Not sure where to get feedback for this so tossing into the ether...
I've been getting many PM interviews for Technical Hat; I wonder what others think of this line of questioning?
- We have a SMB with 1000 devices and 20 servers
- These machines generate log files (1st question, does candidate know what a log file is?)
- Your product needs to meet the needs of the following users
- Sysadmins need to be able to diagnose problems, do postmortems.
- Auditors need to enforce rules on system usage
- A security team wants to detect intrusions, malware etc.
I then ask the candidate to ask clarifying questions and try to get them to give me any/all of the following through progressive probing:
- Min viable features of the product
- Do they suggest graphs? notifications? email alerts?
- What about user provisioning? Admin features?
- What kind of UI? Web? Mobile? Command line?
- Search?
- A high level technical design showing how the we get from Logs -> UI
- Push vs pull?
- Where/when does parsing happen?
- Technical
- How do you store the data? How do you transform it? Batch?
- What database? How many QPS?
- Redundancy? Failover?
- On site / off site?
- Insights
- Does the candidate understand privacy/security concerns? (Mention wipeout, retention for the auditor use case)
So far I've gotten some decent responses, but most fall into the run reports on files and store those.
For the good candidates we are able to progress to phase II where we design for a multinational fortune 500 scenario.
So WDYT? Good question?
PMs? How do you think you'd do on my question?