Behavior Questions

logicmojo.com

• How to showcase soft skills(Teamwork, Leadership skills, Adaptability, Decision Making etc) in interview
• Objective
• hiring right candidate, not just the technical.
• right fit for job. To predict future performance based on past performance in similar situation
• Are you easy to get along with
• Can you communicate effectively with different personalities
• Are you able to respond to situations that occur during work
• Are you able to adjust to changing work environments(Adaptability)
• Can you assist your coworker or team when needed
•  
• Give me an example of ...
• Tell me about a time when you..
•  have you ever ..
• what do you do when..
• Describe situation where
• To Test teamwork skills
• how you resolve conflict between team members, with cowokers, manager, clients
• tell me about a team project that you worked on 
• Leadership skills
• tell about time you took the lead in a team project. How did you handle it and what was the outcome
• Two import team members left your team right before the deadline for a big project. How would you approach
• Communication
• Handling challenging clients/customers
• Brainstorming sessions
• Adaptability
• Describe situations in which you were assigned new tasks. How did you adapt to this situation and what was the result.
• Manager suddenly informs you that the clients requirements have changed. 
• Decision Making
• 
  
• Amazon 14 Leadership Principal with examples
1. Customer Obsession
1. Basic functional needs with low latency & responsiveness
2. Ownership
1. Not just your model/your part when multiple integrations. When integration issue exists review diagnose and even if integration module
2. Take ownership and fix even if it is integration code
3. Invent and Simplify
   
1. Simple solution for complex problems
2. Use available apis instead of reinventing
4. Leaders are Right a Lot
1. Take decision at every level
2. eg: Mature product where mgmt is satisfied -> If bug exists, new engineer can take decision to prioritize and present to mgmt with data points
5. Learn and Be Curious
1. Be curious keep on improvising,
2. don't get used to technology
3. learn new technology. Don't get comfortable with technology
6. Hire and Develop the Best
1. Don't hold people back, but use their influence to maximize the potential of new engineers
2. Give opportunity to grow
7. Insist on the Higher Standards
1. Raise the bar of coding & designing standards
2. instead of manual testing -> go for automation, edge cases, 
8. Bias for Action
1. Speed matters in business. Speed matters than go deep
2. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking
9. Frugality
1. Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense. 
10. Dive Deep
1. When a P1 ticket comes. Mitigate the issue and unblock the customer rather than deep dive for RCA.
11. Earn Trust
1. Take blame for teams mistake. Accept responsibility for both good and bad
2. Treating others and their idea with respect
3. admit failures
4. Listening, communicating and delegating to help employees
12. Have Backbone. Disagree and Commit
1. Even if every one disagrees with you, but try to prove with all valid facts/data
13. Deliver Results
1. Deliver features on time with quality. Prioritize your deliverables. 
2. Deliver in any circumstances(even when some team members are not well, attrition, deliver irrespective of any situation)
14. Think Big
1. Design scalable and distributed systems
2. Should be managed to scale for billions of txns/users
3. It should work for most diverse situations
• How you will resolve conflict with team members in project
• Use SAR(Situation, Action & Result)
• Situation
• Explain situation rather blaming
• reasons
• Communication gap
• inappropriate tone
• diff interpretation
• diff expectation - listen to other party with out getting upset, talk separately, understand concerns/point of view
• Action
• willingness to communicate
• focus on fact and data instead of blaming other person
• Result
• Explain the outcome of the action against situation
• Say one is working on dual role. Along with working on your module you are communicating with higher mgmt on progress of feature
• due to other team co-worker - task is delayed
• talk to other engineer/mgmt.
• Found that the engineer is occupied with some other projects
• Work with respective manager and address root cause
• Result: Sprint planning/retrospective meeting - solved the issue
• ex2: disagreement over an idea -> project brainstorming session
• focus on fact and data
• ex3: integration projects
• Sit with coworkers & scrum master privately and resolve the issue
• ex4: conflict with manager on deadline
• Leads have insights into internal technical difficulties
• privately talk to manager, understand manager commitments to customer
• breakup tasks into backlog items and provide cost
• ex5: some engineers wants to use fancy features in DB
• not every one knows - learning curve
• Stability not established
• hence, lets make it simple
• so that we can plug any new engineer & meet deadline
• 
  
• How you handle situation, when you failed to deliver the project within project estimation timeline. most recent failure/biggest failure
• Failure could be "missing deadline", "failed to train your team members", "Bad Hire"
• What have you done & what is your learning
• Regression for addressing performance tuning. Add more conditions so that less % of customers are impacted
• Promotion min timeline of 2yrs
• Don't take literally. Discuss and brainstorm with other product owners.
• Too many ownership once I became Director. Taking lot of responsibility 
• Hiring froze and had to slog for almost 6 months.
• Understand the responsibility and work involved. 
• Negotiate better on timelines so that team doesn't slog too long
• Take calculated risks
• Effort estimations - consider reviewers, automation, presentations
• Ad hoc tasks calculation
• Devised a tracking system "Interruptions" to track the number of tasks and time being taken for it.
• It helped in better resource allocations
• Effort estimate
• IC5 estimates to IC2. Multiplier factor, leaves, reviews.
• Learning curve
• misc activities
• What skills would you like to improve
• AI ML, Kafka
• Networking skills, Contacts
• uncomfortable reaching out to unknown people at network events
• Mentoring & Presentation skills
• Presentation skills -> present to large audience standing on stage
• voice control and delivery
• Biggest Technical mistake you have done in your project 
• Mistake: Specific timeline when it happened: 3 integration teams along with our team. One team didn't do impact analysis. 240 suppliee site size
• learning, how you improved:  feature flag or optin enabled
• steps you took so that it doesn't repeat: 
• customers are impacted. Mitigated by datafix & disabling the feature for customer temporarily
• Learning: understand downstream integration and take ownership of it.
• avoid no man land issue
• Situation when you had solved a very difficult problem in project
• Give response based actual situation
• It shows actual experience. Show case problem solving and critical thinking skills under work pressure
• Problem/Situation/context: pdfJS
• how you approached: 
• action take: version increments, Operations to clean CDN, hand over to support
• Result/benefit: cost reduction? bandwidth saving?
• When you have taken initiative in a project
• Test competency. Not just take it but also deliver/complete
• It helps evaluating leadership, prioritization, dealing with ambiguity
• speak up and share ideas
• eg: multiple teams working on micro service projects
• Toi documents - covid
• play book for diagnosing the issue
• new joiner training program. onboarding and learning process for new joiners
• feature links with DoD
• Automation tests -> with recordings
• depenency on seniors is less
• It has become the process
• product owner can get complete control and visibility
•     1. self correction
  
       2. Architecture change?
       3. replaced sql db with nosql
       4. performance issues/latency issues
       5. replace open source library with Oracle library
• Most difficult task in recent past
• Spark removal
• Time when you have failed to meet customer deadline in project. Cannot deliver ontime
• Support to previous project(P1 bugs)
• Extra buffer time due to unplanned escalations, learning curve
• Train other engineers to avoid such situations
• lack of resources, using engineers with other skills on other project. Buffer for learning curve(UI vs backend engineers)
• miss deadline -> backport to customer branch by the time they upgrade
• What is your greatest achievement in a project
• Product management takes my input on functionality
• Campaign management -> monolity to microservice architecture and delivery
• new engineers with technical skills
• I took architect role and guided them
• unvalidated invoices -> proactive identification of customers havint issues
• irie -> 30% REDUCTION IN SR INFLOW
• 
  
• Time when you successfully meet the tight deadline of a project(worked under pressure)
• Lack of resources, budget, engineers, uncertain requirements from clients, poor planning
• Situation: Engineer suffered from serious illness(miscarriage). I didn't want to let down my manager. So, I took ownership. 
• Action: Extra hours to learn and understand the new module. What have they done. Prioritize the core features in the module. Took SAE team help for manual testing. 
• Result: Able to deliver the feature on time without impacting quality. 
• Tell me the time when you regret your decision in a project deliverables 
• Reasons
• Wrong estimates
• External dependency
• Less resources/lack of experienced engineers
• Interruptions
• Scope change
• what should be done
• communicate to client/manager
• update schedule in schedule char
• Deliver critical items - Front load them
• Borrow additional members from other teams
• Update process internally for specific release
• Create sheet that influence the factors.
• Manage to release the feature and perform RCA analysis
• Tell me the time when you regret your decision in a project deliverables 
• Never share a decision that could cost you the job
• Convince interviewer it will never happen again
• discuss how you addressed the problem
• Took lot of ownership without considering the resources
• Think of long term and complete view of ownership. Avoid team to place them under pressure
• learned in hardway
• balance between various things
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