Common questions in interviews

[mukesogel]

So I'm going to have an interview for Network Engineer soon. I always get kind of nervous because I usually get questions to prove my knowledge. Now, because of my previous jobs I have far more experience with WAN than with LAN almost nothing with firewalls, load balancers and DNS.

I was searching in Google for common questions in interviews but almost every results shows questions that I never got, like: what is a network or what LAN mean. In my experience, those questions are never asked to someone with some experience, it just unnecessary. I usually get questions like: how packets are handled in a network or why you should choose eigrp or ospf or why this happen or how to avoid that.

Honestly I am not PRO expert in regarding to networking, I have experience with multiple IT stuff but I am not an expert in an specific thing. I have more experience with WAN and troubleshooting than configuring or designing but I know the theory or have basic understanding.

Anyway, could you please help with questions and if you want and can't, answers that you usually got or ask to candidates? I am asking for answers too because sometimes I don't understand what kind of answers they expect. Any suggestions also?

Thank you so much.

[Leo Laohoo]

Do not lie in your interview.  

[Seb Rupik]

Hi there,

In my experience the 50 questions style of interview usually occurs when there is someone on the panel who is not native to the technical field. They don't know what original questions to ask (nor know what answers are correct!), so pick from a pool, expect a specific answer and will mark accordingly.

My last few interviews (I've had more than most as a result of being a contractor), have been with TDAs or principle engineers and are more like hour+ long conversations. Being asked to give examples of working with certain technologies or methodologies. The length of your answer can be a good indicator of experience and the detail of explanation shows depth of understanding. They tend to give you enough rope to hang by if you try to bluff your way through!

Recurring topics for me have always been around automation, CI/CD, routing protocol redistribution and hybrid cloud architectures.

Good luck with you interviews.

Oh yeah, and what @Leo Laohoo said too

cheers,

Seb.

[Leo Laohoo]

@mukesogel wrote:

Honestly I am not PRO expert in regarding to networking

---

Look, you already admitted this.  That's a start.  
Just think for a moment:  What is going to happen if the prospective employer realized you are lying or "pretending" to have skills you don't/never have?

Do not lie.  Never lie in a job interview.  

(In our place of work, we have people claiming to be CCNP or CCIE and the only thing that stopped garbage from clogging the recruitment process was to implement a "practical exam" before the interview process.  (Before this, we had a guy who claims to be "CCNP" but he did not know how to subnet, will take him a day to implement a FW rule and he designed a rack-full of servers to be powered by PoE+.)

On the flip side, I worked with this person who can quote, word for word, from any Wendell Odom's book but he's never touched a router or a switch.  

Reflect on it.  

Getting eliminated from a job because of "unsuitable due to lack of experience" is one thing, however, getting eliminated from a job because the candidate "could not support his/her claims in technical skills" is a different level.