I haven’t done many interviews and maybe my stories are weak but I don’t know. I fail miserably during behavioral rounds. For the life of me I can’t figure out how to answer precisely and eventually end up generalizing it. Is this simply a lack of practice? I usually fail on follow ups. Do you all have not great experiences as part of your stories as well? Do they also end with good outcome or they could be something that did not end well? What are the most common follow ups you all prepare for? #swe #software #engineering
I feel like I really excel on these and I don’t prepare at all. I don’t know how haha. I mostly think about what I did and what was challenging and use some amount of humor and thoughtfulness about any people I worked with that “made things difficult” etc. I’m super into psychology and honestly if I could do things over again I would love to be a couples counselor or like therapist for startup founders etc so maybe that’s why it comes naturally to me to be “fair” to both sides - not that I even have any horror stories but you know It is hard to say why the behavioral rounds are the difficult issue for you. Have you ever gotten feedback that is why you’re rejected or any specific feedback on those rounds?
Come up with made up stories, nobody has perfect stories. Or it may have happened with someone else in your team use it :) don’t fret about it
You fail on follow ups because you fail on driving the key points in the initial telling. If you do the initial story well, there are few follow ups. Think STAR or SBI model
Yeah, I have my stories based on STAR model or at least I try to follow that
Likely isn't hitting all the cultural cues they are looking for. Go read the company's page and pull out culture values they claim and they should be trying to test for.those. make sure.your stories project what they're looking for in terms of.culture fit and role
Prepare ahead for made up stories. All interviews are BS because what you interview is totally different from what you gonna do at work. So you have to makeup your own stories for interviews. If you are not a good story teller, memorize the lines 4 or 5 times and then say it to yourself in the mirror. Practice practice practice. If still you cannot make it that blame it on luck factor.
This is correct. Don't listen to anyone here saying JuSt bE nORmAl. No, that's the opposite of the point of these interviews. Think of it as like a leetcode interview but they're testing your ability to read between the lines and navigate undefined territory/the implicits of the industry. Watch "A life engineered" YT channel, he has good content on this. Google or chatgpt for a set of maybe 20+ behavioral standard questions. Prepare answers. Practice with someone becaue even if you wrote down the story, it's hard to convey in a nice presentable way that gets the message across. Every time you have a behavioral interview, write down what you were asked. Prepare answers to those questions for future interviews. Repeat.
One more thing: I tend to struggle when interviewers pry deeper into questions, eg. "so did you lead this project? how many people were there? how did you resolve X issue? What was the result?" I have a bad habit of like pivoting at this stage and underselling everything even though i wrote it down to try to be more impressive. So I try to practice from this angle to counteract this bad habit. "Did you lead the project?" "YES. 6 engineers. We ran into X and Y but I worked with team Z to find a path forward that was inline with all the stakeholders." etc etc
I’m autistic and it’s hard for me too. I usually just come out and tell them that and sometimes ask for questions to be reframed to help me loosen up. It has not hindered me though
The key, and I think you’re onto this already, is to use specific examples that actually happened. So instead of “in a situation such as x I would y” go with “in this situation x I did y”. Easier said than done but like any skill you can improve.
There are two parts to doing well in behavioral interviews: * On the job, do you actually behave in the way they're looking for. * Do you properly convey your on-job behavior. One step to improvement is just actually confirming which is the issue. Sure some people communicate poorly, but often also the scope of your past work is too small or your own described actions under certain situations are sub-optimal. If you always knew your actions were "wrong" you'd either change your own behavior or not mention those particular mistakes.
Thank you for the great feedback
What should we do if our scope is / was small?
Just like leetcode to prep for the technical portion, practice is your friend here. Don't wing it, particularly if you know this is a weakness. You can find many STAR, interview questions online. Write down your answers to about 20 of them. Use very specific data points about what you accomplished and how. Then film yourself giving the answer. It will feel uncomfortable at first, but once you've done each answer a dozen times you'll get more comfortable. Then find a human to start doing it so it doesn't look like you're talking to a machine. Repeat until you are fluid. Generally having answers to about 20 possible questions will give you enough in storage that you can apply them to. Just about any other question you might be asked. With preparation will come competence and then confidence. But don't underestimate the work this will take if this is a weak area for you
One problem is it sounds you’re trying to tell a really good story instead of being genuine and telling *your* stories and sharing your experiences. If this is what’s happening then it can come off as a surface discussion and the interviewers can have difficulty getting a read on who you are and how you’ll fit into the team and the company. Try this, collect behavioral questions you were asked and find some on the internet and practice answering them. Don’t make things up, think about your experiences and answer honestly. This will give you more practice for interviews. When asked in an interview, take your time and pause to gather your thoughts.
I am being genuine. The problem is maybe not practicing enough or not thinking deep enough. But yeah there is something I am missing here Great point about collecting questions from past experiences and more from internet and practicing
Just behave like a human
Bold of you to assume a SWE is able to do that
Younger generations are really at a disadvantage in this regard due to the anti social nature of modern society. Back in the before times, people were able to understand what this means and it was just easy to be "normal" and sociable. Nowadays with the bizarre culture shifts and weirdness introduced into society along with the Covid anti-social policies and distrust and animosity introduced into society in general, it's much harder for people who were screwed by all that to just be a person anymore.