The Microsoft Interview Question I Keep Thinking About

A few months ago, while interviewing for a Cloud Solutions Architect role at Microsoft, one of the interviewers asked me a question that stuck with me long after the interview ended. Not because I couldn't answer it. But because I kept thinking about whether I had answered it well. The question was: "What's the hardest part about working on mainframe technology?" At the time, I was still relatively new to the world of mainframes. And by "relatively new," I mean embarrassingly new. Before joining my current company, I didn't even know something called a "mainframe" still existed. If you'd asked me what COBOL was, I probably would've guessed it was a Pokémon. Okay that is an exaggeration but you get what I mean. I still remember early on hearing terms like KT (Knowledge Transfer) being thrown around and quietly wondering if everyone had received some secret corporate dictionary except me. The good news is that I've never been particularly afraid of looking stupid. So my strategy is simple: Ask the question. Then ask the follow-up question. Then ask the question that reveals I didn't understand the previous answer either. Surprisingly, people were usually happy to explain. Anyway, after a few KT sessions and what I'd generously describe as a "bare minimum amount of research," my brain went where most developers' brains probably would've gone. The technology The age The tooling The learning curve The fact that some of these systems were designed before I was even born All perfectly reasonable answers. But while I was sitting there in the interview, another thought appeared: "This feels too obvious." Interviewers at that level usually aren't asking for the first answer that comes to mind. They're trying to understand how you think. And the more I reflected on that question afterwards, the more I realized something interesting. The hardest part isn't the technology itself. Before I started working around large enterprise systems, my mental model of old technology was pret