You gave a great interview, but you did not get the job. Why not? In today's newsletter I'm going to explain some common yet secret mistakes that you make in your interviews. How do I know these problems? I am a working solutions architect who has taken over hundreds of cloud interviews and has been an architect for a very long time. When you go into that interview room, chances are you will face me or someone like me. I'm a nice guy, so I'm sharing these tips and tricks🙂.

Mistake 1

So let's say I ask you hey mister Tom can you tell me how do you scale your applications running on EC2? Tom says sure - "I will horizontally scale those EC2s. I'll create an autoscaling group. I will also create an application load balancer pointing to that autoscaling group. So when the EC2s are scaling up or down, application load balancer will discover the EC2s and automatically distribute traffic."

Is this answer good? Well, it's an average answer. Why? Because EC2 and auto scaling group application load balancer has been out for many years now. All other candidates will give this answer. Heck. At this point, my wife and even my grandmother also know about autoscaling groups and load balancers. Now, let’s say Ravi walks through the door, and I ask him the same question. And he goes…

"I will use an auto scaling group to horizontally scale the EC2s based on appropriate metrics. And I'll use application Load balancer to distribute traffic across those EC2s. These are out of the box setup, and based on the nature of the application traffic,requires additional customization. For example, if your application is expecting heavy bursty traffic for a big release, I can pre warm the application load balancer,and use scheduled scaling where a bunch of EC2 will already be up and running, ready to handle heavy traffic for the big traffic day. I will make sure the EC2 images are lightweight so that they can scale faster. Also, most of the applications use database. I also have to make sure when your application is scaling up or down, the database can also handle the burst of traffic.I will utilize features like read replica for heavy read traffic, and introduce a caching layer to reduce the burden on the database.." See the difference? The difference is you do not just answer, you have to delight the interviewer because cloud jobs are competitive, especially solutions Architect jobs.

The trick is to mix in real-world challenges and solutions in those answers. A real-world architect knows that just doing regular vanilla solutions is not enough. So when someone gives the answer that the second candidate gave, it shows that he has thought through the challenges and knows how to solve them.

When you prepare for your interviews, you can Google, go to Glassdoor, etc., and have a list of questions. Then, think about how you can customize the answers that the average candidate will not mention.

Mistake 2

This is the second mistake that I see happening a lot. Again, let's try to understand this with an actual question and answer.

Let's say I ask Hey, Tom. You designed an application. How do you know it's good? Or how do you even approach creating this design?

So, Tom says, "I will just sit with the team, go through the requirements, and then, based on the requirements, work backwards and select services. Then, I'll create the design, load test it, and make sure the services are approved by the company. I will put the design and implementation tasks in Jira or on a Kanban board to track and execute. That's how I ensure the design is good."

This answer sounds good, but it's not! Because anyone can say those things. There are some table stakes when it comes to SA interviews. This question is related to one of those. So why not ask directly? More often, the interviewer will ask that question in a different way to see if you can connect the concepts. Because that’s how real world projects are - confusing and ambiguous. That’s why Solutions Architects make big money. If all the requirements are known, and all the tasks are clear, there is no need for an architect, anyone can google and create a design. So whenever you hear about whether the design is good, how do you evaluate, etc., etc.. think of well-architected framework, which is a table stake for SAs. So answering the same question, how do you go about designing an application? Or how do you know your design is good?

Candidate answers, "I will utilize AWS well architected framework for this. I will sit down with the application leads and prioritize the pillars. And working backward from that, I will design the application. And then I will execute a well architected review to ensure the design is up to the mark, and if anything is missing we will remediate that." And then you can elaborate on the pillars.

Shared responsibility is another table stakes. Make sure you study that. Some of the other critical areas are cost optimization, networking, compute, security, and Migration. Remember, 85% of the workloads are still on-premises. I see a lot of times people know compute very well. But you also need to understand the migration. So make sure to study all those.

Mistake 3

One of the big qualities of solutions architects is convincing the team, including executives, of the design and the direction. As a result, SAs need to have good communication and presentation skills. If two candidates give comparable answers, the interviewer will always pick the candidate with better communication skills. It does not matter how much hands-on you have done; you need to practice representing the work so it comes out smoothly in interviews.

You are not going to get every question that you know, but this is just like soccer, cricket, or baseball. When you get a good ball that you can score, you have to swing it hard so that the questions that you are preparing, that you know, that you have worked on, that you have studied well, that you have done hands-on - you have to make sure you knock them out of the park. Practice them so that the interview is not the first time you are saying the answer.

Now, go crush your next interview 🙌

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If you have found this newsletter helpful, and want to support me 🙏:

Checkout my bestselling courses on AWS, System Design, Kubernetes, DevOps, and more: Max discounted links​

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Keep learning and keep rocking 🚀,

Raj