When interviewing for mid level and senior roles in Europe, at least in my experience and what I have also seen in subreddits, you won’t get these type of questions. They’re so simple that it will be like it’s too good to be true how easy you’re getting the job 😂.
Go to tech subreddits of any Western European country or the US, people are crashing out like mad cos they can’t find a job even when they’re experienced.
The difficulty level is hard to explain.
The questions are mostly situational so it’s hard to just cram and 'read' about it. You’ll need actual experience. In most cases, it does not even feel like an interview. It’s more of a conversation because the interviewers are going to be your peers. If it feels like a typical question and answer interview, it means they’re not moving forward with you.
The format is usually something like, "I see you did X in your resume, how did you handle Y?". How you respond determines the next phase of the conversation. Sometimes we even talk about your hobbies.
Before I started conducting interviews, my company organised a training session to coach us on what we should focus on. We want to find out what you know and most importantly, how you behave when you don’t know something?
Instead of asking microservices vs monoliths, ask about the setup in their current company. You’ll find out what they think about the architecture; you’ll also know if they are familiar with scrum based on how they respond.
"We use Postgres but it is a managed service in AWS" already tells you they know about cloud services, so no need to ask any cloud related question except to probe their contribution to managing the cloud resources. A good follow up question will be something related to Terraform. If they don’t have experience with it and can’t explain how AWS is managed in their current company, they’re trying to bullshit their way through. No need to push further, change the topic so they don’t feel like they’re performing badly in the interview.
Interviewer: How does TLS secure your data?
Candidate: "It encrypts everything
with a public and private key"
What's missing from this answer?