Common Behavioral Interview Questions For Big Tech – Dev Leader Weekly 60
TL; DR:
Are you prepping for your software engineering interviews?
Odds are you’ve been doubling down on your coding and system design questions… But what are you doing for your behavioral interviews?
Ryan Murphy and I are very excited to bring to you our course on Nailing the Behavioral Interview in Big Tech! Stay tuned for the launch on Dometrain!
Interested? Register for a special discount here: https://tinyurl.com/y9yjmc86
Exclusive Article: Common Behavioral Interview Questions For Big Tech
Why Behavioral Interview Questions
You’re a software engineer. You love to solve problems. You love to code. You love to push to prod on a Friday.
So why the heck are we wasting time with “behavioral” interviews when we’re applying for jobs? Why can’t we just triple down on writing wicked-awesome code?
Simply put: there’s a lot more to being a great software engineer than just writing code.
Behavioral interviews in Big Tech are designed to help a company gauge how well they think you’ll fit in with their workplace and culture. It’s quite common that many companies will publish their key competencies or values — the things they expect every employee to emulate.
At the end of the day, if you can reverse a linked list or use the A* algorithm, it’s not going to be enough if you’re not nailing the behavioral interview.
Free Resource & Structure
I’ve shared this before, but here’s my friendly reminder that I have this very free PDF that you can download to help you practice behavioral interview questions. It even has an example AI prompt that you can (and should) tweak to help you come up with more practice questions.
ACTION: Make sure you download your free copy and GET PRACTICING!
What I’ll be doing for the remainder of this article is cherry-picking some questions, explaining why they’re asked, and giving you an example of what to look out for when answering them. I’ll be touching on a couple of key competencies just so we can cover more ground.
Ready? Let’s jump in.
Teamwork and Collaboration
Question: Describe a time when you had to work closely with a team to complete a project. What was your role?
Goal: Software engineering is a group activity — it’s very rare you’re building in isolation. As a junior engineer, you might be working on small features and bug fixes within your team, but you’ll still be working closely with others on your team. Depending on your organization and the size of your company, odds are that as you become more senior as a software developer you’ll be collaborating with other teams to deliver projects. The goal of this question is to assess:
Watch Out For: It’s easy to provide lots of context about what the project was and the details of what was being built — but for behavioral interviews, this might not matter as much as you’re thinking. While the technology and the product/service being built could be interesting, consider why the interviewer is asking you this question in the first place!
ACTION: Try to stay focused on explaining details showcasing your communication, informal leadership, and ability to collaboratively work through challenges… NOT the nitty-gritty details of the thing being built.
If you had negative interactions or things were challenging, try to focus on the positive learnings. You can always reframe negative experiences as positive growth opportunities.
Finally, remember to highlight your role in this collaboration — Your interviewer shouldn’t be left guessing what you were responsible for versus someone else working on the project
ACTION: Remember to be specific about YOUR role in the situation.
Communication
Question: Describe a time when you had to explain a technical concept to a non-technical stakeholder
Goal: Communication is one of THE most important skills as a software engineer. I can guarantee you that you’ll need this more than you’ll need to understand how to implement a Linked List.
One key aspect of communication is being able to understand how to effectively communicate technical concepts to others. Often this is framed as directly to a non-technical stakeholder, but in theory, this could be explaining a technical concept to a technical person in a COMPLETELY different domain — they aren’t going to understand things to the same level of detail you will.
Consider focusing on:
A good follow-up to this question is being able to explain a scenario where this effective communication led to a positive outcome in a project. For this kind of situation, there might even be opportunities to explain how poor communication was replaced by effective communication and turned the situation around.
ACTION: Focus on how you knew your communication was effective and what you did to adjust to the right level of detail
Watch Out For: As with many behavioral interview questions, you want to consider WHY you are being asked this question. It’s okay to frame up the scenario, but you don’t want to spend the majority of your time answering about technical details of the project being discussed — only if they are relevant to how you needed to adjust your communication!
It can be easy to describe situations where there is communication — but you want to make sure your point is clear that there’s a discrepancy in the level of understanding of an area. This doesn’t mean the other person is a dummy or anything bad on their part, so there’s no need to frame anything remotely close to that. Simply explaining that they don’t have domain knowledge or a level of understanding of a technical detail that was the root of a problem can convey the point without putting anyone down.
ACTION: It might go without saying, but you don’t need to frame the non-technical stakeholder in a negative way
Leadership
Question: Describe a time when you provided guidance or mentorship to a junior team member.
Goal: I’ll say it again, but software is built in teams. This question is of course trying to understand how you help level up those around you.
Sometimes this might feel more difficult to illustrate when you’re more junior, but there are still plenty of opportunities where this could happen. For example, new hires helping other new hires, or interns helping other interns… Even if you’re interviewing for your first job, you may have had opportunities in school or bootcamp where there were more junior people you were helping out.
The expectation of demonstrating leadership is generally lower for more junior members (often replaced by an emphasis on how effectively can you ramp up in new areas) but it’s a great opportunity to show potential for solid team players. For more senior team members, the expectation around informal leadership continues to grow. Hiring managers want to make sure they’re bringing on people who can help the whole team grow.
ACTION: Informal leadership can take many different forms, so lean into a scenario where you helped someone become successful in their work!
Watch Out For: If you’re having a hard time answering this because of limited experience, try not to panic. Consider if you were new to a team, how might you help new members joining the team after you? How could you help them become effective faster based on what you’ve learned so far?
Try to watch out for making it sound like mentoring others was a burden on you. We all know that as software engineers we love to code and we love to focus on getting our work done — but we can help an entire team become more productive by mentoring others.
ACTION: Remember that mentoring others shouldn’t come across as a burden, rather an opportunity you took to help others improve
Closing Thoughts
Hopefully these examples give you some ideas to think through when you go to practice. And remember, you should be practicing! Interviewing is just like any skill, so putting time and effort into it will make a big difference in your ability to perform during your interviews.
I highly recommend you try to consider what the goal of behavioral interview questions is rather than just jumping into explaining the details of a scenario or the product/service you were working on. If these details aren’t going to help communicate what an interviewer is hoping to get out of it, it might be wasted time.
If you found this helpful, remember that we’re launching our behavioral interview course soon! You can register for a special discount here: https://tinyurl.com/y9yjmc86
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Weekly Recap
Test Driven Development & Developer Advocacy – Interview With Gui Ferreira
You’re not a real developer unless you do TDD.
Guilherme Ferreira is a TDD expert — but no, not even he would tell you this.
In our chat together, we covered a lot of ground. It was great to sit down with a fellow Dometrain course author to go over:
Huge thanks to Gui for the talk, and I’d love to do more in the future!
Overcoming My Biggest Fears In My Career – Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA
Want to know my biggest fear?
Spiders.
But my second biggest fear is being complacent. Getting too comfortable.
The problem is… it’s easy to get comfortable.
I am still to this day trying to convince myself that:
Let’s talk about why we should and how we can take on new challenges — putting us right back to beginner mode.
This stream focused on:
Combining Collections in C# – LINQ Zip and MoreLINQ Zip Methods
What’s one of the most common ways we combine collections?
Something like appending or concatenating — pretty typical.
But what about when you want to combine two or more sets of data item by item? What if it’s not sequentially but in parallel to the other collections?
This operation is known as Zip in LINQ and in this video we’ll dive into how it works and what we have access to in MoreLINQ!
Developing For Feature vs Platform Teams – Interview With Gaurav Rohatgi
Have you worked in feature teams developing products for end users?
What about working on a platform team where your customers are the ones building on top of your infrastructure?
In this interview, Gaurav Rohatgi discussed these topics in depth with me.
We went over his career journey with an EXCITING pivotal moment and then got right into what it’s like to work on these different types of teams.
Thanks for the great discussion, Gaurav!
Does MoreLINQ Zip Outperform LINQ Zip? Let’s Benchmark Them!
A duel between two methods for zipping collections in CSharp!
But a challenger approaches:
Our very own naive implementation of LINQ Zip!
In this video, I’ll walk through the BenchmarkDotNet benchmarks to compare the LINQ zip method and MoreLINQ ZipShortest and ZipLongest methods. We’ll even see how my naive implementation does against these!
Buckle up and get ready to see how optimized my code is!
Spoiler Alert: It’s not.
More Spoiler Alert: You’ll still be surprised.
As always, thanks so much for your support! I hope you enjoyed this issue, and I’ll see you next week.
Nick “Dev Leader” Cosentino
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Software Developer internetapplications.ca
3 周The only interview question you need .. is the getter joke ?? :D