My First Cloud Engineer Interview

TLDR: The position was waay above my knowledge level and I knew it 5mins in. Thankfully the interviewer stopped us 15mins in as he realized the same.

I feel like most people don't write about this interview experiences, but I wanted to talk about mine. It's no secret I want to retire from mobile apps in my daily work but I haven't figured out what I want to do. That being said I applied for a what I thought was a jr cloud engineer role.

For background context I had seen this company on reddit, attended the career fair, and found out they don't have jr positions available. Cool with me I'll keep chugging along. Well days later someone from HR reached out. The job descriptions didn't sound like jr level but I thought maybe they were giving me a change for it.

Fast forward to the interview and 1-2 questions in I realize I don't have the hands on experience to answer these questions. Don't get me wrong, I know things. I just haven't done cloud work on a large scale. A "team" of me or a little help on a small start up team is not the same type of experience that they were asking about.

I'm a believer in "reading the room" in interviews. People have certain tell signs even if they don't know it. I realized that the interviewer didn't like my answers very quickly and knew that this would be painful if it was dragged out a full 30min-1hr, and that I wasn't getting this job.

Was I sad? Maybe a little. I was more appreciative that the interviewer took both of us out our misery. I'll probably reapply to that company in the future but it was a good learning lesson for me. The thing they don't tell you when you switch focuses is that sometimes you really have to start from the bottom all over again. I'm fine with that though as the bottom isn't truly the bottom (it's just a title), but I am hopeful I find my new place in tech for my career.