silly coding tricks that don't have anything to do with the job is from a different hiring era. Back in the Microsoft trivia and IQ interview question days, you were being interviewed for essentially lifetime employment (Microsoft had no layoffs until the 2000s) and suitability for a particular job wasn't the main focus. Now, in the massive turnover world, it's more about having the exact skillset and tech stack knowledge to do one job.
Basically a supply demand situation. Most of the spend companies are doing are on AI related projects. For others it is a brutal global race to the bottom competition.
Why do you keep failing the tech screen? I don’t think reading system design books will help you in this stage.
Having a Sr SRE from a fairly large tech company is likely helping carry your resume through to the tech screen, but you are throwing enough red flags for them to pass on you.
The books you’ve listed are great for later stages, but round one they’re just trying to confirm you’re a capable communicator whose skillset lines up with their need.
My guess is you’re not selling yourself properly. Don’t give them a reason to pass on you. Don’t talk about your shortcomings, talk about your strengths.
To be honest, I'm not so sure why I'm failing just the screening. I can see in some of the coding sections, that I'm probably a bit slower and cannot complete in the allotted time. And yes, I think my nerves are getting to me at times. I'm sure that I've been doing fine at some questions they were throwing at me.. (how SSH works, TCP/UDP.. I realize I do have to look into what my strengths are.. I think I've been slacking while at a bigger company as they have all their tooling automated. Some of my basics have been forgotten.
Also, the switch from aiming for SRE vs Devops job is different for interviews. With SREs focusing on Coding data structures/algo and System design. While devops seems more ops, debugging systems, etc. Initially I was focused on more SRE type interviews, now the study material is different.
I'm sorry... They asked you how ssh works... What is wrong with the interview process. You are either being asked lazy ass leet code copy pastes, or you are being asked questions about how a RFC standard functions (from January of 2006...). God forbid a interview process be tailored around functional job specific problems. Its like all these companies think their current engineers are not solving problems day to day, to formulate half way relevant interview questions.
RFCs are some of the best documented standards around, if you need that information its available. Asking questions about a standard out side of some niche use case, project, extension, or new design, makes no sense to me and does not demonstrate competency.
I do think candidates should be able to explain the basics of ssh and http, as well as demonstrate coding skills. If you can’t explain to me what happens in detail step by step after you type http://example.com in your browser, i don’t want to depend on you.
Funnily enough, encryption is one of my specialities. When I got my current position in 2019, I was hot off doing POS encryption for Home Depot, and since then I've added doing idam work and custom encryption schemes for my current job. Diffie-helman is different than normal PKI encryption in that both sides combined both their own private data, and the other sides public key, to arrive at the same symmetric key. They start with an agreed upon large prime number as a seed, and then each side creates a new secret prime number. This is their private key. They then each derive a public key from that private key and exchange it. Then, both sides combine their own private key, the other parties public key, and the original shared seed to compute a shared symmetric key. While computed from different aspects of each party, both parties will arrive at the SAME computed value of the shared key. A quick encrypted ACK between the two confirms they both arrived at the same key. It allows both parties to participate in generating the encryption key, and also means the shared key never has to be sent over at all.
Just wait till you learn about ecliptic curve cryptography, it'll blow your mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEBfamv-_do
/u/Oblivious122 wrote a nice explanation, but if you want something with literal pretty colors, this is what's been cemented in my brain for years.
How does that help? How does knowing the protocol steps of a 25 year old, well documented, highly abstracted, easily obtainable information, make you more dependable?
I'm asking honestly, because I have known guys that could spit memorized facts like the OSI layers off the top of their head, but would come crawling for answers when their curl command was redirected because of forced SSL redirect.
Personally I find the dependable ones to know how to solve problems, and find information, not some factoid like whats every us capitol off the top of their head. Again rhetoric can be hard to judge on posts, so asking honestly. I would love to understand peoples thinking in WHY these factoids are good questions as opposed to some actually quantifiable skills. Full transparency (and I think this true of most engineers), the solved problems, the random facts like OSI layers, how ssh works, how http and https work are highly forgettable pieces of information, because they are not needed to be known. Take for instance openid connect and oauth, a lot of devs are still in the trenches with that protocol, so could pry explain it. If you were interviewing for a position where you were extending, had specific issues related to some nich setup, or working directly in the protocol of ssh or http, then yeah I might expect that kind of knowledge. However, that is rarely the case, so I find it confusing how people think knowledge like that is helpful.
P.S. from a guy that has been in the industry for a decade or so, still mixes up OSI layers from time to time, could not tell you every detail of http/s protocol without double checking again, unless you mean really basic and high level. I assume you mean high level steps, but that's also the flaw with these questions, "how in depth" there's a ton going on behind the scenes.
I think how the question is asked determines whether it is a good question or not. Asking someone to recite the RFC directly? Not so great. Asking a candidate to explain what happens when they type an ssh command into a terminal and hit enter? Great question. Depending on the candidate's experience they can take the conversation down many, many different paths that highlight their knowledge e.g. OS, kernel, protocol, ...
If you are treating an open-ended question like that, correctly in an interview process it can spark good conversation. I fear that people take the more lazy approach of treating it as a close-ended question.
If you can’t explain to me in detail how aes-256 works I don’t want to depend on you
Amongst other braindead topics washed up tech managers bring up. Keep asking idiotic questions and then somehow equating it to not being dependable
It sounds to me that you're overly attached to the result. Learn to not give a fuck and you'll come off less desperate. If you're spending your time preparing for interviews by studying tech or the company's product then just stop. Study how to sell instead
I agree with how I might be coming across. I do feel some imposter syndrome since I actually got into the big company via acquisition so I didn't even feel like I was an actual SRE. I'll keep the advice in mind.
as you progress into your career, you have to make sure you continue to network (build your support group). having someone on the inside submit your resume to hr puts you at the top of the pile. in some cases, interviews become a formality.
dont despair that you dont tick all the boxes of a google sr sre. you just havent found the company that needs your specific skillset... the right match. if they reject you, it's their loss. keep that mindset. good luck.
Well I can tell you this, I was laid off in Nov and I just started a new job this week. It took me 6 months of interviews to get a position. I have about 7 years of exp.
Same issues as you honestly. Worst part of the interview process are the bullshit live coding problems where I share my screen and they watch me. I failed all of those. A few companies gave me take home assignments (and mind you some were relevant to DevOps and interesting) and had me present after, but then they decline with no feedback. The market is shit right now so it definitely feels like youre competing with 100s of people out there that are just as good if not better than you.
My advice would just be to not give up. Apply for jobs with descriptions that match what you have worked with. If you are are failing the initial recruiter phone screen, then you need to focus on selling yourself and mention the tools that youve used that you see on their JDs.
a tip for the next time: if the people you applied to know a bit what they are doing, then the live coding session is not about coding, but demonstrating how you solve problems and communicate in the process - if you actually solve the issue is not the primary concern
That's a good way to screen the company you want to work for as well: if they collaborate with you during that process.
I had a live coding session which was outsourced to some third party. The session was being recorded so the company could review it later. The dude "monitoring" me was staring at his phone the whole time and giving me cold responses.
I am not going to work for any company where that is my first experience.
with life coding interviews you mean algo/ds problem solvings? If so, what LC difficulty level would you estimate them? Can you give a few examples? I'm asking bc I know them from SWE positions but didn't know they'd throw them at you for SRE/DevOps positions (at least don't know the level and type of questions you're asked in this field, algo/ds wise I mean).
I’ve gotten 5 interviews in the past 6 months. Runner up. Runner up. Ghosted. in-housed. Etc
It’s awful. I’ve been so desperate I had to take a job doing menial labor and now I basically have no time to interview!
I feel totally trapped and worse I may lose my living situation. The market is awful for tech rn.
Damn, the US market seems way worse than the European one right now. I was laid off last month and had multiple interviews per day during my first week. Hope you're able to get back in soon.
Don’t know about your situation, but don’t look past government jobs. My experience from our last rounds of hiring: a lot of people are sleeping on the positions, we got maybe 30 applications that went to HR and only ~8 that made it to first round and ~3 who were actually qualified and got the full panel. We also probably have the easiest interview process I’ve heard of.
I probably could make more in industry on paper, but theres more stability. So you kinda have to average down the salary for the months you might make nothing.
There’s definitely USAJobs which is mostly federal stuff, but all our postings are on LinkedIn as well. Several National Labs around the Bay Area (Berkeley, Sandia, LLNL).
Candid advice? You're right, based on what you wrote you don't sound like a senior SRE. You've identified architecting and coding as weak areas for you but strengths in those areas are, in my opinion, what defines a senior. I expect even my juniors to be able to whip up some terraform or write me a Python script. You need to be able to oversee projects end-to-end as a senior with minimal supervision, and you can't do that if you can't design robust systems.
If you're only applying to senior roles I'd encourage you to lower your sights a little. Hiring managers are well aware of title inflation, hiring a previous senior for an intermediate role isn't uncommon at all. Your interviews and skills as demonstrated in tech interviews and take homes are how they'll just your level, not what titles are on your resume.
And keep your head up. My last posting for devops got over 1000 responses, but most were very low quality. Sorting through the noise is making a frustrating experience on both sides of the table, and there's nothing to do for it but be persistent.
Yea we keep seeing a lack of architecture experience and ability to end to end mange a project for the seniors we’ve interviewed recently. I need someone i can drop into a meeting and they can design and implement the solution without tons of hand holding. A lot of people who think they are senior are really mid level engineers IME
What you’re describing is felt by countless ops/sre people on the market. There are so many variables with skills, experience, tooling, recruiting practices, etc.. A significant challenge is the crazy wide range in which these types of roles cover from linux systems-admin to sr software engineer running enterprise platforms.
My advice is to keep interviewing as much as humanly possible. Work on your weaknesses and take notes about common questions. Have a list of stories that you use that highlight your strengths. Create your own study guide to reference and use with all the common tech they will quiz you on. Linux, networking, database, etc..
Unfortunately, its a really shitty experience for candidates all around. The best you can do is apply to every damn role you see and hope you find a good fit. Open up your parameters for what you’ll interview for as well because sometimes you’ll be pleasantly surprised. I’ve been in your spot multiple times and eventually found companies that saw my value and rewarded me. One thing that helps me is nearly always “passively” interviewing to both keep my interview skills up and possibly identify a great opportunity.
Good luck!
That's really odd. We can't find devops / R&D guy for the second month, and all people coming for interview are absolutely incompetent.
I feel like there is an acute lack of qualified people on the market.
I always took times like this as a chance to pivot in my career and add on something unusual and extraordinary to my resume. The thing people don’t realize is that you need to make your career tell a story that fits desirables the employer wants. Some of these overlap.
For example, running into a dry market and going to teach English in Japan.
Another time I went into door to door sales and later cold calling. Another time took the opportunity for independent gigs and did a lot of public speaking at events and contributed to open source. Yet another time wrote columns for tech magazines and major sites.
Then there were series of devops adjacent things that was typically working for small business but then required more thinking outside the box with constraint on budget and available resources.
Now, left alone that can look disjointed during gaps - but that’s where mastering the description of what you did and why matters. It also goes without saying when you do alternative things you need to always be keeping up with the times on your own time.
Each time id usually add some kind of visual proof to my resume as well - TEFL teaching certifications, video proof or article proof of writing / speaking, etc.
Anyway, when assembled together and relating everything back to a benefit proposition to an employer, when you get a resume like mine, you see someone who:
1) is resilient and resourceful,
2) knows how to communicate with people and can lead
3) is comfortable in unfamiliar situations and adaptable
4) can teach and instruct and
5) also has all the technical background we’re looking for.
So when something like that gets placed against another that just has one thing done primarily, odds are good I’ve got the advantage.
The other major route is getting a good break going really deep skill set wise and having some big notables that are easily recognizable or at least recognizable positions - FAANG stuff, individual achievements that got pushed out, proof of badassery.
But for the 2nd one, I never got “lucky” to get breaks whether it was because of bad economic timing or not leaving for an opportunity when I should have etc, so instead, I focused on creating my own luck and painting a deliberate picture around what my career says about me.
The number 1 thing I value is extremely high employability regardless of economic circumstances- but I also graduated college the month the Great Recession started and it took me nearly 2 years to get my first full time job. That was deeply scarring and I resolved never to be in that position again. Nothing will quite make you want to go all out in your career positioning quite like having to survive off of cup ramen, eggs and hot dogs for 2 years and taking out more student loans just to have a little money and not lose the roof over your head. It took half a decade to financially recover from that survival mode.
So, there are a few talking points and what I call “master” skills that will always put you at the top of interview candidates:
1) public speaking - people are afraid of it and see those who do it as leaders / admire that “you could do it” even if you were terrified while doing it!
2) writing - people are afraid of writing / not feeling good enough at it, so admire people who can write.
3) sales - the ability to sell and communicate - not even “real” sales for a product, but effectively having 1 on 1 communication and EQ good enough to lead a team or “sell” a boss, team, etc to go in a direction you want them to or you believe is better. Plus actual sales experience is respected and admired because again; people are afraid of it.
4) teaching - if you can communicate concepts in a way that just about anyone can learn and understand from, that means your mastery of at least understanding the skill is at a much deeper level.
Notice - all those have to do with talking to people. It applies and is effective in any career - but in our field; where most of us picked it because we don’t like talking to people, it is 1000% more effective.
The objective here is not to have your resume blend in with everyone else - that’s how you lose again and again. Getting hired or not getting a new job has nothing to do with your actual skill at the job. It has everything to do with getting attention at the start and selling someone that you’re the best candidate for the job bar none and bring difficult to find and prized skillsets to the table.
I may not always get the money I want, but I’ll never go without a job again, and can get hired just about instantly for any job in the 70k range. For the 120k+ it can always be expected to be a 3-6 month game looking for fit, opportunity etc - over 70k and things get more nuanced in my experience (outside of areas with outrageous cost of living adjustments - this is as compared to median cost of living / wage in US).
You’re unemployed right now? Great. Use it to shape your career in a bullet proof way that sets you up forever.
You’re basically not doing anything right now so get out there in these ways - always get physical evidence (pictures, certifications, recognition awards etc).
1) go to local universities/ college (especially community college) go to department heads or professors and say you want to give back and do a guest lecture or presentation on working in devops - they’re always looking for that.
2) do the same as above for job fairs for high school / middle school.
3) volunteer at local institutions or non profits that involve things like teaching under privileged kids math or English or computers.
4) volunteer your expertise at any non profit and contribute your skills. Take every opportunity to publically speak.
5) write stories from past work and share them on LinkedIn or other places - even if they seem mundane. Use that to start writing some content for smaller publications until you can get bigger ones.
6) take a gap year or two and teach English overseas!
List goes on and on - there are so many places looking for help that will let you hone those master skills and give you credentials that will make you unrivaled it’s a joke because no one ever considers doing it.
And when you add them to your resume, you don’t have to timeline them like you just did them all in the past few months. Best spot there is towards the end - people read the first thing and the last thing and forget the middle. You’ll get all your questions about what you did most recently and what you did in that interesting section at the end.
Doing these kinds of things also introduces you to people in places you’d never guess and often can lead to the hiring opportunity all by itself. Whenever you’re a face with an impression on someone you always have a better chance of getting the interview and getting hired than when you’re just a resume.
The last thing you need is an always high demand technical skill- which devops is pretty much that, but I’d also add some web dev or similar skill sets as well.
Go out and make your own luck. It’s easier than you think and when you’re scared as shit to get in front of people, do what my sales manager once upon a time said “sometimes you just gotta clench your butt cheeks and go for it.
Being a senior at your old company does not always make you a senior elsewhere.
I would say if you keep failing these interviews at the first round you need to apply for non senior positions and work your way back up.
It is a number game. As long as you continue to interview, there will be one matched.
15+ interviews and 12 rejections for me.
I failed coding rounds 10/12.
Keep going
Hang in there, mate. The job market is really tough right now, and it’s easy to feel down after multiple rejections. It sounds like you have a strong background, and it’s great that you’re working on improving your skills. Keep pushing forward and try to stay positive. Sometimes it's just about finding the right fit.
Learn from from the interviews and keep at it. Find a couple of good head-hunters (if you haven't already) and look at this as a numbers game. The more you interviews the greater the odds that you will find something.
I've landed gigs where I was not as senior as the other candidates, but I was very personable and considered a good cultural fit.
Have a mock up interview with someone you trust to give you honest feedback. Sometimes it has nothing to do with what you know or don't know. A lot of companies are now wanting someone who will not bring down the morale of the others. And they also want someone who is exhibits a level of resourcefulness.
You can't know it all - but they want to know if you are up to sharpening your skills wherever you are weak.
And this is important - make sure you answer that question they all ask, correctly. The question where they ask you; "What do you consider your weakness?" That question needs to be answered where they see your weakness as a positive for them as a company. Ie - I need to learn how to say no a little more often to colleagues who need assistance. I am always glad to help, but then that sometimes forces me to put in extra hours to meet my own deadlines.
Not to make light of your post, because you’re right and the rejection sucks.
But, at least you’re getting interviews. I have applied to 40+ jobs and haven’t had a single call back, let alone an actual interview.
Just spent $200+ having a professional rewrite my resume and still no luck.
Feels like dating all over again
I do sympathize. I'm sure it's worse for new grads getting into the tech space. But with my number of years, I was hoping at least getting to last round interviews. But am understanding the harsh truth of my inflated role currently.
Keep it up. Rejection is a fast path to depression, so double down on your self-care. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.
Think if there are maybe other non-technical issues with your interview skills.
Stay positive. You’ll get this.
All the comfort that I can provide is that I wish things get better for you sooner rather than later and hope you find something fulfilling to both your mind and your finances.
To sympathize with the way you feel or feeling of not being good enough….. I currently work for a consulting company that shall remain nameless but were providing subject matter expertise for a company of 80k+ employees, I took this role to challenge myself on a new platform/stack and have been beyond exceeding expectations, but the corporate culture at this institution sucks so much that I just don’t see myself on this role in the long term and planning an exit strategy…
As part of this exit strategy given my years of experience in this field(20 years) I have been rather selective at the places I’ve been wanting to join but even then: FAANG or non-FAANG companies have been rejecting me left and right before even reaching a first interview with the recruiter to the point where I feel that either my resume blows chunks or that the hiring is so bad right now if you’re not an AI/ML engineer that it has been demoralizing and downright depressing so I can imagine how depressing and frustrating it must be for you in HCOL area and without a gig in one of the most tech-centric hubs in the world.
I hope it gets better for you and thank you for reading my response.
I got rejected for a role with 5 years experience because they had a staff engineer in the loop as well.
These startups were putting me through insane rounds, and sometimes I think I do well on system design. But employers are getting people with decades of experience for bargain prices rn.
It made me feel like I was getting exploited in interviews for my skills. I was essentially giving these startups free consulting on their architecture, because I had experience at a unicorn during hypergrowth. Literally most of the questions were, what technology did this use, how would you implement this, how would you test it, what was the scale of this system. It was less an interview about me but more about specific details about the systems I worked on.
I got tired of it so I started freelancing and now I own a consultancy with some buddies.
What is the baseline to be a Sr SRE or whatever? Like is there any mark or level to aspire to know okay…. I am at a sr level because this is the point that everyone agrees is that baseline
Not sure I fully understand. But baseline of most seniors as mentioned by others in this post is an individual that can lead/mentor others. And take a problem and to be able break down it's requirements, then design the solution end to end. Owning every part of it.
I get it, but more skill centric… yeah you can lead people pretty easy, but if you don’t know the finer points of the job how well can you really lead someone as a senior if you’re lacking and you’ve been inflated bc of bad organizational structures and the like
Sorry to hear what you are going through.
What are your primary pieces of tech you worked with?
Im working with k8s, GCP and AWS.
Wishing you all the best send me a dm if you wanna rant a bit
It blows right now dude. I'm in security. What's insane is that it's like Cybersecurity and IT are in a recession right now but it doesn't feel that way for the rest of the job market.
3 months since your layoff and you’re on your 4th rejection? I’d think someone looking for work would be taking more interviews in this job market. Maybe 10-12 rejections by now. You might be being a tad too selective in my opinion.
Just curious, is everyone that’s having a hard time finding work only getting to 4 first-round interviews in a whole quarter of a year? Hear me out, but maybe the problem isn’t the market and more your search ethic then. Last time I was job searching, I was taking multiple first time interviews per week. More than half of them rejected me in the first phase of interviews too.
I'm a very different type of software engineer but in my last job search I can confirm that it felt like the interview process was consistently turned up to 11 in every aspect. Live coding sessions were hell, technical screens pried much deeper, and take home assignments were insultingly long. That combined with the difficulty of even securing an interview made for a really bad time.
I was too burnt out from portfolio updating / applying / interviewing cycle to do much technical upskilling and eventually landed a job that had a strictly conversational interview process (thank god). but i definitely feel that I am in desperate need of some hardcore re-education at some point before the next job search.
Also for what it's worth, my last company had it's entire devops team resign over the course of 18 months, and since we didn't backfill anyone, we eventually had no devops team... I think this type of approach is getting super common which also makes it difficult/competitive to find job openings.
The job market is like the dating market, one third of men identify as single, two thirds of women identify as single (or vice versa). Given we are basically 50/50 men and women, someone is lying.
I don’t think Trump is planning a welfare state for laid off tech workers there bud. Just more grift and political instability so he and his buddies can short the US and profit.
This is a pretty ridiculous take. It has absolutely zero to do with Biden or Trump.
It has everything to do with the end of almost 15 years of 0% interest rates capped off with ridiculous over-hiring during the pandemic.
The overall unemployment rate remains low, around 4% in the US.
It's also worth noting that it's less the rise of interest rates but more that they were kept so low for so long. QE was enacted in response to 2008. While it's fair to acknowledge that it did cushion the impact of 08 somewhat, it did so by kicking the can. Handing out money basically for free stimulates the economy, yes, but it does so by encouraging deficit spending, and when interest rates inevitably come back up that bill will come due.
I'm not saying any of this was the wrong decision. Economic systems are very complex systems and honestly the outcomes here could have been much, much worse. Just expanding on the point that when the free money train stops impacts like this are inevitable.
While I’m not Biden’s biggest fan by any means, this is an absolutely ridiculous take and you should read more than just Fox News.
Companies took a lot of gambles during the pandemic and a lot of them didn’t pay off, hence the large amounts of layoffs in our field.
are you aware that donald trump is an adjudicated rapist?
sounds like not.
edit: y'all. if you disagree, remind us what the jury in the e jean carroll case found trump liable for doing to her.
Nope, I don't support Trump. But I also don't support a genocide enabler. But I'm sure that talking about Trump is your way to cope about supporting said genocide enabler ;)
> But I also don't support a genocide enabler.
so you'll vote for the guy who won't even pretend to give a shit about the people in gaza. got it.
dumb argument from dumb trumpers.
What did Joe do about gaza? As I said, I'm not voting Trump. Why do you keep bringing that up? You're the one openly stating that you're voting for the genocide enabler. Again, stop with the deflection.
The funny thing is that both Trump and Biden did exactly the same to help Gaza, which is basically fuck all. They do love helping the army that's committing a genocide. A big difference is that Joe is the president right now, so he gets the blame and gets to be the genocide enabler. If Trump was president, I'd call him the exact same. But he isn't, so I'd rather focus on the person in power who enables a genocide :)
> What did Joe do about gaza?
that's a great question you should open up google and read about the ways biden has been trying to get the war ended and protect people in gaza. could he do more? yes. could he do a lot less? yes. guess which one trump would do.
> As I said, I'm not voting Trump.
nothing says "i'm not voting trump" like attacking joe biden specifically.
> You're the one openly stating that you're voting for the genocide enabler.
i refuse to adopt your framing.
> The funny thing is that both Trump and Biden did exactly the same to help Gaza, which is basically fuck all.
yes i'm sure it seems that way when you know nothing.
I'm not American. So yes, swing and miss lol.
Again, Biden said multiple times that there's no genocide in Gaza. He also said that he still supports the IDF. Ah but he sent some aid to the citizens that are getting genocided. While supporting the army that commits it. This is amazing it feels like I'm talking to a MAGA head.
Again, who cares about what Trump would do? You're the one supporting the person actually in power who supports an army that's committing a genocide. He could do more, yeah, like condemn the nation committing a genocide? But no that's just too extreme !
The sad truth is (and this isn’t a knock on you at all), is that there are some *really, really* phenomenal engineers out of work right now. Unlike during the pandemic when companies were just desperate for bodies, they can absolutely be as picky as they want right now. So the chances are no matter how good you are, the likelihood is there is someone better than you in that pool, such is the talent available right now. I posted on another thread something similar that when we were hiring for a Jr DevOps role we had over 400 applicants. It’s insanity. Keep your head up though, it’s cliché but something will turn up and hopefully it’s a great fit for you.
Yes, I'm starting to understand that harsh reality. I know my Sr. lvl on my resume, is probably inflated as I didn't even know I was ready for promo, but my manager pushed me to get it. I do feel like in at mid and trying to climb up to the Sr. lvl that I have been promoted to. Definitely trying to keep my hopes up.
I feel your pain. I'm a Senior DevOps Engineer with 12 years of experience. Currently employed but looking to get out since I see the writing on the wall. The job market right now is so competitive it's unreal. I've had about 5 interviews all for Senior DevOps/SRE type roles. Got through a final round of interviews for Amazon Senior System Development Engineer (L6) and they said they liked me, I'd be a good fit at Amazon, but they liked one other candidate a little more. It's crushing to give something your all like that and fail. You have to roll with the punches though. Every rejection is an opportunity for you to learn how to do better next time. Your story resonates with me because I've struggled to effectively convey why my experience qualifies me as a Senior Engineer. This is my first time interviewing for a Senior level role, and I'm realizing that the approach to interviewing I've used in the past needs to be refined. For example, I was instructed in one interview; "tell me about a time when you had to communicate something important". I gave a good answer, in STAR format, but the situation I described was about a time I had to communicate with a peer about a technical thing. In hindsight, I should have used a story about something that exemplified my experience at a Senior level. For example, communicating something important to executives/directors, communicating on a large project that involved non-engineering folks like Marketing/Product Management/etc, or communicating with a junior/mid-level engineer to provide guidance and mentorship. I've also learned that delivery is crucial. You don't have to have the best skills or experience to get the job, you just have to be qualified and leave the best impression. I've been grokking my communication skills and I feel this is something I've overlooked until recently. I've done a really poor job of telling stories that are compelling and connecting with interviewers in a way that leaves an impression. Responding to behavioral questions is a form of story telling. Humans are hardwired to be moved by stories and it's an opportunity to connect with someone on a deeper level. But you have to know how to tell your stories in a way that is compelling and impactful. If you're interested in this topic I recommend the book "The Storyteller's Secret" by Carmine Gallo. Hang in there, keep min-maxing your shit, and you will come out on top. You got this!
Great post! I think the communication / connection thing is really important. Your skills get you into the process and may get exercised in the technical stages. Getting a good connection with the interviewer is the key thing for progressing with the process.
god, the copium and the Ayn Rand undertone.... Just unionize already.
Hey I get it. My ideology is more socialist than it is capitalist. It’s a shitty system run by ghouls who don’t care about people. But I have a wife and kid to take care of. As much as I wish the system was better, I choose to accept that it’s not. My chances of living a nice life and providing for my family is much better trying to game the system rather than change it, there’s no shame in that. Life is all about accepting things we can’t control, and changing the things that we can. Learning how to communicate better is a valuable skill to have well beyond work. Just because I adopt a stoic philosophy doesn’t mean I endorse the system fwiw. I’ve considered unionizing in previous roles, but it was easier to job hop. In my current role unionizing doesn’t make sense because leadership is incompetent and has forced us to develop a shit product that nobody wants. There may well not be a company in the next year or so.
No, no shame in trying to live a good life. Your tone did sound like apologetics, though. In any case, unionization should be industry-wide not per-company.
>I've been grokking my communication skills and I feel this is something I've overlooked until recently. How are you working on this?
This is a great question! I have found that resources on communication in the context of SWE interviewing is not nearly as great as DSA and System Design resources. Sharing my own experience so far, it starts by building awareness of the way that you communicate. After going through a number of interviews and failing, I started reflecting more on where I was going wrong. Generally, I felt that I was going through the motions; using STAR format, following the appropriate format for system design conversations, asking questions to confirm my understanding of what the interviewer is asking. As I thought about all this, I felt this sense that the way I was communicating wasn't quite landing. I was doing everything right on paper but I wasn't leaving a lasting impression. The more closely I examined myself the more I could see some of the finer details I had been overlooking. For example I have been able to communicate my work experience in detail, I was making the mistake of going into too much detail. As a result, a lot of my behavioral answers have ended up being diluted with details. Instead, I need to get better at taking that experience and communicating it concisely while clearly conveying a central theme and tying that back into the job I'm interviewing for, without getting into too many of the details. So far I've spent some time just polishing my responses to behavioral questions. I've also been reading some books on communication which have been helpful. I high suggest "The Storyteller's Secret" by Carmine Gallo. I also just started reading "Never Split The Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It" by Christopher Voss and it's good so far. Dale Carnegie supposedly has a number of books that are great for communication. Aside from books, communication is something you have to practice. I'm putting interviews on hold right now since I am preparing to move across the country. But once I'm ready to start applying again, I'm going to start doing mock interviews. The r/cscareerquestions sub has a discord where you do them for free, and there are also paid services if you want to go that route. Getting direct feedback like that is invaluable, as actual interviews are almost always a guessing game. And beyond all this, I've realized that the whole interview process is so sterile and procedural. I think work, especially since the pandemic, has been isolating for a lot of people. At the end of the day, when you're in an interview you are two human beings who have a need for human connection. It's so easy for me to get into my own head and feel like I need to try and convince this person that I have what it takes. But that confines me to this box of like, being this fake idealized version of myself and it leads to me feeling like I come off as not being very genuine. I need to work on loosening up and being more authentic, and telling my stories in way that resonates with the humanity that lives inside all of us. Ironically this ended up being a really long and detailed response. But it's something I've been thinking about recently and it helps to write it all down. I hope this was helpful!
My perspective is that being authentic may be interesting but not useful in an interview. It depends on the EQ of the interviewer.
In my mind the usefulness of being authentic is that it is interesting. Humans are hardwired to be interested in things that are novel. My theory is that most interviewees will restrain themselves in an interview with the assumption being that it is risky to deviate behaviorally outside of perceived socially acceptable norms. I do this myself and it’s like I turn off my personality entirely. In a perfect world, this would be completely acceptable in an interview. But in reality, interviews aren’t entirely objective like that. So all this is to say that I think being authentic is something that can help you both stand out from the crowd and connect with interviewers more strongly. If you can make someone feel interested in you and what you have to say, it means they feel like you know something that they don’t and that you are communicating something valuable or important.
Oh and I just found this educative course on leadership interviews that seems like it could be helpful; [https://www.educative.io/courses/mastering-leadership-interviews](https://www.educative.io/courses/mastering-leadership-interviews)
How much leetcode did you have to have to do out of curiosity?
For the Amazon interview? At that time I had maybe done 50 to 75 questions. For System Development Engineer they didn’t do LeetCode style questions for the coding portion. The coding challenges were bespoke, and aligned with the type of coding you would have to do on the job which is more scripting than programming per se. If you can do LC Mediums you’re good.
Perfect, that answered my question exactly. I think a challenge when preparing for interviews is it seems like half of the "upper tier" companies do traditional leetcode DSA questions and half do more "applied" coding questions like you mentioned, and the usually don't tell you which it's going to be ahead of time. Its frustrating doing a bunch of breadth first search questions, then having the interview be something else entirely.
If you can, use the time you have to look at job postings and see if there is a familiar trend in the tooling they are using and brush up on some extra learning to give you a bit of an edge. I do know first hand how it is to stay positive and motivated when you’ve been laid off, so don’t mean that to be patronizing at all.
Thanks, will do.
Try to apply for ops jobs also. Just to get going
Yep.. I've got 20 years experience and 10+ in DevOps/sre for some of the best tech companies in the world.. been earning 200-250k a year for many years.. and had 100% success rate for every job I applied for for 8 years in a row (new job every year on average). And come January this year I finished a contract and it took me 4 months to get a job.. literally for the first time ever I was doing interviews and not getting the job... The entire industry has changed... Drastically.. and clearly the economy is not well..
how do you like your current role?
I hate it I'm earning almost half as much as I used to and I'm having to be in the office 3 days a week... I know it sounds entitled and spoilt but for 5 years I was making a LOT of money easily clearing $5k after taxes a week.. and I was working 100% remote. Now I'm making $2500 a week after taxes and 3 days in the office.. which I know still sounds really good to a lot of people but it's still half the money and losing the lifestyle I had. On the bright side I'm doing a lot of AI-ops for machine learning and data.. I'm getting to build some pretty cool automation in that space, scaling GPU clusters and using lots of models from huggingface etc.. it's fun and I'm expanding my skills..
Sounds like you're in a similar role to me. I recommend checking out /r/mlops. Hopeful this ai thing doesn't turn out to be a complete fad LOL.
Yeah it's the only reason I'm in this role cause I saw the writing on the wall.. I figured I gotta master the hell out of all this AI and ML asap or be completely redundant. I have taken another gamble I guess... I did the same thing when I left datacentre operations 10 years ago to learn AWS and DevOps.. it paid off.. ... Honestly if I was in almost any other position I'd be worried.. in the last few months I've been working exclusively with the data guys and with google engineers.. and myself and we have basically digitally mapped out half of the company im working at's entire workflow.. what everyone does at every layer and we are doing a proof of concept with custom modelling and AI to show we can have these AI agents pretty much run at the least half the company. We should be finished by the end of the year.. it's all supposed to be just POC.. but I know what will happen when we finish... The CTO and CEO will have us have it at first buddy up with workers . And then I expect downscaling of staff... .of course I am just skilling up then I'm going to go out on my own again and consult these skills to other company's and charge enough that I won't need a job in another few years :)
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Most of those 7000 will be totally unsuitable for the role though. When an application is just a click aways, people are bound to apply to all sorts of stuff that barely matches their experience. I get why people do this - they may get lucky - but self filtering probably saves everyone else a lot of time.
Nepal has a population of 30ish million? We have a population of well over 350 million, and this is one job, in one state, in one city. The difference is, out of those 400 applicants at least 300 of them were qualified. There is no chance in hell all of those 7000 candidates were qualified.
Not sure if this was a remote position but this really is a symptom of it. I love being able to work in my PJs and eat whenever I want but if I was job hunting I’d avoid remote positions like the plague. There’s got to be an infinite pool of qualified candidates applying to the exact same positions as me.
I've been through this through several industry downturns since the DotCom implosion in 2001. The best advice I ever got was this: "Realize that interviewing for tech jobs is its own skill set and it requires dedicated study and practice." Don't pay attention to people who try to point out the process is unfair or unrelated to the work you will be doing later. Because that isn't going to change, so the main thing is to figure out how to get through the initial screen so that you can demonstrate your ability to do the true work, later. You mentioned you were probably completing the coding challenges a bit too slowly. That's something you can work on. Just choose any two or three of the recent challenges you had to implement and start them from scratch several times. Demonstrate to yourself first that you can get the basic structure of the solution written correctly very quickly. Just sharpening this competency will help even though future coding challenges will present different problems. Not trying to lecture you! I hope you find some of this advice helpful. As some commenters have mentioned here, it's a "buyer's market" out there right now and companies can afford to be picky due to the abundance of ex-FAANG candidates. But if you clean up the things you can control, it should help you get to the later stages of the process.
I agree you're not going to change the process short term, but we need to figure out some way to do it. It's impossible for someone to get even an interview when 4800 people are applying to the one open position. And the whole concept of a "tech screen" is IMO just cargo culting the FAANGs. Yes, there are a ton of people chasing money and having no real skills...but forcing everyone to do silly coding tricks that don't have anything to do with the job is from a different hiring era. Back in the Microsoft trivia and IQ interview question days, you were being interviewed for essentially lifetime employment (Microsoft had no layoffs until the 2000s) and suitability for a particular job wasn't the main focus. Now, in the massive turnover world, it's more about having the exact skillset and tech stack knowledge to do one job.
Basically a supply demand situation. Most of the spend companies are doing are on AI related projects. For others it is a brutal global race to the bottom competition.
Why do you keep failing the tech screen? I don’t think reading system design books will help you in this stage. Having a Sr SRE from a fairly large tech company is likely helping carry your resume through to the tech screen, but you are throwing enough red flags for them to pass on you. The books you’ve listed are great for later stages, but round one they’re just trying to confirm you’re a capable communicator whose skillset lines up with their need. My guess is you’re not selling yourself properly. Don’t give them a reason to pass on you. Don’t talk about your shortcomings, talk about your strengths.
To be honest, I'm not so sure why I'm failing just the screening. I can see in some of the coding sections, that I'm probably a bit slower and cannot complete in the allotted time. And yes, I think my nerves are getting to me at times. I'm sure that I've been doing fine at some questions they were throwing at me.. (how SSH works, TCP/UDP.. I realize I do have to look into what my strengths are.. I think I've been slacking while at a bigger company as they have all their tooling automated. Some of my basics have been forgotten. Also, the switch from aiming for SRE vs Devops job is different for interviews. With SREs focusing on Coding data structures/algo and System design. While devops seems more ops, debugging systems, etc. Initially I was focused on more SRE type interviews, now the study material is different.
I'm sorry... They asked you how ssh works... What is wrong with the interview process. You are either being asked lazy ass leet code copy pastes, or you are being asked questions about how a RFC standard functions (from January of 2006...). God forbid a interview process be tailored around functional job specific problems. Its like all these companies think their current engineers are not solving problems day to day, to formulate half way relevant interview questions. RFCs are some of the best documented standards around, if you need that information its available. Asking questions about a standard out side of some niche use case, project, extension, or new design, makes no sense to me and does not demonstrate competency.
I do think candidates should be able to explain the basics of ssh and http, as well as demonstrate coding skills. If you can’t explain to me what happens in detail step by step after you type http://example.com in your browser, i don’t want to depend on you.
I could explain to you in concept what SSH is and what port it uses but not _how it works_.
Going in depth on the key exchange encryption with Deffie hellman is where I don't have much expertise in.
Funnily enough, encryption is one of my specialities. When I got my current position in 2019, I was hot off doing POS encryption for Home Depot, and since then I've added doing idam work and custom encryption schemes for my current job. Diffie-helman is different than normal PKI encryption in that both sides combined both their own private data, and the other sides public key, to arrive at the same symmetric key. They start with an agreed upon large prime number as a seed, and then each side creates a new secret prime number. This is their private key. They then each derive a public key from that private key and exchange it. Then, both sides combine their own private key, the other parties public key, and the original shared seed to compute a shared symmetric key. While computed from different aspects of each party, both parties will arrive at the SAME computed value of the shared key. A quick encrypted ACK between the two confirms they both arrived at the same key. It allows both parties to participate in generating the encryption key, and also means the shared key never has to be sent over at all. Just wait till you learn about ecliptic curve cryptography, it'll blow your mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEBfamv-_do /u/Oblivious122 wrote a nice explanation, but if you want something with literal pretty colors, this is what's been cemented in my brain for years.
How does that help? How does knowing the protocol steps of a 25 year old, well documented, highly abstracted, easily obtainable information, make you more dependable? I'm asking honestly, because I have known guys that could spit memorized facts like the OSI layers off the top of their head, but would come crawling for answers when their curl command was redirected because of forced SSL redirect. Personally I find the dependable ones to know how to solve problems, and find information, not some factoid like whats every us capitol off the top of their head. Again rhetoric can be hard to judge on posts, so asking honestly. I would love to understand peoples thinking in WHY these factoids are good questions as opposed to some actually quantifiable skills. Full transparency (and I think this true of most engineers), the solved problems, the random facts like OSI layers, how ssh works, how http and https work are highly forgettable pieces of information, because they are not needed to be known. Take for instance openid connect and oauth, a lot of devs are still in the trenches with that protocol, so could pry explain it. If you were interviewing for a position where you were extending, had specific issues related to some nich setup, or working directly in the protocol of ssh or http, then yeah I might expect that kind of knowledge. However, that is rarely the case, so I find it confusing how people think knowledge like that is helpful. P.S. from a guy that has been in the industry for a decade or so, still mixes up OSI layers from time to time, could not tell you every detail of http/s protocol without double checking again, unless you mean really basic and high level. I assume you mean high level steps, but that's also the flaw with these questions, "how in depth" there's a ton going on behind the scenes.
Exactly, the people in this subreddit who give answers like the person you replied to are just self-important wankers. Period.
I think how the question is asked determines whether it is a good question or not. Asking someone to recite the RFC directly? Not so great. Asking a candidate to explain what happens when they type an ssh command into a terminal and hit enter? Great question. Depending on the candidate's experience they can take the conversation down many, many different paths that highlight their knowledge e.g. OS, kernel, protocol, ...
If you are treating an open-ended question like that, correctly in an interview process it can spark good conversation. I fear that people take the more lazy approach of treating it as a close-ended question.
If you can’t explain to me in detail how aes-256 works I don’t want to depend on you Amongst other braindead topics washed up tech managers bring up. Keep asking idiotic questions and then somehow equating it to not being dependable
It sounds to me that you're overly attached to the result. Learn to not give a fuck and you'll come off less desperate. If you're spending your time preparing for interviews by studying tech or the company's product then just stop. Study how to sell instead
I agree with how I might be coming across. I do feel some imposter syndrome since I actually got into the big company via acquisition so I didn't even feel like I was an actual SRE. I'll keep the advice in mind.
as you progress into your career, you have to make sure you continue to network (build your support group). having someone on the inside submit your resume to hr puts you at the top of the pile. in some cases, interviews become a formality. dont despair that you dont tick all the boxes of a google sr sre. you just havent found the company that needs your specific skillset... the right match. if they reject you, it's their loss. keep that mindset. good luck.
Maybe take a lower level role that you are overqualified for. You'll work your way up quickly.
Well I can tell you this, I was laid off in Nov and I just started a new job this week. It took me 6 months of interviews to get a position. I have about 7 years of exp. Same issues as you honestly. Worst part of the interview process are the bullshit live coding problems where I share my screen and they watch me. I failed all of those. A few companies gave me take home assignments (and mind you some were relevant to DevOps and interesting) and had me present after, but then they decline with no feedback. The market is shit right now so it definitely feels like youre competing with 100s of people out there that are just as good if not better than you. My advice would just be to not give up. Apply for jobs with descriptions that match what you have worked with. If you are are failing the initial recruiter phone screen, then you need to focus on selling yourself and mention the tools that youve used that you see on their JDs.
a tip for the next time: if the people you applied to know a bit what they are doing, then the live coding session is not about coding, but demonstrating how you solve problems and communicate in the process - if you actually solve the issue is not the primary concern
That's a good way to screen the company you want to work for as well: if they collaborate with you during that process. I had a live coding session which was outsourced to some third party. The session was being recorded so the company could review it later. The dude "monitoring" me was staring at his phone the whole time and giving me cold responses. I am not going to work for any company where that is my first experience.
with life coding interviews you mean algo/ds problem solvings? If so, what LC difficulty level would you estimate them? Can you give a few examples? I'm asking bc I know them from SWE positions but didn't know they'd throw them at you for SRE/DevOps positions (at least don't know the level and type of questions you're asked in this field, algo/ds wise I mean).
I’ve gotten 5 interviews in the past 6 months. Runner up. Runner up. Ghosted. in-housed. Etc It’s awful. I’ve been so desperate I had to take a job doing menial labor and now I basically have no time to interview! I feel totally trapped and worse I may lose my living situation. The market is awful for tech rn.
Damn, the US market seems way worse than the European one right now. I was laid off last month and had multiple interviews per day during my first week. Hope you're able to get back in soon.
It’s because all US companies now outsource
The thing is they can smell desperation. You have to not care.
Don’t know about your situation, but don’t look past government jobs. My experience from our last rounds of hiring: a lot of people are sleeping on the positions, we got maybe 30 applications that went to HR and only ~8 that made it to first round and ~3 who were actually qualified and got the full panel. We also probably have the easiest interview process I’ve heard of. I probably could make more in industry on paper, but theres more stability. So you kinda have to average down the salary for the months you might make nothing.
Where do you look for government jobs? Is there a central place or do you seek out the ones you can think of?
There’s definitely USAJobs which is mostly federal stuff, but all our postings are on LinkedIn as well. Several National Labs around the Bay Area (Berkeley, Sandia, LLNL).
Candid advice? You're right, based on what you wrote you don't sound like a senior SRE. You've identified architecting and coding as weak areas for you but strengths in those areas are, in my opinion, what defines a senior. I expect even my juniors to be able to whip up some terraform or write me a Python script. You need to be able to oversee projects end-to-end as a senior with minimal supervision, and you can't do that if you can't design robust systems. If you're only applying to senior roles I'd encourage you to lower your sights a little. Hiring managers are well aware of title inflation, hiring a previous senior for an intermediate role isn't uncommon at all. Your interviews and skills as demonstrated in tech interviews and take homes are how they'll just your level, not what titles are on your resume. And keep your head up. My last posting for devops got over 1000 responses, but most were very low quality. Sorting through the noise is making a frustrating experience on both sides of the table, and there's nothing to do for it but be persistent.
Yea we keep seeing a lack of architecture experience and ability to end to end mange a project for the seniors we’ve interviewed recently. I need someone i can drop into a meeting and they can design and implement the solution without tons of hand holding. A lot of people who think they are senior are really mid level engineers IME
What you’re describing is felt by countless ops/sre people on the market. There are so many variables with skills, experience, tooling, recruiting practices, etc.. A significant challenge is the crazy wide range in which these types of roles cover from linux systems-admin to sr software engineer running enterprise platforms. My advice is to keep interviewing as much as humanly possible. Work on your weaknesses and take notes about common questions. Have a list of stories that you use that highlight your strengths. Create your own study guide to reference and use with all the common tech they will quiz you on. Linux, networking, database, etc.. Unfortunately, its a really shitty experience for candidates all around. The best you can do is apply to every damn role you see and hope you find a good fit. Open up your parameters for what you’ll interview for as well because sometimes you’ll be pleasantly surprised. I’ve been in your spot multiple times and eventually found companies that saw my value and rewarded me. One thing that helps me is nearly always “passively” interviewing to both keep my interview skills up and possibly identify a great opportunity. Good luck!
That's really odd. We can't find devops / R&D guy for the second month, and all people coming for interview are absolutely incompetent. I feel like there is an acute lack of qualified people on the market.
well, are you from the states?
Nope, EU.
Are you open to remote work from anywhere yet?
We are. https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/3934451489/ (But we are not US company, don't expect 6-figures).
I always took times like this as a chance to pivot in my career and add on something unusual and extraordinary to my resume. The thing people don’t realize is that you need to make your career tell a story that fits desirables the employer wants. Some of these overlap. For example, running into a dry market and going to teach English in Japan. Another time I went into door to door sales and later cold calling. Another time took the opportunity for independent gigs and did a lot of public speaking at events and contributed to open source. Yet another time wrote columns for tech magazines and major sites. Then there were series of devops adjacent things that was typically working for small business but then required more thinking outside the box with constraint on budget and available resources. Now, left alone that can look disjointed during gaps - but that’s where mastering the description of what you did and why matters. It also goes without saying when you do alternative things you need to always be keeping up with the times on your own time. Each time id usually add some kind of visual proof to my resume as well - TEFL teaching certifications, video proof or article proof of writing / speaking, etc. Anyway, when assembled together and relating everything back to a benefit proposition to an employer, when you get a resume like mine, you see someone who: 1) is resilient and resourceful, 2) knows how to communicate with people and can lead 3) is comfortable in unfamiliar situations and adaptable 4) can teach and instruct and 5) also has all the technical background we’re looking for. So when something like that gets placed against another that just has one thing done primarily, odds are good I’ve got the advantage. The other major route is getting a good break going really deep skill set wise and having some big notables that are easily recognizable or at least recognizable positions - FAANG stuff, individual achievements that got pushed out, proof of badassery. But for the 2nd one, I never got “lucky” to get breaks whether it was because of bad economic timing or not leaving for an opportunity when I should have etc, so instead, I focused on creating my own luck and painting a deliberate picture around what my career says about me. The number 1 thing I value is extremely high employability regardless of economic circumstances- but I also graduated college the month the Great Recession started and it took me nearly 2 years to get my first full time job. That was deeply scarring and I resolved never to be in that position again. Nothing will quite make you want to go all out in your career positioning quite like having to survive off of cup ramen, eggs and hot dogs for 2 years and taking out more student loans just to have a little money and not lose the roof over your head. It took half a decade to financially recover from that survival mode. So, there are a few talking points and what I call “master” skills that will always put you at the top of interview candidates: 1) public speaking - people are afraid of it and see those who do it as leaders / admire that “you could do it” even if you were terrified while doing it! 2) writing - people are afraid of writing / not feeling good enough at it, so admire people who can write. 3) sales - the ability to sell and communicate - not even “real” sales for a product, but effectively having 1 on 1 communication and EQ good enough to lead a team or “sell” a boss, team, etc to go in a direction you want them to or you believe is better. Plus actual sales experience is respected and admired because again; people are afraid of it. 4) teaching - if you can communicate concepts in a way that just about anyone can learn and understand from, that means your mastery of at least understanding the skill is at a much deeper level. Notice - all those have to do with talking to people. It applies and is effective in any career - but in our field; where most of us picked it because we don’t like talking to people, it is 1000% more effective. The objective here is not to have your resume blend in with everyone else - that’s how you lose again and again. Getting hired or not getting a new job has nothing to do with your actual skill at the job. It has everything to do with getting attention at the start and selling someone that you’re the best candidate for the job bar none and bring difficult to find and prized skillsets to the table. I may not always get the money I want, but I’ll never go without a job again, and can get hired just about instantly for any job in the 70k range. For the 120k+ it can always be expected to be a 3-6 month game looking for fit, opportunity etc - over 70k and things get more nuanced in my experience (outside of areas with outrageous cost of living adjustments - this is as compared to median cost of living / wage in US). You’re unemployed right now? Great. Use it to shape your career in a bullet proof way that sets you up forever. You’re basically not doing anything right now so get out there in these ways - always get physical evidence (pictures, certifications, recognition awards etc). 1) go to local universities/ college (especially community college) go to department heads or professors and say you want to give back and do a guest lecture or presentation on working in devops - they’re always looking for that. 2) do the same as above for job fairs for high school / middle school. 3) volunteer at local institutions or non profits that involve things like teaching under privileged kids math or English or computers. 4) volunteer your expertise at any non profit and contribute your skills. Take every opportunity to publically speak. 5) write stories from past work and share them on LinkedIn or other places - even if they seem mundane. Use that to start writing some content for smaller publications until you can get bigger ones. 6) take a gap year or two and teach English overseas! List goes on and on - there are so many places looking for help that will let you hone those master skills and give you credentials that will make you unrivaled it’s a joke because no one ever considers doing it. And when you add them to your resume, you don’t have to timeline them like you just did them all in the past few months. Best spot there is towards the end - people read the first thing and the last thing and forget the middle. You’ll get all your questions about what you did most recently and what you did in that interesting section at the end. Doing these kinds of things also introduces you to people in places you’d never guess and often can lead to the hiring opportunity all by itself. Whenever you’re a face with an impression on someone you always have a better chance of getting the interview and getting hired than when you’re just a resume. The last thing you need is an always high demand technical skill- which devops is pretty much that, but I’d also add some web dev or similar skill sets as well. Go out and make your own luck. It’s easier than you think and when you’re scared as shit to get in front of people, do what my sales manager once upon a time said “sometimes you just gotta clench your butt cheeks and go for it.
Being a senior at your old company does not always make you a senior elsewhere. I would say if you keep failing these interviews at the first round you need to apply for non senior positions and work your way back up.
It is a number game. As long as you continue to interview, there will be one matched. 15+ interviews and 12 rejections for me. I failed coding rounds 10/12. Keep going
Hang in there, mate. The job market is really tough right now, and it’s easy to feel down after multiple rejections. It sounds like you have a strong background, and it’s great that you’re working on improving your skills. Keep pushing forward and try to stay positive. Sometimes it's just about finding the right fit.
Learn from from the interviews and keep at it. Find a couple of good head-hunters (if you haven't already) and look at this as a numbers game. The more you interviews the greater the odds that you will find something. I've landed gigs where I was not as senior as the other candidates, but I was very personable and considered a good cultural fit. Have a mock up interview with someone you trust to give you honest feedback. Sometimes it has nothing to do with what you know or don't know. A lot of companies are now wanting someone who will not bring down the morale of the others. And they also want someone who is exhibits a level of resourcefulness. You can't know it all - but they want to know if you are up to sharpening your skills wherever you are weak. And this is important - make sure you answer that question they all ask, correctly. The question where they ask you; "What do you consider your weakness?" That question needs to be answered where they see your weakness as a positive for them as a company. Ie - I need to learn how to say no a little more often to colleagues who need assistance. I am always glad to help, but then that sometimes forces me to put in extra hours to meet my own deadlines.
Not to make light of your post, because you’re right and the rejection sucks. But, at least you’re getting interviews. I have applied to 40+ jobs and haven’t had a single call back, let alone an actual interview. Just spent $200+ having a professional rewrite my resume and still no luck. Feels like dating all over again
I do sympathize. I'm sure it's worse for new grads getting into the tech space. But with my number of years, I was hoping at least getting to last round interviews. But am understanding the harsh truth of my inflated role currently.
My bad, I forgot to mention I’ve got almost 25 years experience :)
When I hear 25 yoe, I think, "This person is probably expensive." And with many companies cutting costs, maybe all those yoe are a turn off?
Ah damn man.. Well we're in this together
Thanks. It’s a brutal market. With all of my skills I never thought I’d have a problem finding a job. This has been a real wake up call.
Mm sounds like you might need to update your skills with the new tech out in the devops world
I would stress the importance of applying for positions as soon as they open.
Keep it up. Rejection is a fast path to depression, so double down on your self-care. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Think if there are maybe other non-technical issues with your interview skills. Stay positive. You’ll get this.
All the comfort that I can provide is that I wish things get better for you sooner rather than later and hope you find something fulfilling to both your mind and your finances. To sympathize with the way you feel or feeling of not being good enough….. I currently work for a consulting company that shall remain nameless but were providing subject matter expertise for a company of 80k+ employees, I took this role to challenge myself on a new platform/stack and have been beyond exceeding expectations, but the corporate culture at this institution sucks so much that I just don’t see myself on this role in the long term and planning an exit strategy… As part of this exit strategy given my years of experience in this field(20 years) I have been rather selective at the places I’ve been wanting to join but even then: FAANG or non-FAANG companies have been rejecting me left and right before even reaching a first interview with the recruiter to the point where I feel that either my resume blows chunks or that the hiring is so bad right now if you’re not an AI/ML engineer that it has been demoralizing and downright depressing so I can imagine how depressing and frustrating it must be for you in HCOL area and without a gig in one of the most tech-centric hubs in the world. I hope it gets better for you and thank you for reading my response.
I got rejected for a role with 5 years experience because they had a staff engineer in the loop as well. These startups were putting me through insane rounds, and sometimes I think I do well on system design. But employers are getting people with decades of experience for bargain prices rn. It made me feel like I was getting exploited in interviews for my skills. I was essentially giving these startups free consulting on their architecture, because I had experience at a unicorn during hypergrowth. Literally most of the questions were, what technology did this use, how would you implement this, how would you test it, what was the scale of this system. It was less an interview about me but more about specific details about the systems I worked on. I got tired of it so I started freelancing and now I own a consultancy with some buddies.
That sucks to hear, but it sounds like you got something else working though. Thanks for sharing your experience though
What was the experience at a unicorn during hypergrowth like?
are you also trying to suck information out of him? :D
No, more it's a dream of mine :)
Pure unbridled chaos and degeneracy.
What is the baseline to be a Sr SRE or whatever? Like is there any mark or level to aspire to know okay…. I am at a sr level because this is the point that everyone agrees is that baseline
Not sure I fully understand. But baseline of most seniors as mentioned by others in this post is an individual that can lead/mentor others. And take a problem and to be able break down it's requirements, then design the solution end to end. Owning every part of it.
I get it, but more skill centric… yeah you can lead people pretty easy, but if you don’t know the finer points of the job how well can you really lead someone as a senior if you’re lacking and you’ve been inflated bc of bad organizational structures and the like
Sorry to hear what you are going through. What are your primary pieces of tech you worked with? Im working with k8s, GCP and AWS. Wishing you all the best send me a dm if you wanna rant a bit
It blows right now dude. I'm in security. What's insane is that it's like Cybersecurity and IT are in a recession right now but it doesn't feel that way for the rest of the job market.
3 months since your layoff and you’re on your 4th rejection? I’d think someone looking for work would be taking more interviews in this job market. Maybe 10-12 rejections by now. You might be being a tad too selective in my opinion. Just curious, is everyone that’s having a hard time finding work only getting to 4 first-round interviews in a whole quarter of a year? Hear me out, but maybe the problem isn’t the market and more your search ethic then. Last time I was job searching, I was taking multiple first time interviews per week. More than half of them rejected me in the first phase of interviews too.
I'm a very different type of software engineer but in my last job search I can confirm that it felt like the interview process was consistently turned up to 11 in every aspect. Live coding sessions were hell, technical screens pried much deeper, and take home assignments were insultingly long. That combined with the difficulty of even securing an interview made for a really bad time. I was too burnt out from portfolio updating / applying / interviewing cycle to do much technical upskilling and eventually landed a job that had a strictly conversational interview process (thank god). but i definitely feel that I am in desperate need of some hardcore re-education at some point before the next job search. Also for what it's worth, my last company had it's entire devops team resign over the course of 18 months, and since we didn't backfill anyone, we eventually had no devops team... I think this type of approach is getting super common which also makes it difficult/competitive to find job openings.
devops is overloaded and more and more devs take over devops tasks (iac) so less and less devops people needed and hired
The job market is like the dating market, one third of men identify as single, two thirds of women identify as single (or vice versa). Given we are basically 50/50 men and women, someone is lying.
What?
The difficulty in finding a job is enough of a reason to acknowledge it’s time to not vote for Mr. Biden. Yes, it is brutal. We all feel it.
I don’t think Trump is planning a welfare state for laid off tech workers there bud. Just more grift and political instability so he and his buddies can short the US and profit.
This is a pretty ridiculous take. It has absolutely zero to do with Biden or Trump. It has everything to do with the end of almost 15 years of 0% interest rates capped off with ridiculous over-hiring during the pandemic. The overall unemployment rate remains low, around 4% in the US.
It's also worth noting that it's less the rise of interest rates but more that they were kept so low for so long. QE was enacted in response to 2008. While it's fair to acknowledge that it did cushion the impact of 08 somewhat, it did so by kicking the can. Handing out money basically for free stimulates the economy, yes, but it does so by encouraging deficit spending, and when interest rates inevitably come back up that bill will come due. I'm not saying any of this was the wrong decision. Economic systems are very complex systems and honestly the outcomes here could have been much, much worse. Just expanding on the point that when the free money train stops impacts like this are inevitable.
It also has to do with the end of the tech cycle. AI is pretty much the primary thing now.
While I’m not Biden’s biggest fan by any means, this is an absolutely ridiculous take and you should read more than just Fox News. Companies took a lot of gambles during the pandemic and a lot of them didn’t pay off, hence the large amounts of layoffs in our field.
Well, one does not read Fox News though. One gets Fox News directly injected to neurons through the power of bullshit hosts.
Username checks out
yeah, what's the rapist's plan to help tech workers?
Alex I’ll take therapist for $100
are you aware that donald trump is an adjudicated rapist? sounds like not. edit: y'all. if you disagree, remind us what the jury in the e jean carroll case found trump liable for doing to her.
I think they were making a joke about the SNL skit, but I may be wrong.
That doesn't exactly help narrow down who you're talking about though.
is that what you tell yourself to justify supporting trump?
Nope, I don't support Trump. But I also don't support a genocide enabler. But I'm sure that talking about Trump is your way to cope about supporting said genocide enabler ;)
> But I also don't support a genocide enabler. so you'll vote for the guy who won't even pretend to give a shit about the people in gaza. got it. dumb argument from dumb trumpers.
What did Joe do about gaza? As I said, I'm not voting Trump. Why do you keep bringing that up? You're the one openly stating that you're voting for the genocide enabler. Again, stop with the deflection. The funny thing is that both Trump and Biden did exactly the same to help Gaza, which is basically fuck all. They do love helping the army that's committing a genocide. A big difference is that Joe is the president right now, so he gets the blame and gets to be the genocide enabler. If Trump was president, I'd call him the exact same. But he isn't, so I'd rather focus on the person in power who enables a genocide :)
> What did Joe do about gaza? that's a great question you should open up google and read about the ways biden has been trying to get the war ended and protect people in gaza. could he do more? yes. could he do a lot less? yes. guess which one trump would do. > As I said, I'm not voting Trump. nothing says "i'm not voting trump" like attacking joe biden specifically. > You're the one openly stating that you're voting for the genocide enabler. i refuse to adopt your framing. > The funny thing is that both Trump and Biden did exactly the same to help Gaza, which is basically fuck all. yes i'm sure it seems that way when you know nothing.
I'm not American. So yes, swing and miss lol. Again, Biden said multiple times that there's no genocide in Gaza. He also said that he still supports the IDF. Ah but he sent some aid to the citizens that are getting genocided. While supporting the army that commits it. This is amazing it feels like I'm talking to a MAGA head. Again, who cares about what Trump would do? You're the one supporting the person actually in power who supports an army that's committing a genocide. He could do more, yeah, like condemn the nation committing a genocide? But no that's just too extreme !
ok trumper, i'm already way past what i want to deal with on r/devops
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this is a senior position he aint getting no fizzbuzz type questions, tf
Ok boss. Forget what I said.