Tell me about a time…

Here are some proposed questions for interviewing someone for an SRE role. Really, these are just conversation starters to get them reflecting and discussing specific incident details.

The questions all start the same way: Tell me about a time when…

… action items that were completed in the wake of one incident changed system behavior in a way that ended up contributing to a future incident.

… someone deliberately violated the official change process in order to get work done, and things went poorly.

… someone deliberately violated the official change process in order to get work done, and things went well.

… you were burned by a coincidence (we were unlucky!).

… you were saved by a coincidence (we were lucky!).

… a miscommunication contributed to or exacerbated an incident.

… someone’s knowledge of the system was out of date, and them acting on this out-of-date knowledge contributed to or exacerbated an incident.

… something that was very obvious in hindsight was very confusing in the moment.

… somebody identified that something was wrong by noticing the absence of a signal.

… your system hit a type of limit that you had never breached before.

… you correctly diagnosed a problem “on a hunch”.