ex-hwops engineer here... The question server repair question served 2 purposes: 1) can you identify a minimum bootable state / repeatable failure case? Can y

ex-hwops engineer here... The question server repair question served 2 purposes: 1) can you identify a minimum bootable state / repeatable failure case? Can you think of obscure corner cases like the metal tray that all the components sit on being the problem? 2) How quickly do you give up and ask for help from humans / other sources. Both were core to the role. Changes in hardware and firmware often resulted in issues needing to be escalated back to manufacturers / internal platform team. The volume/scale of work also meant that being able to concisely convey what you had observed / tested and hypothesised helped the team identify trends / larger issues that were occuring. Datacenter automation and tooling was very much in its infancy. Around that time, the org was growing rapidly (doubling in size yearly) so most people ended up doing interviews. Not everyone is cut out to interview so sorry if your experience was sucky. Side note: I once spent most of an interview slot talking to a candidate about snowboarding. Turned out to be one of the best hires we made (thankfully the other interviewers actually asked some role related questions).