Problem Solving and Learning from Failure Questions
Combines technical or domain problem solving with reflective learning after unsuccessful attempts. Candidates should describe the troubleshooting or investigative approach they used, hypothesis generation and testing, obstacles encountered, mitigation versus long term fixes, and how the failure informed future processes or system designs. This topic often appears in incident or security contexts where the expectation is to explain technical steps, coordination across teams, lessons captured, and concrete improvements implemented to prevent recurrence.
EasyTechnical
0 practiced
Explain the difference between a short-term mitigation and a long-term root-cause fix using a concrete database outage example. For each, describe technical steps, risks, how you would test them, and how you'd prevent the mitigation from becoming permanent technical debt.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
You are the incident commander for a SEV1 that has lasted 8 hours and has major customer impact. Senior executives are demanding immediate timelines and assigning public blame. Describe how you would lead the response: structure updates, protect the response team from distractions, manage executive communications, keep responders focused on remediation, and ensure a blameless review afterwards.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
How would you coach a junior SRE who panics during incidents and makes rushed decisions? Provide a step-by-step coaching plan including immediate safeguards (pairing, approvals), training (runbooks, tabletop exercises), gradual autonomy growth, and how you would evaluate progress.
HardTechnical
0 practiced
Analyze a historical major incident (for example, an S3 service disruption): structure an RCA covering probable technical root causes, failure propagation through dependencies, organizational/process shortcomings, and propose layered mitigations across monitoring, architecture, and team/process changes with prioritization.
MediumTechnical
0 practiced
Case study: Payment gateway latency increased from ~50ms to ~5s immediately after a library upgrade. Outline a full RCA plan: collect traces, metrics, and DB explain plans; perform a binary search over deployments; prepare a rollback plan; communicate impact to stakeholders; and propose long-term testing and deployment mitigations.
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