I had my first interview round at Netapp. The interview began with a long discussion covering Docker and Kubernetes concepts, which took a significant portion of the time. Following this technical discussion, I was presented with a coding problem: to find all prime numbers up to a given integer n. I spent about 15 minutes working on this. After the coding challenge, I was given a design-based DSA problem. The task was to design a chess game from scratch, including defining the necessary classes. I also had to implement key methods such as nextPossibleMoves() to identify valid moves and makenextmove() to execute them, ensuring that the game's state and all moves were properly saved within the board class to manage game flow effectively.

I recently had an interview experience for an SRE role at NetApp. I have 4.3 years of experience in SRE/DevOps and am currently working as an SRE at XYZ. The interview process started after a recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn, and a first technical round was scheduled.

However, the initial Round 1 (60 mins, Tech) was a no-show from the panel, and HR failed to inform me, despite my confirmation just hours before. This was quite frustrating. The round was eventually rescheduled for about a week later. During this rescheduled technical round, I was asked a variety of questions covering both coding snippets and core SRE/DevOps concepts:

• I had to explain the meaning and predict the output of various bash and python code snippets.
• A question on how StatefulSets differ from Deployments in Kubernetes.
• An explanation of namespaces in Kubernetes and their significance.
• Questions about Taints and Tolerations in Kubernetes.
• How to ensure that different replicas/pods for a deployment run on different nodes within a Kubernetes cluster.
• What steps to take if a Terraform state file gets accidentally deleted.
• Explanation of Nginx rate limiting.
• A comparison between helm install and helm upgrade --install.
• An explanation of how Helm works generally.
• Questions relating to Nginx and Ingress controllers.
• Concepts around CDN, rate limiting, DDOS, and DNS flow.
• How certificates work within a Kubernetes environment.

I felt I answered most of these questions fairly well, and the round seemed to go decently.

Afterward, the HR person contacted me for an in-office interview round. I requested some time to provide my available slots, but since then, HR has completely ghosted me.

My key takeaways from this experience are:

• NetApp seems to have a really poor talent acquisition culture.
• It's a reminder never to waste my time or leaves on companies that don't respect a candidate's time.

I haven't faced such an issue before and would be interested to know if others have had similar experiences with NetApp.