The first stage is filling out a Google Forms questionnaire. Most of the questionnaire is just duplicating items from your resume/LinkedIn. There is a large text box in which you must describe CI/CD in depth.
The next stage is an "interview"; however, it's really just an HR representative "selling" the company to you. They asked a few basic questions, such as whether I would be comfortable with 25% or more travel.
The third stage was a one-on-one screen-sharing session in which I reviewed a snippet of code in a language of my choice. There were no "tricky" aspects to the "code review"; there were numerous obvious errors and deviations from best practices. Any candidate with at least a year of real-world usage of a given language should have no issues with this "code review" exercise. After the "code review" portion, the interviewer asked basic questions about CI/CD and general technical project management. The questions were all "softball"; if you use some kind of version control and some kind of CI/CD pipeline, you should pass easily.
The fourth stage is a "mini project". You are given an empty Stelligent-owned GitHub repo, along with a PDF describing the project requirements. The requirements are basically "create a toy web app that responds to GET requests with the following message", combined with "include tests" and "automate everything (some prerequisites are OK; just call them out)". You are given a week or more to complete the project, but I was able to complete it over a weekend. Having a complete and robust project that fully covers all of the requirements is more important than completing the project quickly. There is no direct feedback at this stage.
The final stage is presentation and review of the "mini project". The audience is a panel. Of the panel members, one was silent, one asked a single question when prompted by the "leader", and the final member was effectively the only active participant. All of the panel members aside from the "leader" seemed disconnected; if you have been in a remote meeting in which some participants are coding instead of paying attention to the meeting, you know the feeling. The panel gave no agenda; the "leader" jumped into "OK, explain the project" after introductions were made. At several points in the presentation, the panel "leader" asked questions to which my README already had the answers. Most of the questions were repeats of the "softball" questions about basic CI/CD concepts from the "code review" stage. The questions targeted at the mini-project specifically were mostly typical "why $THING? What could you use instead of $THING?"; for example, deployment using Terraform versus CloudFormation. The "leader" expressed disappointment that there were any prerequisites (in my case, having the AWS CLI, credentials, and optionally a Role / profile to deploy the application), as opposed to a literal "one-click" deployment.
At all the other stages, feedback was either immediate or came back within about 24 hours. At the final stage, I did not receive feedback until three days had passed. I had submitted the mini-project about two weeks before the panel returned their feedback via my recruiter.
The final feedback was completely negative, and downright shocking. The panel concluded that I "did not have a devops skillset", "failed to automate the deployment", and was generally "inexperienced with implementing automated solutions on AWS".
I have been a systems and devops engineer for about a decade, including **at AWS**. I have years of experience creating and managing complex CI/CD pipelines at a literally global scale (e.g., for Kiva aka Amazon Robotics worldwide), writing full end-to-end test suites for Amazon Fulfillment and AWS edge services, etc. Finally, my project utilized Elastic Beanstalk such that the only requisite commands were an "eb init" and "eb deploy". I state all of these things not as a whinging "how dare they not give me an offer", but to give some context as to why the brutally negative feedback at the final stage was so utterly confusing and unexpected. Unfortunately, there was no elucidating feedback about any specific deficiency.
There were practically no actual technical questions. The majority of the questions were very "general", and boiled down to "describe conceptually CI/CD, pipelines, rollbacks, version control, and other basic day to day concepts". I would describe the interview questions in general as "easy". The "code review" and "mini-project" aspects were the only technical aspects of the interview process. Even then, any half-decent engineer with some programming experience should pass both of those challenges with minimal effort.
Overall, I came away with the impression that a solid engineer could easily fail the final stage for arbitrary and mysterious reasons, while an unqualified or under-qualified individual could just as easily pass if they "clicked" with the panel.
