Support interviews test warmth and scripts, then the job turns out to be technical from the first ticket. Here are four tasks on a real box with a real symptom, reproducing a vague report, separating configuration from defect, reading the logs that matter, and writing the reply.
Observability interviews usually become tool interviews, which sort candidates by which vendor their last employer bought. Here is how to test the actual skill: narrowing down a failure that only happens to four percent of requests.
Anyone can draw the migration diagram. Migrations fail at the cutover, at 2am, when half the traffic is on the new platform and the old database is still taking writes. Here are four tasks that test the parts that actually go wrong.
You cannot ship an app in a 60 minute interview, so mobile hiring falls back on algorithm puzzles and a portfolio walkthrough. Here are four tasks inside a real project, a leak that survives the screen, state lost on rotation, a slow network, and a crash only on resume.
PHP hiring still runs on framework questions while the failures are operational and silent. Here are four tasks on a running Laravel application, a queue nobody noticed had stopped, a listing page that issues hundreds of queries, a migration that ran on one server, and uploads that vanish behind a load balancer.
.NET gives you so much for free that the mistakes hide inside the framework rather than in the code under review. Here are four tasks on a running service, a deadlock under load, a captured dependency, a query that drags the whole table into memory, and a background worker that died quietly.
Node interviews ask candidates to recite the event loop, then production fails in ways no recitation covers. Here are four tasks on a running service, an unhandled rejection, a heap that only climbs, a retry storm and a blocked event loop, with what separates a strong answer from a plausible one.
Java interviews still run on trivia that a study guide covers in an evening, while the expensive problems live in transaction boundaries, pool exhaustion and upgrades nobody dares start. Here are four tasks on a running Spring service, and what each one separates.
The best Linux interview question is not a question, it is an SSH prompt on a machine where something is wrong. Here are six scenarios, what each one separates, and how to read the first ninety seconds.
Cloud interviews run on IAM trivia while the expensive mistakes are all operational. Here are hands-on tasks on drifted state, a plan that will replace a database, and a module hiding a bad default, plus the cost review that reveals seniority fastest.
Most ML interviews test modeling, which is the part that goes well anyway. Here are the skills that decide whether a model reaches production, and a real-environment task for each, including the LLM engineer variant.
A security trivia quiz cannot tell a real practitioner from a certificate collector. Give a candidate a real, vulnerable box and watch them find and fix the weakness. Here is how to scope it safely and what to score.
