It feels like a vocabulary quiz and no one tells you what words to study
I recently completed a technical for a big name in Zero-Trust networking.
I studied the product, prepped my STAR answers, and made sure I had a good high level overview of the work I've done with regards to Zero-Trust.
I walked into the interview and was immediately asked to explain TCP, TLS, Authorized vs Authenticated, DNS record types and how to troubleshoot them, and what headers I'd look for in a HTTPS request/response to understand what information I can extract from those.
So all my prep about VPN Split Tunneling, API troubleshooting, SSO, and network architecture flew right out the window and I was left deer in headlights as I was asked what, to me, were minutiae about basic concepts that I could google in 2 seconds to refresh myself.
It just felt like a vocab quiz where I wasn't told what words would be on the test so I should just know everything in great detail.
Now I get why people use AI in their interviews. I've sat on the 4+ hour calls dealing with networking issues and explaining to the customer that it's not our endpoint, it's their firewall not being configured for North-South traffic after their Cloud migration.
Anyway, that's interview 3 in month 3 since my layoff. At least I'm getting better after each one. Just gotta burn through the rest of the jobs that offer a decent salary until I land an interview I can pass the vocab quiz on.
/endrant