Kubernetes interview gone really bad

[u/MountainTruth6073]

I went to a kubernetes tech interview, expecting that they are going to ask me about my experience using kubernetes and some basic question or some system design about how I could possibly build a cluster some scratch but nop they end up asking me questions that I found it very difficult to answer from the top of my head:

- First warm up question was, Can you explain to me what it is Quorum?
- Next question, I guess it was a follow up question, Do you know what ETCD? What is the difference between ETCD and Redis?
- Next question, Given this CNI Flannel, Cilum and Calico, which one you will use and why?
- And the killer question that literally frozen me was explain to me under the hood what is happening when a user clicks a button to download a file.

As a Senior Kubernetes Engineer, it is realistic to know all this stuff from the top of my head? Does it makes sense?

I have the feeling that the interview was setting me to fail, I never have to have to memorize things in my career, I always have to understand and get into conclusion by reasoning. But this is the third interview where the interviewer expect me to know things by heart... I was in another interview where the interviewer asked me to name all of the type of kubernetes services and explain them, I forgot to mention the headless service which I never use in my life.

Maybe it is realistic, that is why I need to vent and have another point of view

[u/PartemConsilio]

TBF, I could understand being a Senior DevOps Engineer and not quite knowing those answers, but if your specific title has Senior KUBERNETES engineer than I would expect you to know that stuff.

The problem is the questions they were asking you are primarily deeper infrastructure questions and if you’re someone who is used to dealing with EKS, AKS or some other form of a managed cluster, you probably never have to worry about knowing those components. But when you are dealing with self-managed infrastructure? That stuff is vital, man.

[u/BlakkMajik3000 → u/PartemConsilio]

This is my sticking point. Once K8s is in the title itself, they expect in depth. Not "I deployed apps to AKS/EKS/GKS", they want war stories. Anyone that has any battle scars from Kubernetes (or really any modern distributed systems) should ace those questions no problem.

[u/SpiritualPen98 → u/BlakkMajik3000]

Exactly, you must know everything about the tool and at that point you are searching a very vertical engineer.