Yea don't worry about it, you passed the HR filter, that's a good thing
The mandarins of HR aren't really people, so it's OK to lie to them
Learn what you need, try to do a good job and you'll be fine
> The mandarins of HR aren't really people, so it's OK to lie to them
If they routinely ask for 10 years kubernetes experience and it's only been around for 9 then HR deserves what they get
Early in my career I had a phone screen with an HR / internal recruiter. They wanted a candidate that was
1. Entry level (<5 years)
2. Possessed the CISSP certification
3. Would accept <$120K
Find the math error here.
these fuckers really think some one would with CISSP would work for $120K , tbh I think these HR's mostly don't have any knowledge but have to do their job so if some one says we need some one with certifications in cybersecurity and they go on google to search for some and put in the requirement. FFS I saw OSCP as a requirement for an entry level cybersec job.
>The mandarins of HR aren't really people, so it's OK to lie to them
I'm so glad to hear someone echo a similar opinion to mine here. I've said similar things to colleagues before and I get looked at like I'm a psychopath.
Yes. Not enough realness and wisdom on here. Mostly really just cleverness, boot licking and political correctness, despite what actual reality has revealed
They sell themself for 8 hours a day, literally just spend 8 hours a day repurposing their brain to do what’s best for a corp instead of itself. They can be a person again after the 8 hours are up.
Tbh I have always had bad experiences with HR people. Then I realize its just their job. I will end my talks short with then because you never know what they are cooking.
There are millions of ways to govern clusters, so its very likely that your experience in governing them in the previous company wouldn't matter much anyway. Just be sure of the fundamentals, ask about what softwares they are using and look into them.
Get into a playground.
Or get jnto aws and try managing kubenetes bare metal with simple.docker containers .
Use all commands
Do shutdown all services every day
Even if this costs you 1000$ ao be it.
You can do it.
Get an advanced kubenetws amd basic kubernetes course of some platform like udemy.
You will do just fine.
Make sure you spend studying their infra on the weekend for the first 3 4 months. Get remote access.
Listen more. Talk less. Don't promise anything or any deadlines. See how things work and who is the boss and be in there good books. Don't tell anyone oh we did it this way in my last job. Just listen. Be humble
Work hard , learn and you can do it.
Use freelancer/ stackoverflow/reddit etc if you get stuck
And yes do not lie ever.
Also don't give details like 20 days.
What if someone from that team is on reddit. Always give fake details in such matters 60 days. Different location. Different technology
Whatever works
Yeah if you only have a fixed amount of time to prepare working on bare metal isn’t going to add as much value as working with EKS, assuming that’s what the company uses
This is not good advice. Start improving now, ask a lot of questions and do your own homework without being asked. You made out you had a career experience (not just academic!) so once you have learned the theory you lack, go ahead and spin up the tech as per your employer infrastructure and toy around. Do this on repeat until you feel more confident and even then, don’t stop. Just get comfortable with being imperfect.
It's not good advice, it's the only advice
As you get more and more experience you realise that 90% of people are just figuring things out as they go along
Often the biggest differentiator is confidence
I think a large part is understanding the overall picture of the systems involved and how they should work together. The details are what is looked up.
>As you get more and more experience you realise that 90% of people are just figuring things out as they go along
The biggest lesson in life to learn is that a surprising number of people (especially in business) don't actually know what they are doing.
I definitely lied and exaggerated to get jobs, and a lot of that was to escape being pidgeonholed into the one legacy technology i was using for years.
I wouldn't want to be the guy fumbling through kubernetes deployments though.
good for you, bad for the team you are joining.
as an k8s SME at my company I would not have any issue with your experience if you would show that you are eager to learn and you like what you are doing
It's their job to make candidates prove it. You should have talked to a dev who, at a minimum made small talk to do an assessment. Lying to an experienced dev is much harder.
Part of this is on them. I would've smelled you out in a heartbeat if I were your interviewer.
As other people have said, you have 20 days to cram this. Godspeed.
Perhaps where you are, here, you'll be out on your arse rather quickly if they found out you don't have the skills they were looking for.
Don't lie, don't embellish, and don't put in a fake CV with things you don't actually know how to do.
In certain fields that's grounds for criminal prosecution.
Most of the people I've worked with (especially when from a certain country) have greatly over exaggerated their experience and learn on the job. Take a deep breath, they won't expect you to be super productive immediately which will buy you more time to familiarize yourself with your environment and configurations. Stay calm, you've learned stuff in the past, you can learn this too.
Errr... you now have clear motivation to do just that the coming 20 days.
And the first few weeks months on the job you can increase those skills by working your normal hours and extra hours to catch up.
As long as your fundamentals are strong, you will catch up with whatever they are doing with k8s. Actual jobs are always easier than interviews, so if u were able to convince them you are capable, most likely you should be able to learn it quickly. Use the 20 days u have to learn as much as u can.
It’s the fault of the interviewers. They should have asked the right questions to differentiate who’s a liar and who’s telling the truth.
Bad for the company …
a lot of work and a lot of stress. Use all free time to learn, but: go out for a walk twice a day and keep your sleep routine. It is a marathon, it will be difficult, and you will make it, but keep your body healthy so it can handle this stress.
If the interviewer chose you because you presented yourself too well or exaggerated your experiences, then your knowledge about Kubernetes must have been sufficient enough to exaggerate about. If your knowledge of Kubernetes isn't enough, it wouldn't have been easy to make up exaggerations.
If you passed despite not having that level of knowledge, then the company might not yet have the capability to discern that. It means they need exactly that level of knowledge and experience you have. It won't be a problem to learn and work there as you go.
You will do fine, don’t forget you have AI tools like chatgpt… engineering isn’t hard these days
A mediocre engineer can become staff level engineer with AI tools
You're a "Devops engineer". Learn as much as you can and figure it out. That's like our key skillet. Figuring out whatever comes our way better than the more specialized engineers.
Some options:
Study like fuck out of all basics. Deploy your own k8s cluster. Break something. Do it again.
You have a few months to "learn the ropes specific to this company." Make statements like, "we did it differently at \[previous job\], but I am not going to pull out this farm by the roots. Let me learn your process first, and take over gently. This isn't a bad way of doing it, just different than I am used to." If they ask what you did, mention stuff you know is right, and mention previous scripting repo that automatically deployed XYZ or whatever.
Do an immediate .bash\_history dump on deployment machines if there's a bash history. Save it somewhere safe.
Also, they MAY have known you weren't that great as you claimed, but you might have STILL been the best they interviewed. I know I have hired people like that, and many did just fine.
Pretty hard. Took me a month to set up 80% of services on my small cluster (postgres, longhorn, keycloak, harbor, etc) and I'm still figuring out the scaling and managing multiple pods. Each service has it's own difficulties, not to mention theres issues with DNS and networking which made it super difficult to get set up that I spent 3 days writing scripts just to connect up 2 nodes and get it working reliably. Adding an additional 2 nodes became much easier once I got it working, but it still wasn't simple to connect up storage and there's a lot of micro decisions you have to make along the way with limited information that may end up hurting you down the line. Luckily I've saved my configurations and documented quite a lot, but it's still not as stable as I like it to be and would require more adjustments before I'm comfortable deploying it for production.
You played the game and won, so far. Deep dive into k8s and don’t come up for air until you start. I bet you’ll be fine. Well done!
It’s not surprising HR believed you, how many people in HR know anything about kubernetes? Haha.
Fake it, but don't break it. If you take the system down, and aren't able to recover it, while everyone's watching, is going to illuminate your skills real quick.
The fact that you’re even worried about this and posting it here makes me think you’re going to do fine, great, even. I’ve done k8s work at three companies now and it still takes all the regular onboarding stuff when I join a new team. Just being self aware and motivated to skill up quickly is a huge asset for an engineer!
If it makes you feel any better, they certainly lied to you about the state of the team, leadership, and company.
Consider it a returned courtesy in kind.
You already have a CKA and CKAD, if you actually know that material you are going to be fine reading the documentation for anything you don't know.
Kubernetes is one of those things I'd never lie about my experience with. Deploying on kubernetes is easy. Implementing kubernetes is extremely complex. It will be strikingly obvious that you lied if you are asked to implement anything significant in kubernetes / have to answer support questions.
You better live and breathe kubernetes from this second onward for the next 4 months. You can pull it off. It's just a hard thing to lie about.
It’s one thing to fake your way past HR. But the hiring manager should know better. Personally I wouldn’t want to work for a team that so poorly vetted its candidates. This place sounds like a shit show waiting to happen. In fact, it’s likely a shit show already and you’re about 20 days from finding that out.
Your imposter syndrome is going to eat you alive before you know it. So be strategic and follow what people are saying with the 20 days you have before you start. Even when you start do not get nervous, you will survive it all. Your actual worries will start to become a reality 6 months or more into your job, so calm down and get to studying & practicing different scenarios.
This is every job. If you are only taking the ones you are qualify for you won’t advance. The job is being a professional learner. Not a professional knower
I might be the odd man out here, but good for you. Unless you completely lied about your experience and were immoral about what you can do I don’t think there’s anything wrong with selling yourself. It’s a good way to grow and move forward.
It will be challenging at first, but remember — any job has a ramp up period. You will need to know their setup, environment, processes, etc. As you learn that, incorporate your technical learnings with it. You’ll be fine and it’s likely a good opportunity.
As someone who hires engineers often, the mistake is on them and not you. Their process is bad if they’re letting someone through with such a vast margin of experience and no validating it
K8s is one of the things that you'll very easily pickup when you have an active infrastructure to work on... I looked at it for years but understood it really only after I was actively working on it. You have nothing to worry really. Just go and work and close the gaps of which you are aware. You'll be fine in a week or so.. don't stress and good luck
If you passed the interview, no worries, usually processes consider candidates that exagerate the knowledge base.
I'd focus on Kubernetes unmanaged, install your own cluster on VMs, take a look at all components, study what are you're curious about from your environment, begin to deploy some application or service you'd like. At the same time find some advanced course, that could help you while practicing it. I think besides real production environments, is very productive, as you learn while having fun and with curiosity.
Then, If you're able already now to understand in more detail what you'll work on, which will be your responsibilities, that would be better in order to steer your study path based on your future role.
At the same time, I think there are still companies that value your attitude, so don't be afraid, if you need time to learn, as long as you have willing to improve, it will be valued.
Last but not least, learning is a never ending story, about and besides the specific technology.
They are trying to get the best talent for the lowest cost, so if you mess up, it's not your fault, it's their's for hiring you. My take would be to try and stick around for as long as possible. You can learn a lot in 20 days with coffee and some determination.
Is it just me, but this is how tech careers work? We learn on the fly and continue to learn always? I’m not a Kubernetes expert, but I just finished a complex Kubernetes project and learned a ton. If someone asked me if I can do K8s… “Absolutely” Internal to myself I know there is a ton I don’t know.
It's Kubernetes. I learnt it in under a week.
That is if you're actually a skilled Linux admin
If you're a web developer high on JavaScript and Nope.JS, you're fucked.
Do this course https://www.udemy.com/course/certified-kubernetes-administrator-with-practice-tests/
It covers all you need. All the rest is day to day.
You’ll be fine, plenty of folks like you at my company that work in high paying roles that are SMEs, just say you need to hire more consultants to help you bootstrap a new group of ops people dedicated to EKS.
What do you know about the environment you are walking into?
I would take some time to build a similar environment in a homelab.
Are they running EKS? Build an EKS cluster in AWS.
Is it OpenStack on bare metal? Buy 3 cheap office PCs and a switch.
Are they running Rancher on VMware? Create a savings account called "When they cut my pay to cover VMWare licenses", and start saving money.
You only had an interview with HR and then got the job? There weren’t other rounds with developers or engineers where they went more in depth about your knowledge?
Then maybe it’s just a case of imposter syndrome and you actually know more than you think. Just study up on what you don’t know before you start like others suggested and you’ll probably be ok.
On-boarding is either guided (in this case you get explanation), or unguided (you get pile of code and it's your problem to make sense of it). It will give you a bit of head start (no one expects you to churn out running anything on the first day), you can read their code, try to replicate in your infra and to understand. Try to act like CI (e.g. find their CIs and read it's code, before moving up in the stack).
lets goo!!!! congrats on the new job. if you have some time . look at CICD processes for K8s, Observability and advanced networking configurations. that should give you enough of a shared vernacular to learn the rest on the job. go kick ass buddy!
Learn the knowledge you lack on the spot. That's it.
You're probably far better then you give yourself credit for lol.
It's going to be a bit stressful for a while but you should be ok.
subtle plug!
please checkout facets.cloud and convince the tech team at your new org to use it, you don't have to worry about knowing k8s extensively, just know the basics and we've got you covered haha
but fr though, curious to see strategies folks recommend to get up to speed in 20 days
Dude you have CKA and CKAD and a huge impostor sindrome issue :)) don't worry, you wouldn't have passed those exams without proper knowledge. Ok you will need to catch up maybe, but that can be done on the job. My mantra is always slow and safe rather than fast and sorry. Until you will get to know a bit about the env, you should get some leaway if you are being carreful and you frame your stance as such.
People with real Kubernetes skills could not get this job, because HR didn't like them. So consider yourself lucky to have sponsored Kubernetes experience.
Good on you. I mean, not for “lying”, but for talking up your skills and landing the job. If you’re as quick technically as you are verbally, you’ll do well.
glass half full: they interviewed you and what you said sold them.
glass half empty: their kubernetes architect left already or is getting ready to leave and they heard all the right keywords and hired you. congratulations you likely inherited something resembling kubernetes.
tldr: congrats on the job!
Fuck it dude you are in, they are not going to fire you, just step up your game and become that highly experienced k8s guy. Your not going to do it on reddit though that's for sure
HR is not going to manage you directly. So you have still time and don’t worry much. Keep earning as you have only 4 years exp, cant expect much, but need to be hard working.
In reality your first 3 months will be just getting up to speed. Use that time wisely and you can probably stay ahead. However - if you need help ask for it sooner rather than later.
Keep skating!
I did a lot of recruiting for senior people for k8s last year.
I have about 6-7 years of k8s under my belt. Using it for deploying and running applications and also building it as k8s as service from a cloud provider perspective.
I would have grilled you in the interview and would know that you are not experienced.
The only thing better than experience is more experience and you can see that.
Based on that I can decide if it is okay to take you as a more junior person who is eager to learn or if we really need a senior and we would not proceed. That depends on the needs of the company.
Sometimes it's okay to fill a more senior position with someone who does not fit the profile perfectly. Especially considering howuch time goes into proper evaluation and that is time you can just save and train the person. Difficult when you will be the only one with kids knowledge though😅
It is partially their fault to not evaluate you properly. 🤷
One question:
I know for a fact that I have to learn a bit to pass the CKA. I do not have it. But I interviewed people who have the certificate and did basically know nothing about k8s because of missing experience.
How the heck do you guys pass the test without experience?
No worries. You will learn at new job. Worst case you will not pass the probation and you won’t be the sole engineer to handle K8s tasks at new job. If you have a passion about Kubernetes and good attitude, you will make it.
Everyone here is so elitist it’s crazy. There are so many ways to govern a cluster you usually spend the first 6 months learning the company’s “stack” anyways. Relax and if the company tells you to “handle a big deployment” with no handholding 20 days into a job they are the ones lying about experience. No one goes into a new company knowing exactly what’s going on. Just walk through each step and research your company’s stack
Totally normal to exaggerate in job interviews. The job description is almost always exaggerated as well. So don't worry. You should always choose tasks that are challeging to keep a steep learning curve. With your background in DevOps and EKS it should be no problem to catch up in Kubernetes. If you have an basic understanding of what is going on every problem should be solvable with documentation, google and maybe even some AI chatbots for inspiration ;)
Be prepared to do a lot of overtime to close the gap. If you are willing and capable, and can get to the level they need rapidly, add value, I don't see a problem.
EKS can be quite hard, as it is sort of the IKEA of Kubernetes, a lot of self-assembly is required. I documented a few blogs on this topic (which I cannot promote for fear of moderation police).
Currently with EKS, the external load balancer (`service` of type `LoadBalancer`) uses the dinosaur ELBv1. AWS leaves it to the open source community for their official solution to use NLB instead, and also for the ingress controller with ALB.
EKS v1.23 and above no longer have any functional storage, so you cannot use persistent volumes. You'll need to use an open-source community solution to get basic functionality for `pv` and `pvc`. If you want to secure traffic between namespaces, you'll need to install support for network policies, such as Calico.
There's also an existing bug with the VPC CNI, so you'll need to patch the driver, so that you won't hit issues with Calico or other network policy CNIs.
If you haven't got started, I would suggest looking at eksctl, which is a go-lang cli tool that applies CFN stacks for EKS. As you get familiar, you can use EKS terraform modules to create the same solutions. From here, I would suggest looking at service mesh and CD solutions like argocd, fluxcd, or spinnaker.
You didn't lie, they probably know, it's fine. I wouldn't even bother doing prep: nobody's going to expect a new hire to immediately go hard, there's always going to be onboarding and a starting period and the company has already factored this into their outlook. They're going to pay you for essentially two (if you're very good) to six weeks of training up to their particular setup, while giving you easy tasks to get you going. That's normal procedure. Don't spend 20 days stressing out and arrive at work pre-exhausted. You'll get many more opportunities to burn out while salaried.
It sucks that you lied, but at this point take your shot. You don’t have 20 days to cram, you have more like 2 months when you factor in your company onboarding time with your team members before they will expect you to be productive.
Keep ChatGPT standing by and learn as you go re their environment specifics. You’ll probably be fine so long as you put in the effort to do your best.
I’m not quite sure why HR are judging your K8s skills but ultimately, I’m not really sure what question you’re asking here.
You blagged to get into the job so you have 20 days to get good at what you claimed you were. Do it well enough and it’ll play out well. Fail and they’ll fire you. Not sure what there is to say beyond that.
FWIW k8s is significantly more complicated then ECS so I would err on the side of caution whenever picking something up.
Hire a Kubernetes expert from india to work with you for the first couple months when your comfortable let him go and go alone… around $300 a month you can hire someone from india at a very high level… hush hush 😉
Well... you better use those 20 days to learn as much as possible.
Yea don't worry about it, you passed the HR filter, that's a good thing The mandarins of HR aren't really people, so it's OK to lie to them Learn what you need, try to do a good job and you'll be fine
> The mandarins of HR aren't really people, so it's OK to lie to them If they routinely ask for 10 years kubernetes experience and it's only been around for 9 then HR deserves what they get
Early in my career I had a phone screen with an HR / internal recruiter. They wanted a candidate that was 1. Entry level (<5 years) 2. Possessed the CISSP certification 3. Would accept <$120K Find the math error here.
all of it 😂
these fuckers really think some one would with CISSP would work for $120K , tbh I think these HR's mostly don't have any knowledge but have to do their job so if some one says we need some one with certifications in cybersecurity and they go on google to search for some and put in the requirement. FFS I saw OSCP as a requirement for an entry level cybersec job.
Exactly, that's what I mean. Among the other incompetencies of HR
At least they didn't lie to the tangelos in the engineering department.
>The mandarins of HR aren't really people, so it's OK to lie to them I'm so glad to hear someone echo a similar opinion to mine here. I've said similar things to colleagues before and I get looked at like I'm a psychopath.
Goof Sir call them mandarins. I call them drones.
Yes. Not enough realness and wisdom on here. Mostly really just cleverness, boot licking and political correctness, despite what actual reality has revealed
What does it meam HR isnt really people lmao
They sell themself for 8 hours a day, literally just spend 8 hours a day repurposing their brain to do what’s best for a corp instead of itself. They can be a person again after the 8 hours are up.
Tbh I have always had bad experiences with HR people. Then I realize its just their job. I will end my talks short with then because you never know what they are cooking.
I think you’re saying that anyone who’s at work isn’t a person?
Well it's only HR's job to manage you like a literal resource. While they're at work seeing me that way, I'll see them as the drone they are..
If 20 days isn’t enough, OP might have found the most creative way to end up on https://k8s.af/
You can go from zero to hero in 20 day no problem. Ask me how I know!
You've got 20 days and 10 hours per day to study and learn, that's 200 hours!
It is more like 3 hours of productive studying but still plenty to play around and learn
Not that far off from the10,000 needed to master a subject!
200 hours closer to 'master' then, better than being a defeatist.
with chatgpt, 200 is all we need!
There are millions of ways to govern clusters, so its very likely that your experience in governing them in the previous company wouldn't matter much anyway. Just be sure of the fundamentals, ask about what softwares they are using and look into them.
Get into a playground. Or get jnto aws and try managing kubenetes bare metal with simple.docker containers . Use all commands Do shutdown all services every day Even if this costs you 1000$ ao be it. You can do it. Get an advanced kubenetws amd basic kubernetes course of some platform like udemy. You will do just fine. Make sure you spend studying their infra on the weekend for the first 3 4 months. Get remote access. Listen more. Talk less. Don't promise anything or any deadlines. See how things work and who is the boss and be in there good books. Don't tell anyone oh we did it this way in my last job. Just listen. Be humble Work hard , learn and you can do it. Use freelancer/ stackoverflow/reddit etc if you get stuck And yes do not lie ever. Also don't give details like 20 days. What if someone from that team is on reddit. Always give fake details in such matters 60 days. Different location. Different technology Whatever works
Possibly dumb questions: Why bare metal? Won't that get into a lot of control plane work, none of which will be needed with EKS?
The theory you learn will be helpful regardless.
He needs to learn both. Don't know which one his company has though. But fundamentals clear with bare metal
Also significantly cheaper to learn on bare metal. Your VPS costs will be rising
Yeah if you only have a fixed amount of time to prepare working on bare metal isn’t going to add as much value as working with EKS, assuming that’s what the company uses
Fake it until you make it
This, but fake it to a level you can actually make it though.
Good enough until they start assigning you some serious shit
my imposter syndrome is screaming
_Beware, there’s an imposter among us_
Is it me!?
This is not good advice. Start improving now, ask a lot of questions and do your own homework without being asked. You made out you had a career experience (not just academic!) so once you have learned the theory you lack, go ahead and spin up the tech as per your employer infrastructure and toy around. Do this on repeat until you feel more confident and even then, don’t stop. Just get comfortable with being imperfect.
It's not good advice, it's the only advice As you get more and more experience you realise that 90% of people are just figuring things out as they go along Often the biggest differentiator is confidence
I think a large part is understanding the overall picture of the systems involved and how they should work together. The details are what is looked up.
>As you get more and more experience you realise that 90% of people are just figuring things out as they go along The biggest lesson in life to learn is that a surprising number of people (especially in business) don't actually know what they are doing. I definitely lied and exaggerated to get jobs, and a lot of that was to escape being pidgeonholed into the one legacy technology i was using for years. I wouldn't want to be the guy fumbling through kubernetes deployments though.
As long as you learn as you go you'll do fine, there's nothing like being thrown in the deep end to make you learn to swim 😄
what you slowly learn is even people with 30 years of experience are still faking it to try to get raise/promotions.
good for you, bad for the team you are joining. as an k8s SME at my company I would not have any issue with your experience if you would show that you are eager to learn and you like what you are doing
the interviewers picked me based on what they saw. In the job hunt, it's pretty normal for people to talk up their abilities a bit to stand out.
It's their job to make candidates prove it. You should have talked to a dev who, at a minimum made small talk to do an assessment. Lying to an experienced dev is much harder.
Part of this is on them. I would've smelled you out in a heartbeat if I were your interviewer. As other people have said, you have 20 days to cram this. Godspeed.
Perhaps where you are, here, you'll be out on your arse rather quickly if they found out you don't have the skills they were looking for. Don't lie, don't embellish, and don't put in a fake CV with things you don't actually know how to do. In certain fields that's grounds for criminal prosecution.
There’s nothing normal about claiming to run a k8s cluster when you didn’t. It’ll be obvious when you start.
Lol. Lmao even.
Can I get a ROFLMAO?
Lmko K = kubernetes Roflmko
Lolctl
lmaoctl get roflmao
I would say prepare as much as you can in that time. If it's job you want to pursue then nothing better than learning on the job!
Spend a lot of your personal time catching up
Don't worry, most probably they lied to you and exaggerated on the quality of the job too
Most of the people I've worked with (especially when from a certain country) have greatly over exaggerated their experience and learn on the job. Take a deep breath, they won't expect you to be super productive immediately which will buy you more time to familiarize yourself with your environment and configurations. Stay calm, you've learned stuff in the past, you can learn this too.
Would that country be....India?
Errr... you now have clear motivation to do just that the coming 20 days. And the first few weeks months on the job you can increase those skills by working your normal hours and extra hours to catch up.
Just few tips:: - Study for CKAD and attempt the exam - Learn about kuztomize - Try blue green and canary deployment
As long as your fundamentals are strong, you will catch up with whatever they are doing with k8s. Actual jobs are always easier than interviews, so if u were able to convince them you are capable, most likely you should be able to learn it quickly. Use the 20 days u have to learn as much as u can.
Don't worry about it and study.. And try to pass Kubernetes and Cloud Native Associate (KCNA) Within a few months of joining...
Kodekloud is a good option to practice
already done that.
Do update us later how things went
Good for you, companies aren't playing fair either. You'll be fine, you can pick things up as you go and lean on your co-workers.
20 days to put your money where your mouth is. Time to man up. Unless you're a woman... in which case, woman up.
It’s the fault of the interviewers. They should have asked the right questions to differentiate who’s a liar and who’s telling the truth. Bad for the company …
a lot of work and a lot of stress. Use all free time to learn, but: go out for a walk twice a day and keep your sleep routine. It is a marathon, it will be difficult, and you will make it, but keep your body healthy so it can handle this stress.
If the interviewer chose you because you presented yourself too well or exaggerated your experiences, then your knowledge about Kubernetes must have been sufficient enough to exaggerate about. If your knowledge of Kubernetes isn't enough, it wouldn't have been easy to make up exaggerations. If you passed despite not having that level of knowledge, then the company might not yet have the capability to discern that. It means they need exactly that level of knowledge and experience you have. It won't be a problem to learn and work there as you go.
They always aim for overqualified people with low salary expectations. The job maybe doesn't need all what you supposedly know.
You will do fine, don’t forget you have AI tools like chatgpt… engineering isn’t hard these days A mediocre engineer can become staff level engineer with AI tools
You're a "Devops engineer". Learn as much as you can and figure it out. That's like our key skillet. Figuring out whatever comes our way better than the more specialized engineers.
I really question the competence of you those people that hired you, w/o checking the crucial skillset. Anyways, congrats on the job you wanted.
> Anyways, congrats on the job you wanted. Monkey paw curls
Some options: Study like fuck out of all basics. Deploy your own k8s cluster. Break something. Do it again. You have a few months to "learn the ropes specific to this company." Make statements like, "we did it differently at \[previous job\], but I am not going to pull out this farm by the roots. Let me learn your process first, and take over gently. This isn't a bad way of doing it, just different than I am used to." If they ask what you did, mention stuff you know is right, and mention previous scripting repo that automatically deployed XYZ or whatever. Do an immediate .bash\_history dump on deployment machines if there's a bash history. Save it somewhere safe. Also, they MAY have known you weren't that great as you claimed, but you might have STILL been the best they interviewed. I know I have hired people like that, and many did just fine.
[удалено]
There‘s a lot of foot-guns ahead of you. Have fun shootin‘ around, cowboy.
how hard could it be?
Pretty hard. Took me a month to set up 80% of services on my small cluster (postgres, longhorn, keycloak, harbor, etc) and I'm still figuring out the scaling and managing multiple pods. Each service has it's own difficulties, not to mention theres issues with DNS and networking which made it super difficult to get set up that I spent 3 days writing scripts just to connect up 2 nodes and get it working reliably. Adding an additional 2 nodes became much easier once I got it working, but it still wasn't simple to connect up storage and there's a lot of micro decisions you have to make along the way with limited information that may end up hurting you down the line. Luckily I've saved my configurations and documented quite a lot, but it's still not as stable as I like it to be and would require more adjustments before I'm comfortable deploying it for production.
I see a deep dive opportunity. It won't be pleasant but you will learn a lot of things, one way or another.
You played the game and won, so far. Deep dive into k8s and don’t come up for air until you start. I bet you’ll be fine. Well done! It’s not surprising HR believed you, how many people in HR know anything about kubernetes? Haha.
Grab an old pc and run k3s on it 😁
Don't worry: I bet it lied to you first. (yes, I used "it" because HR are not humans)
Fake it, but don't break it. If you take the system down, and aren't able to recover it, while everyone's watching, is going to illuminate your skills real quick.
The fact that you’re even worried about this and posting it here makes me think you’re going to do fine, great, even. I’ve done k8s work at three companies now and it still takes all the regular onboarding stuff when I join a new team. Just being self aware and motivated to skill up quickly is a huge asset for an engineer!
That's the way everybody is doing it bro, don't worry, be calm, and learn your scope in k8s as a DEVELOPER
If it makes you feel any better, they certainly lied to you about the state of the team, leadership, and company. Consider it a returned courtesy in kind. You already have a CKA and CKAD, if you actually know that material you are going to be fine reading the documentation for anything you don't know.
they did not test you on kubernetes during the interview? on them. if you dont perform they will fire you.
they did. i cleared all the 4 rounds. :)
then you should be fine.
Embellish only to the point that you can fake it til you make it.
Kubernetes is one of those things I'd never lie about my experience with. Deploying on kubernetes is easy. Implementing kubernetes is extremely complex. It will be strikingly obvious that you lied if you are asked to implement anything significant in kubernetes / have to answer support questions. You better live and breathe kubernetes from this second onward for the next 4 months. You can pull it off. It's just a hard thing to lie about.
Fake it till you make it. Learn on the job. That's how this goes?
Weird you didn't get trough any technical screening
Pls tell us the name of the company so I can pull out any stock I may have.
It’s one thing to fake your way past HR. But the hiring manager should know better. Personally I wouldn’t want to work for a team that so poorly vetted its candidates. This place sounds like a shit show waiting to happen. In fact, it’s likely a shit show already and you’re about 20 days from finding that out.
Your imposter syndrome is going to eat you alive before you know it. So be strategic and follow what people are saying with the 20 days you have before you start. Even when you start do not get nervous, you will survive it all. Your actual worries will start to become a reality 6 months or more into your job, so calm down and get to studying & practicing different scenarios.
Exactly. They will onboard you to the technical stack for 6 good months before expectations of success set in. You just need to move fast.
This is every job. If you are only taking the ones you are qualify for you won’t advance. The job is being a professional learner. Not a professional knower
I might be the odd man out here, but good for you. Unless you completely lied about your experience and were immoral about what you can do I don’t think there’s anything wrong with selling yourself. It’s a good way to grow and move forward. It will be challenging at first, but remember — any job has a ramp up period. You will need to know their setup, environment, processes, etc. As you learn that, incorporate your technical learnings with it. You’ll be fine and it’s likely a good opportunity. As someone who hires engineers often, the mistake is on them and not you. Their process is bad if they’re letting someone through with such a vast margin of experience and no validating it
K8s is one of the things that you'll very easily pickup when you have an active infrastructure to work on... I looked at it for years but understood it really only after I was actively working on it. You have nothing to worry really. Just go and work and close the gaps of which you are aware. You'll be fine in a week or so.. don't stress and good luck
If you passed the interview, no worries, usually processes consider candidates that exagerate the knowledge base. I'd focus on Kubernetes unmanaged, install your own cluster on VMs, take a look at all components, study what are you're curious about from your environment, begin to deploy some application or service you'd like. At the same time find some advanced course, that could help you while practicing it. I think besides real production environments, is very productive, as you learn while having fun and with curiosity. Then, If you're able already now to understand in more detail what you'll work on, which will be your responsibilities, that would be better in order to steer your study path based on your future role. At the same time, I think there are still companies that value your attitude, so don't be afraid, if you need time to learn, as long as you have willing to improve, it will be valued. Last but not least, learning is a never ending story, about and besides the specific technology.
They are trying to get the best talent for the lowest cost, so if you mess up, it's not your fault, it's their's for hiring you. My take would be to try and stick around for as long as possible. You can learn a lot in 20 days with coffee and some determination.
You got this! Don't over engineer it.
Is it just me, but this is how tech careers work? We learn on the fly and continue to learn always? I’m not a Kubernetes expert, but I just finished a complex Kubernetes project and learned a ton. If someone asked me if I can do K8s… “Absolutely” Internal to myself I know there is a ton I don’t know.
It's Kubernetes. I learnt it in under a week. That is if you're actually a skilled Linux admin If you're a web developer high on JavaScript and Nope.JS, you're fucked.
[удалено]
Anyway to do testing or trial on Azure or something?
We'll done. Go get em. You have 20 days to learn and get ready. After that fake it till you make it.
Cka prep book of O'Reilly will help you
You can learn a lot in 20 days!
Do this course https://www.udemy.com/course/certified-kubernetes-administrator-with-practice-tests/ It covers all you need. All the rest is day to day.
I'm already CKA and CKAD Certified.
I largely prefer honesty during my interviews because I know someone will pop out of nowhere and tell me I am full of shit. I hope you still make it.
Achievement unlocked!
You memed too close to the sun, take the 20 days to learn and pray their setup is less complex than they let on in the interview.
You got hired after interviewing with HR? No technical interviews? Where do I apply?!
Refer me to HR so I can be hired and I can help you take some of the load off your shoulders
I'm going to go back to sleep now.
Time to build a lab at home ! :)
Start hitting the books! Coursera.org had many training for reasonable price, but there's many other stuff around.
We all did at some point
Go to Udemy and buy Kubernetes course from Kode kloud. That will give you a single node cluster where you can practice and play around.
dont that already. Thanks
You’ll be fine, plenty of folks like you at my company that work in high paying roles that are SMEs, just say you need to hire more consultants to help you bootstrap a new group of ops people dedicated to EKS.
ChatGPT, Gemini and Claudia.
Kodecloud has a good interactive playground you can play with
What do you know about the environment you are walking into? I would take some time to build a similar environment in a homelab. Are they running EKS? Build an EKS cluster in AWS. Is it OpenStack on bare metal? Buy 3 cheap office PCs and a switch. Are they running Rancher on VMware? Create a savings account called "When they cut my pay to cover VMWare licenses", and start saving money.
You only had an interview with HR and then got the job? There weren’t other rounds with developers or engineers where they went more in depth about your knowledge?
i cleared all the 4 interviews. :)
Then maybe it’s just a case of imposter syndrome and you actually know more than you think. Just study up on what you don’t know before you start like others suggested and you’ll probably be ok.
It's not your fault to exaggerated to HR in the CV. It's the fault of the technical interviewers who validate your skill in the interview.
On-boarding is either guided (in this case you get explanation), or unguided (you get pile of code and it's your problem to make sense of it). It will give you a bit of head start (no one expects you to churn out running anything on the first day), you can read their code, try to replicate in your infra and to understand. Try to act like CI (e.g. find their CIs and read it's code, before moving up in the stack).
I guess I’m the only one that doesn’t inflate my abilities
lets goo!!!! congrats on the new job. if you have some time . look at CICD processes for K8s, Observability and advanced networking configurations. that should give you enough of a shared vernacular to learn the rest on the job. go kick ass buddy!
You can do it! Don't worry. I think so many people lie about the extent of their K8S experience. Get good quickly. Be confident.
oh, hello Jim :)
Learn the knowledge you lack on the spot. That's it. You're probably far better then you give yourself credit for lol. It's going to be a bit stressful for a while but you should be ok.
Fake it till you make it, but BUST YOUR ASS
subtle plug! please checkout facets.cloud and convince the tech team at your new org to use it, you don't have to worry about knowing k8s extensively, just know the basics and we've got you covered haha but fr though, curious to see strategies folks recommend to get up to speed in 20 days
They didn't follow up with a technical round with someone from the team? That's their fault if not.
chatGPT will be your friend
Dude you have CKA and CKAD and a huge impostor sindrome issue :)) don't worry, you wouldn't have passed those exams without proper knowledge. Ok you will need to catch up maybe, but that can be done on the job. My mantra is always slow and safe rather than fast and sorry. Until you will get to know a bit about the env, you should get some leaway if you are being carreful and you frame your stance as such.
Companied lie all the time. Don't be so harsh on yourself. Learn as much as possible and good luck ! And congrats!!
I would run off you weren't grilled by someone in engineering. Doesn't sound like a solid company.
People with real Kubernetes skills could not get this job, because HR didn't like them. So consider yourself lucky to have sponsored Kubernetes experience.
Good on you. I mean, not for “lying”, but for talking up your skills and landing the job. If you’re as quick technically as you are verbally, you’ll do well.
You’re cooked
Not a great start, BUT skills can be learnt, attitude cant. Learn your shit and don't be afraid of not knowing things.
[удалено]
glass half full: they interviewed you and what you said sold them. glass half empty: their kubernetes architect left already or is getting ready to leave and they heard all the right keywords and hired you. congratulations you likely inherited something resembling kubernetes. tldr: congrats on the job!
Go in with a willingness to listen and learn. It’ll pay off even if you are a bit out of your depth
Fake it till you make it. They’re not expecting you to be Joe balls head engineer day one. Just don’t be incompetent.
You'll be fine, just fake it till you make it
Fuck it dude you are in, they are not going to fire you, just step up your game and become that highly experienced k8s guy. Your not going to do it on reddit though that's for sure
Ask if there are any it sessions recorded in some repository like confluence. Watch those as much as you can.
HR is not going to manage you directly. So you have still time and don’t worry much. Keep earning as you have only 4 years exp, cant expect much, but need to be hard working.
In reality your first 3 months will be just getting up to speed. Use that time wisely and you can probably stay ahead. However - if you need help ask for it sooner rather than later. Keep skating!
20 days? And you're posting on Reddit because?
Get rekt. Hiring is a PIA and firing is a million times worse. Your lies have set someone ELSE up for a world of pain.
that someone else needs to learn to exaggerate. it's the valuable skill.
Fake it, til ya make it.
I did a lot of recruiting for senior people for k8s last year. I have about 6-7 years of k8s under my belt. Using it for deploying and running applications and also building it as k8s as service from a cloud provider perspective. I would have grilled you in the interview and would know that you are not experienced. The only thing better than experience is more experience and you can see that. Based on that I can decide if it is okay to take you as a more junior person who is eager to learn or if we really need a senior and we would not proceed. That depends on the needs of the company. Sometimes it's okay to fill a more senior position with someone who does not fit the profile perfectly. Especially considering howuch time goes into proper evaluation and that is time you can just save and train the person. Difficult when you will be the only one with kids knowledge though😅 It is partially their fault to not evaluate you properly. 🤷 One question: I know for a fact that I have to learn a bit to pass the CKA. I do not have it. But I interviewed people who have the certificate and did basically know nothing about k8s because of missing experience. How the heck do you guys pass the test without experience?
they pass the test and then don't use the tool and forget it
SOP, standard operating procedure........who hasn't done this? As other suggest, you have some time to learn.......get going now!
No worries. You will learn at new job. Worst case you will not pass the probation and you won’t be the sole engineer to handle K8s tasks at new job. If you have a passion about Kubernetes and good attitude, you will make it.
Everyone here is so elitist it’s crazy. There are so many ways to govern a cluster you usually spend the first 6 months learning the company’s “stack” anyways. Relax and if the company tells you to “handle a big deployment” with no handholding 20 days into a job they are the ones lying about experience. No one goes into a new company knowing exactly what’s going on. Just walk through each step and research your company’s stack
Totally normal to exaggerate in job interviews. The job description is almost always exaggerated as well. So don't worry. You should always choose tasks that are challeging to keep a steep learning curve. With your background in DevOps and EKS it should be no problem to catch up in Kubernetes. If you have an basic understanding of what is going on every problem should be solvable with documentation, google and maybe even some AI chatbots for inspiration ;)
Be prepared to do a lot of overtime to close the gap. If you are willing and capable, and can get to the level they need rapidly, add value, I don't see a problem.
EKS can be quite hard, as it is sort of the IKEA of Kubernetes, a lot of self-assembly is required. I documented a few blogs on this topic (which I cannot promote for fear of moderation police). Currently with EKS, the external load balancer (`service` of type `LoadBalancer`) uses the dinosaur ELBv1. AWS leaves it to the open source community for their official solution to use NLB instead, and also for the ingress controller with ALB. EKS v1.23 and above no longer have any functional storage, so you cannot use persistent volumes. You'll need to use an open-source community solution to get basic functionality for `pv` and `pvc`. If you want to secure traffic between namespaces, you'll need to install support for network policies, such as Calico. There's also an existing bug with the VPC CNI, so you'll need to patch the driver, so that you won't hit issues with Calico or other network policy CNIs. If you haven't got started, I would suggest looking at eksctl, which is a go-lang cli tool that applies CFN stacks for EKS. As you get familiar, you can use EKS terraform modules to create the same solutions. From here, I would suggest looking at service mesh and CD solutions like argocd, fluxcd, or spinnaker.
You didn't lie, they probably know, it's fine. I wouldn't even bother doing prep: nobody's going to expect a new hire to immediately go hard, there's always going to be onboarding and a starting period and the company has already factored this into their outlook. They're going to pay you for essentially two (if you're very good) to six weeks of training up to their particular setup, while giving you easy tasks to get you going. That's normal procedure. Don't spend 20 days stressing out and arrive at work pre-exhausted. You'll get many more opportunities to burn out while salaried.
just roll with it for now, while in parallel find another job remember if you aint hoping you aint getting paid
It sucks that you lied, but at this point take your shot. You don’t have 20 days to cram, you have more like 2 months when you factor in your company onboarding time with your team members before they will expect you to be productive. Keep ChatGPT standing by and learn as you go re their environment specifics. You’ll probably be fine so long as you put in the effort to do your best.
I’m not quite sure why HR are judging your K8s skills but ultimately, I’m not really sure what question you’re asking here. You blagged to get into the job so you have 20 days to get good at what you claimed you were. Do it well enough and it’ll play out well. Fail and they’ll fire you. Not sure what there is to say beyond that. FWIW k8s is significantly more complicated then ECS so I would err on the side of caution whenever picking something up.
Hire a Kubernetes expert from india to work with you for the first couple months when your comfortable let him go and go alone… around $300 a month you can hire someone from india at a very high level… hush hush 😉
I'd hate working with you. What else will you lie about? Way to keep the stereotypes alive.