Date: 03.10.2025 (2025-10-03)
Harsh Interview with Eng Manager at BT (03.10.2025) 1. L2 / L3 Operations • ServiceNow is currently used for incident management, but experience is poor. • Contractors at L2/L3 levels often lack sufficient context to resolve issues effectively. • Procuring and managing test data is a significant pain point: • Compared to Airbnb, which handles test data and mocking well, BT struggles. • Test data is varied, difficult to procure, and generally a mission.
2. Developer Experience • Developers currently use AmazonQ. • Keeping Jira tickets updated is a recurring problem.
3. Engineering Manager Repetitive Tasks • High volume of repetitive approval tasks, including: • Procurement approvals • Annual leave approvals • Expense approvals • System access approvals
4. Quality Assurance • Ratio: ~2–3 QAs per developer. • QA function costs approximately £2M annually.
5. Monitoring • Synthetic monitoring is currently in place on production. • Dynatrace is the primary tool used, but it is expensive (adding new tests incurs significant cost). • An additional internal synthetic monitoring solution exists but is perceived as ineffective. • EM expressed willingness to pay for synthetic monitoring that allows frictionless addition of new test cases.
6. Health Check Assessments • Health checks are conducted quarterly by external auditors (human-led). • These audits are considered costly, burdensome, and intimidating. • EM expressed strong interest in automation of these assessments using LLMs. • Quarterly budget exists for this, and willingness to pay is high.
7. Infrastructure / Security Requirements • Preference for on-premise solutions. • Tools must integrate smoothly with existing employee authentication (MFA).