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Ask HN: Does your company do online coding assignment (DevOps Roles)

11 points by jake_test_dev ↗ HN
Hello HN,

I had to make an alternative account to ask this question (privacy reasons)

I would love to hear if your company does coding assessment when hiring for roles such as DevOps or IT infrastructure where you work mostly with writing YAML, Python or Bash

11 comments

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PragmaticPulp
> I would love to hear if your company does coding assessment when hiring for roles such as DevOps or IT infrastructure where you work mostly with writing YAML, Python or Bash

It doesn't really make sense for a company to ask for algorithmic programming challenges if the role is going to be limited to modifying YAML and writing basic shell and Python scripts.

However, most companies I've worked at haven't had such limited DevOps roles. DevOps were expected to code and were very capable developers.

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merciBien
I interviewed someone for a Senior DevOps Engineer position earlier this week. We don’t do coding exercises for this position, but we’re unlikely to hire someone for Senior roles who can’t convince us they can automate a project without help. Non-Senior roles don’t need Python coding experience, but it helps.

I asked questions about experience coding with Python and shell scripts, and experience creating and managing infrastructure with Terraform. So far we haven’t found a good candidate for Senior.

stevekemp
I came to devops, after being a syadmin, and after working as a full-time developer.

Amongst colleagues over the years the ones who have been best at their jobs could code, often very well. In my current role I write utilities in golang, write pipelines in bash, and generate cloudformation templates from python. There's a lot of programming going on in the background, even for those people that just manage systems with puppet, ansible, and similar.

I've never really been involved in coding-assignments when either giving or receiving interviews, but it doesn't feel like it would be out of place to do a little.

jwstarr
My former employer did coding assessments for roles of that type, although the expectations were very different than for a software development role. For these kinds of roles, the coding test was on the level of fizzbuzz, is a string a palindrome, or a fairly routine scripting task.
shetill
Never seen a DevOps actually code. These people are just systadmin that use modern tools and write a lot of yaml. No clue why they ask them coding on interviews.
astaunton
Some DevOps engineers code, some dont and it can depend on the organisation / tasks they are involved in. Some DevOps engineers will code extentions to some of the tools they use, to cover off tasks that may be unique to their orgainisation. One example could be writing Python modules for Ansible or SaltStack to be used n the configuration of their internal servers and platforms. Some may need to code applications to act as in an interface between existing Off-the-shelf applications (e.g. get the build server to update ticket status in Jira / ServiceNow depending on the outcome of the automated tests).
bradwood
You must have worked in some pretty crappy places. For me a DevOps/sre/platform engineer (call it what you want) who can't code in bash + at least one other (node, golang, python) is just out.
bradwood
I set a take home task. Go build me a k8s cluster using free tier AWs that deploys hello world and is invoked with a single shell invocation or git push. That usually shakes out the wheat from the chaff.

I look for: CI knowledge Shell/python/node/whatever Infra design (AZs, vpcs etc) Etc

ewuhic
Do you provide accounts/cover for costs incurred for people who've run out of free tier?