Interviews are to understand how the candidate:
- thinks about infrastructure engineering.
- documents what they are thinking.
- tech pitches the solution they are thinking.
- responds to a challenge to their thinking about the solution.
"Interview jeopardy" is an insult to every candidates intelligence. "How do you show the contents of a Linux directory?" - the only appropriate answer is "Why do you think I am lying about working in infrastructure for the past xx number of years?". If you are asking my how to ls a directory on Linux, and my resume shows xx+ years of Linux SysAdmin experience, you are accusing me of lying about those xx+ years since running ls is done within the first 5 seconds of logging into a Linux box for the first time on the very first day of being a SysAdmin. During a technical interview, asking any question that can be googled, is insulting to candidates intelligence. The goal of a interview is not to see how well someone searches the web, but how they think and communicate. Thinking and communicating are the two basic tenets of any technical engineering job.
The infrastructure homework kit is designed to showcase how the candidate thinks about building infrastructure and how the candidate communicates those ideas to the customer. For this homework the interviewing engineer will act as a semi-technical enterprise engineering lead or non-technical product manager looking to build an internal sales & marketing dashboard of potential customers and markets based on data extracted from various sources. During the architectural discussion the enterpirse engineer or PM may ask questions about the infrastructure proposal. There are no trick questions, hidden answers, or "gotchas" as we just want to see how the candidate builds resilient infrastructure to get the job done.