This document provides an overview of how Byteboardâs Site Reliability Engineering Assessment differs from the Software Engineering Assessment. It is intended to provide context for individuals who are already familiar with Byteboardâs Software Engineering Assessment.
Overview
The Site Reliability Engineering assessment has an explicit focus on assessing the skills required to create scalable and highly reliable software systems. It differs from Byteboard's general Software Engineering assessment by providing signal for domain-specific skills including Distributed Systems, Performance, Networking, and Monitoring while removing runtime complexity questions that previously informed the Pattern Matching & Intuition skill.
Content Changes
Part 1 - Design Document | Part 2 - Coding Segment |
Part 1 has an increased focus on designing a scalable and reliable software system. Runtime complexity-focused questions asked in comments by âcollaboratorsâ have been replaced with questions assessing domain-specific skills. | Identical to Software Engineering assessment. |
Domain-Specific Skills
Four new skills have been introduced to assess highly requested Systems & SRE focused Software Engineering skills. While the assessment is still able to evaluate signal on Basic Algorithms & Data Structures, the assessment no longer evaluates Pattern Matching & Intuition.
Skills | Baseline expectations for displaying desired skill |
Distributed Systems | The candidate can understand and critically reason about distributed systems. |
Performance | The candidate is able to recommend optimizations to improve application performance and scalability. |
Networking | The candidate is able to provide recommendations to improve user experience despite networking issues or faulty connections. |
Monitoring | The candidate is able to provide recommendations for how to design metrics and monitor the health of the system. |
Pattern matching & intuition | Candidate leverages basic knowledge of algorithms and data structures. |