Behavioral Question Challenges

Aug 15, 2019 13 Comments

Hey guys, As I am preparing for a facebook behavioral interview, I have prepared a response for the question - How do you tackle challenges? Name a difficult challenge you faced while working on a project, how you overcame it, and what you learned.

Situation, Task: When the product X was in a development phase, I was assigned to build a end-to-end Y feature. I had previous experience working with implementing the client side of Y. However, I had never worked on a server side Y feature before and did not get a chance to tackle associated problems.
Action:
The first action that I took was to identify the challenges associated with a real-life Y feature. Next, I tried to ramp up with the network architecture and broke it down to different logical blocks. With this information, I presented a High level Design to the team.
Result:
There were multiple back and forth exchange of ideas with the team and finalized the design. Having followed a structured step by step process, I was able to implement and deploy the feature in the following week addressing all the potential issues. I found this a very good learning and challenging experience.

As a response to this, I am expecting interviewer to drill through the project and the various aspects of it.
Do I need to give more technical details or focus on personal traits like communication and problem-solving?
Are interviewers expecting a more complex challenge from a senior engineer? Is this example not good enough?

YOE: 9
TC : 230K

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TOP 13 Comments
  • Uber
    bumbm

    Go to company page Uber

    bumbm
    I think what you presented seems very generic in a way I can’t really separate you from any other candidate, it almost feels like you are saying what I want to hear. Also as engineers we are often in situations where we have to learn something new - it’s not a challenge but part of the job, so i would be thinking how are you stretching beyond your responsibilities here.
    Aug 15, 2019 4
  • @bumbun good feedback. I assume you are interviewer. So could you let us know what you would like to hear may be with an example ? Thanks
    Aug 15, 2019 7
    • Challenges
      In one of my previous roles, I was looking into our error rates using x. I noticed more than 20% of our errors were caused from the x module. When I investigated further, I realized that the way our x module had originally been set up, any object in the app could write to the shared instance of x module. At the same time, I was also reading the x objects from another thread to send data to server. This caused inconsistencies in the code and caused crashes.
      I came up with a fix which required two main steps. Refactoring the code so that the objects dependencies with the x modules were properly managed using factory methods. Secondly, I synchronized the consumers of the x module using different thread synchronization techniques.
      Once this was implemented, I saw a significant reduction in the original errors, making our overall error rate dip sharply. This also provided a better architecture design for these modules.
      Aug 21, 2019
    • @bumbm how is this response ☝️
      Aug 21, 2019