Handbook
The Interview Spine
The seven things every archetype on this site tests, whatever the job title. Start here if you are preparing for an interview.
Cross-cutting. Each chapter is linked from every role that tests it.
CHAPTER 1
Measuring what resists measurement
Tested in every field on this site under a different name — evals, SLOs, DORA, ablations. Named in 59% of AI and 42% of platform postings, and almost nobody studies it deliberately.
CHAPTER 2
The control
One habit separates strong candidates from plausible ones more reliably than any technical depth.
CHAPTER 3
Design under constraint
The decisive round for SRE, AI Platform, Infrastructure — and the reason strong engineers fail it.
CHAPTER 4
Latency and cost arithmetic
The one piece of maths that is genuinely counterintuitive — and it comes up in every agent interview.
CHAPTER 5
Discovery before solution
The decisive round in three separate archetypes, with the lowest pass rate of any stage.
CHAPTER 6
Failure and incident narrative
Every archetype asks for this story. The outage is the setting; the decisions are the content.
CHAPTER 7
Reading a job description
About 70% of a posting is boilerplate. Knowing where the other 30% lives changes how you apply.
CHAPTER 8
Which market are you interviewing for?
AI-native and enterprise are two different jobs wearing one title. Studying for the wrong one is the most expensive mistake on this site.
CHAPTER 9
Negotiating the offer
The highest hourly-rate conversation of your career, and the one people prepare for least. India needs a different playbook from the US, and this chapter gives both.
CHAPTER 10
The first ninety days
You were hired on evidence of past work. You will be judged on the first quarter. These are different things.
CHAPTER 11
What the loops actually look like, company by company
Only a handful of employers publish their process. Here is what they say, what is merely reported, and why the difference decides what you prepare for.
CHAPTER 12
AI in the interview, and what the cheating data shows
Three published positions rather than two, a controlled experiment on whether cheating is detectable, and the question construction that actually changed.
CHAPTER 13
Does any of this predict performance?
The validity numbers on every hiring slide are from 1998, were corrected downward in 2022, and the correction is still being argued about.