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The arithmetic takes ten seconds and most candidates stall on it. The stall is the signal: it means error budgets are something you have read about rather than used.

Every candidate can define chaos engineering. Far fewer can say what they would break first, and almost none volunteer the abort condition, which is the thing that makes it a programme rather than an incident.

Alert fatigue is a design failure, not a discipline failure. The fix is a rule about what may page at all, and burn-rate alerting is how you implement it.

Spending the budget is arithmetic; enforcing consequences is politics plus automation. The answer that lands names trigger thresholds, the deploy gate that blocks releases, and the dated escape valve.

Repeated action items are a measurable defect with a mechanical cause. Candidates who answer 'culture' without a mechanism are describing the symptom back to you.

The valuable part is the first ten minutes of context gathering, which is tedious and mechanical. The dangerous part is anything that changes production while a human is still working out what is wrong.

Burnout questions look soft but score systems thinking. Interviewers want the signals you watched, the structural fixes you made, and the number that proved the fix worked.