DevOps Coding Questions: A Guide for Engineering Leaders

Peanut butter and jelly. Shoes and socks. Yin and yang.

Some things just go together.

The same is true for DevOps – Development and Operations. DevOps is an approach that emphasizes communication and collaboration between an organization’s application teams and software developers.

Individually, these departments work fine. But combine them using DevOps, and you get effective product delivery as well as support through every stage of the software development lifecycle.

Want to ship products faster? Your organization needs an experienced DevOps engineer to perform various functions, including security and automation, infrastructure designing, testing, development, and communication, to name a few.

These individuals are valuable – and they’re in high demand.

That’s why it’s important to have a comprehensive DevOps engineer skills assessment to gauge how qualified someone is for the role. Using the right DevOps coding interview questions can help you land top talent amidst the competition.

Unfortunately, not all DevOps coding questions are fit for experienced engineers. Here are some DevOps hiring challenges you might run into:

• Senior developers don’t want to take code quizzes
• Most technical interviews are tedious and time consuming
• Whiteboards are terrifying – and not a good predictor of success

We think it’s time for a new DevOps interview test. We’ll show you what we mean.

DevOps interview questions and answers for freshers

There’s no one more eager than a pumped-up fresher straight outta college.

Like an empty cup, a fresher will work their butt off to gain industry expertise and the occasional thumbs up from their engineering manager. Plus, what they lack in experience, they usually make up for in coding skills.

Now is the time to break out those Python coding interview questions for DevOps to assess their knowledge. You can use these Python coding interview questions and answers as a guide.

Try to avoid Python tricky interview questions or Python interview questions for engineers with five years’ experience with these folks. Instead, you’ll want to ask concise and clear questions like:

• Describe a DevOps engineer, their skills, and roles.
• What goes on in DevOps, and what programming language is used?
• Why do you think DevOps is booming?
• What is SSH, and where can you use it?
• Define the terms configuration management and continuous integration (CI).
• Describe some DevOps use cases.

These questions are different from your typical Python interview questions for experienced engineers. If you need to hire senior developers, you’ll want to bring in the big guns.

DevOps interview questions and answers for experienced developers

This is where things get a bit more challenging.

When it comes to hiring senior developers, it’s important to ask DevOps interview questions for two years experience or more. These folks have evolved from learning how to automate security to doing it unsupervised.

After years on the job, such an engineer has joined the big dogs, and now you can use DevOps interview questions and answers for five years’ experience to understand how they think and problem solve.

These questions usually aren’t as straightforward; some hiring managers like to throw in DevOps tricky interview questions to make the interview a bit more interesting.

Some examples of DevOps practical interview questions you can ask experienced engineers include:

• Describe the process of configuring the git repository to run the code smoke checking tools before any commit. If it fails, explain how to prevent it from occurring again.
• What are post mortem meetings in DevOps?
• How does the infrastructure as code (IaC) work?
• Describe the architecture of Jenkins.
• What is the dogpile effect, and how can you prevent it?

Unfortunately, many coding interview tools today aren’t worthy of experienced DevOps engineers. They ask the same DevOps coding questions to senior devs and freshers, which results in candidates dropping out of the interview process.

Why?

Because experienced developers don’t want to take a code quiz. They want to show you how they think and how they approach real-world problems.

The good news is, senior engineers like Woven.

Toughest DevOps interview questions

A PSA to all organizations: just because you want to hire the best doesn’t mean you have to have a grueling interview process!

DevOps engineers are experienced in solving real-world challenges and delivering exceptional products and services. They are the go-to developers for challenging assignments.

That means your assessment needs to include DevOps interview questions and challenges that simulate what this person will do on the job. Take these DevOps architecture interview questions, for example:

• Break down the duties and responsibilities of a DevOps architect.
• Differentiate between DevOps and DevSecOps.
• Debunk the process of measuring the success of DevOps across an organization.
• What are your thoughts on establishing a DevOps team to execute DevOps in an organization?
• Develop a continuous delivery solution for distributing software updates and changes onto an AWS cloud.

As you can see, these questions go beyond code to assess a candidate’s debugging ability, communication style, and cognitive skills. That’s exactly what you want when hiring someone of this caliber.

Use Woven’s DevOps coding challenges to interview these multi-skilled candidates. After the interview, we’ll provide them with engineering feedback and send you our hiring recommendations.

How to crack DevOps interviews

Type how to crack a DevOps interview into Google and you’ll get information on mastering DevOps coding challenges, DevOps take-home tests, and other DevOps coding tests.

These resources tell candidates they need to understand the SDLC, configuration management, deployment strategies, and disaster recovery and data restoration, plus cram in DevOps practical interview questions and other loads of baloney.

With Woven, engineers can nail the technical interview and enjoy a positive candidate experience.

Our platform helps you discover a DevOps engineer’s full potential and assess skills in engineering principles, operational discipline, mature automation, and more.

Here’s what companies experience when they choose Woven:

• Increase in qualified hires while only spending ⅓ of recruitment budget
• Interview time reduced by 80%
• Less bias and fewer candidates being overlooked
• Higher offer/accept rates thanks to a positive candidate experience

If you’re an engineering manager who’s looking for a different approach, start a free trial with Woven today. We’ll show you how our DevOps coding challenges can help you find (and hire!) your DevOps unicorn.

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