If you are cloud based this does not sound correct. If you have the cluster autoscaler setup, then the cluster should grow to allow for the deployment based on the constraints in your deployment.
If you are on prem then this is reasonable, since you have limited physical hardware so the cluster can not automatically grow.
I think this is the key, someone can easily use k8s in the wrong way, so if you don't understand the concepts and try to use it like a VM you will have serious issues.
Very different from my experience, k8s makes deployment very easy. We use Concourse CI for build and deployment and it's very easy. Using Helm to control DDL changes using liquibase pre-deploy jobs, makes the deployment self contained.
This look interesting, it took some digging to get to what the actual treatment is, so it gets your body use to the allergen to build up tolerance. What happens when you have multiple pollen allergies, how does it track all of them. Also seems like many pollens will be region specific, different trees, etc.
I agree with that, we had to replace the whole logging module that Phoenix gives you out of the box to provide for logging messages to one line, JSON format, logging both to stdout and file. This is an area that would be easy to improve. Also distributed tracing is not easy to get working or at least the libraries I've found.
Use your time to learn some new skills or become more of an expert on existing skills. My best experiences when interviewing someone is when I learn something new. If you are a Java developer go through all the proposals to be added to the language so you can discuss. If you are a front end developer, try one of the new frameworks and be able to discuss pros and cons against react for example.
You can also make some open source contributions to show you are still gaining skills even if not getting paid.
As an interviewer you are also trying to figure out how the person will fit into the team, there are literally people that you can't get a word in. Learn how to pause and get feedback to see if you are on track.