This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/sysadmin by /u/ultimatrev666 on 2026-03-28 02:50:04+00:00.
Can we talk about the gate keeping some interview panelists are doing these days?
Just because someone doesn’t have a decade of commanding CI/CD pipelines and IaC modules, doesn’t make them a “false” engineer. Long before I ever went to school for tech or had a job in tech, I’ve acquired many skills (such as PC repair, imaging, Citrix virtual apps, batch processing and scripting) long before I had to do any of that professionally.
Since my lay off two months ago, I have been adamantly learning Terraform, checking my modules’ sanity with Checkov, and learning GitHub Actions. I’VE LITTERALY BUILT OUT A FULL AZURE LANDING ZONE WITH RBAC, FIREWALLS, FIREWALL RULES, KEYVAULT, LOG ANLYTICS, DIAGNOSTICS, VNETS, NSGs… Just because I haven’t done it hundreds of times in a production environment, doesn’t make me less of an engineer.
Tools can be taught to pretty much anyone. My 19 years in FinTech IT Ops and Prod Support with mostly “exceeds expectations” on performance reviews should speak for itself. Quite frankly, you interview panelists are probably overlooking candidates who would be far better suited to the job than the “unicorn” you guys are holding out for. Give people a chance.
Gatekeeping in interviews is a total non-starter for me. We’re looking for problem solvers, not code golf champions. Can we focus on how they’d tackle real-world infrastructure challenges instead of trying to stump them with obscure HCL syntax?