In 2024 and 2025, I interviewed a total of more than 100 people. During these interviews, I was able to observe different types of technical capability, perception, and ways of thinking. Being exposed to all these interviews helped me understand how to build high-performance infrastructure teams and also helped me quickly identify when excessive knowledge can hinder specific objectives.

Approximately 50 percent of the candidates I interviewed for Senior DevOps Engineer positions had certifications and diverse work experiences but lacked basic knowledge necessary for a strong foundation and more assertive decision-making.

On the other hand, another portion of these candidates were mid-career professionals who had deep knowledge in the topics they discussed, even though they were unfamiliar with other topics.

Building high-performance infrastructure teams is not an easy task, and here are the points I learned on this journey.

Certifications mean nothing without practice: That’s right, it may sound harsh, but the vast majority of certified professionals I interviewed did not have the ability to detect problems that are only detected when you have actually worked with them. This indicator was very important because it made me analyze and validate whether market certifications are truly valuable for identifying high-performance professionals in the execution of these technologies.

Not knowing is better than pretending to know: A portion of the mid-level professionals I interviewed did not know about certain topics, and that is completely normal. However, only some of these professionals had the ability to openly acknowledge that they really didn’t know a particular topic and made this very clear, which is positive because people who know their limits tend to absorb knowledge faster. The brain doesn’t understand whether you know or don’t know; it understands blockages, and this automatically reflects in the way you absorb new knowledge.

Ask questions relevant to the position you want to fill: There’s no point in asking how we can optimize log performance with Fluentbit for someone who will be extremely focused on automating the deployment of your applications. What I mean is, ask relevant questions for the position, and you will save both your time and the interviewee’s time. Normally, positions try to cover too broad a scope, and I believe this is already wrong. From my point of view, positions should be designed to cover a specific scope with some additions, not a very broad scope, because someone who is good at everything ends up being mediocre at many things.

These were the lessons I learned during these nearly two years of technical interviews that helped me build high-performance teams and hire excellent professionals. If you are one of these professionals, please comment on this post and leave your feedback. If you are not, I hope these tips can contribute to your next recruiting session.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.