Technical Communication and Decision Making Questions

Focuses on the ability to explain technical solutions, justify trade offs, and collaborate effectively across engineering and non engineering stakeholders. Topics include articulating design decisions and their impact on reliability performance and maintenance, walking through solutions step by step, explaining algorithmic complexity and trade offs, asking clarifying questions about requirements, writing clear comments documentation bug reports and tickets, conducting and communicating root cause analysis, participating constructively in code reviews, and negotiating quality versus delivery trade offs with product and operations partners. Interviewers evaluate clarity of expression, reasoning behind decisions, and the ability to make choices that balance short term needs and long term quality.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

A newly hired engineer submitted runbooks that are long, optional-heavy, and not used by on-call engineers. How would you coach that engineer and drive changes to the runbook process? Detail a practical approach for feedback, iteration cycles, and measurable criteria to determine whether the runbook improved on-call effectiveness.

MediumBehavioral

0 practiced

You review a postmortem draft that contains the sentence 'The junior engineer failed to follow the checklist and thus caused the outage.' Rewrite that sentence to be blameless and systemic. Then describe three editorial guidelines you would add to your postmortem review checklist to avoid blame language in the future.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Write a concise, well-structured bug report for an intermittent cache eviction bug that causes approximately 1% request errors. The report should include: reproduction steps (as much as known), expected vs actual behavior, example log snippets (faux data is fine), environment, frequency estimate, and a suggested priority and owner.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

During an incident engineers are split between rolling forward a risky patch and rolling back to a known-good version. As incident commander, describe step-by-step how you would make the decision, who to consult (roles), what immediate checks you would require, how you'd communicate the decision to stakeholders, and how you'd document it during the incident.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

You receive a terse ticket: "High error rate in payments". List at least eight clarifying questions you would ask to scope the issue effectively, and for each question briefly state why it matters (one sentence each). Cover areas such as timeframe, environment, recent changes, user impact, and reproducibility.

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