Know yourself

The behavioral portion of the interview allows the team to better understand how you work and what motivates you professionally.

Know yourself. Take the time to review your own resume as your interviewer will almost certainly ask questions about key events in your work history.

Be honest. Not every project is a runaway success and we may not always interact perfectly with our peers. Being transparent in these situations won’t be counted against you in the interview. In fact, sharing and discussing how you learned, improved and grew from your past experiences is valued.

Use the S.T.A.R. (Situation, Task, Actions, Results) method to mentally organization your thoughts. This will provoke a well thought-out and chronological action of events. Easy to describe, easy to follow.

Have concrete examples or anecdotes. Support each question with practical experiences and examples. Avoid theoretical answers - if you go into a theoretical tangent, your interviewer will redirect you to provide a concrete example.

Some typical behavioral interview questions are:

What are some of the best things you’ve built?

One of the best things I have built is a family of models that were successfully implemented. This series of models are fundamental to our department. The key components to the success are:

Learned from great products that other companies have built already: stand on the shoulders of giants
Mathematics
Automation + business intuition
Talk with business experts and get their feedback. For example, using e-commerce/non-e-commerce was my innovation. But to look at e-commerce was suggested by a a credit approver.

What are you most proud of? My ability to focus on priorities, and ability to turn around difficult situations.
What could you have done better? I could have a more balanced life, used regular exercises to reduce stress. Healthy mind and body is essential for long term success in work and life.
What were some excellent collaborations you’ve had?
Tell me about a time when you advocated for and pushed your own ideas forward despite opposition.
How do you deal with conflict? In a large corporate, I have experienced different kinds of conflicts.
1. Technical
2. Between peers
How do you like to give and receive feedback?
What kinds of technologies are you most excited about?

Be yourself. This means being open and honest about your successes and failures.

Be humble and focus on teamwork, leadership, and mentorship qualities.

Move fast Focus on long-term impact Build awesome things Live in the future Be direct and respect your colleagues

Here is a quote from a Quara member named Nat Russo: Being a real software engineer means solving real problems. And, real problems aren’t typically wrapped in nice packages with a neat little bow. Because real problems often have concealed requirements in domains that are arcane even for software engineers.

Real software engineering isn’t about writing a binary tree or a linked list. It’s not about memorizing algorithms and design patterns. It’s about being a very good detective and problem solver with at least passable coding skills.

Why only passable? Because coding isn’t the primary focus of software engineering. It’s not even close to being the most important skill set. Even if you’re the best technical coder in the world (in terms of rote memorization of concepts and language structures), you could still be the worst software engineer.

I can teach you how to code. I can’t teach you how to adopt the mindset of a problem solver.

It doesn’t matter how strong your coding skills are if you don’t know

how to get to the root cause of a problem how to communicate with non-engineers (both verbally and in writing) how to work as a team member with a common goal how to make the hidden visible (a list of explicit requirements is great, but the ones that will get you every time are the implicit requirements). how to come to an understanding of what the client needs as opposed to what they’re asking for. how to extrapolate from a limited data set