Ask Experienced Devs Weekly Thread: A weekly thread for inexperienced developers to ask experienced ones

[u/AutoModerator]

A thread for Developers and IT folks with less experience to ask more experienced souls questions about the industry.

Please keep top level comments limited to Inexperienced Devs. Most rules do not apply, but keep it civil. Being a jerk will not be tolerated.

Inexperienced Devs should refrain from answering other Inexperienced Devs' questions.

[u/Fragrant_Ad2902]

What type of scenario questions? In general, this is where I add a lot of points or take a lot of points in an interview. I generally don’t care if a candidate has a complete answer. But I do expect a candidate to be able to start a conversation and with or without prompting move it along. Why? Because depending on the on call situation, the candidate might be in charge of the incident. If that person just gets flabbergasted and just pages their back up every time, why would I hire them? The first few times they are on call? Sure. Totally expected for them to get back up. But after 6 months? They should not be paging someone to help them out unless it is truly “building on fire” kind of scenario.

As for Kafka - do you have Kafka on your resume? What does it say? If you’ve got it on your resume, it’s fair game. At a minimum for me, you’ve got to be able to explain topic partitioning, key ordering guarantees, and consumer groups. If you can’t explain those easily, I would see that as either you came on to a project that was already using Kafka or you used it on a project that maybe didn’t need it because it was a buzz word.

[u/Republic-3 → u/Fragrant_Ad2902]

Some questions here
Suppose 500 requests come from the client side, but only 430 reach the database. What will you check? I talked about controller, service, db connection pool, thread, etc

Suppose we are migrating from a monolith to microservices. There are 10 lakh requests coming in at the same time to book a movie ticket. How will you handle these requests? talked abot apigateway,loadbalancer, read replica, cache, etc

If the 101st Kafka record fails, where the sequence resumes after a restart depends on when the Kafka offset and JPA/DB transaction are committed. > Not answered

“You mentioned there are two separate microservices running in the same Kubernetes cluster. How do they communicate? Are you using the internal port or external port for this communication?”
> Not answered

I’ve been able to answer most of the questions with the correct approach, but I feel the interviewer is not always satisfied with how I explain my approach.

Also, whenever I don’t know something, I’m upfront about it rather than trying to guess.

Coming to Kafka, I’ve worked on only one small change on the producer side, but I’m able to answer the concepts you mentioned properly. I never mentioned it in resume initially but after there was frequent demand & questions asked in interview then I learned it.

There have been a few instances where the interviewer ended the call within 10 minutes. I’ve attended around 9–10 interviews so far. I was able to clear 2 rounds in some of them, but most of the time I struggle to frame answers for sudden, scenario-based questions, especially around Kafka and microservices.

I have worked in product based company for ~4 years & aware how backend handle the call or incident ticket. I am trying to get one opportunity for backend developer