Common Behavioral Interview Questions For Big Tech - Principal Software Engineering Manager AMA

usually takes a few seconds so just a moment usually it's Instagram that takes the longest to to kind of kick in here okay I see the feed coming through on a bunch of platforms um give me one more SEC here just want to move the chat around so I can actually read what's going on and one more thing with Tik Tok here I need to check it out but I just noticed that um the platform I use stream.io supports Tik Tok and I I don't know if I noticed this before but I've been running the Tik Tok Studio application for my desktop I absolutely hate it it's like does not feel like it's designed at all for for working on a Windows machine like the the actual windowing mechanism is Bonkers it's everything's weird about it so if I can get this through restream iio I'm definitely going to do that instead but there was like one minute before the Stream started and I was like ah I don't think I'm going to try setting it up to go live with that much time left so um wanted to say welcome thanks for joining folks if you can do me a favor uh say hi in the chat let me know that the chat is actually working I can see that there's folks from Twitter and twitch so far I do see people on Tik Tok joining as well so just say hi in the chat so I can see that make sure things are coming through I appreciate it uh I am watching uh the the shared chat which I need to turn on good reminder Nick good job cool so there is the shared chat I see Yo from ards on X thanks for joining thanks for letting me know the chat's working I do appreciate it um if you haven't been to my live streams before definitely want to remind folks like please feel free to like Drop questions in the chat like ask whatever you want I don't care if it's on topic or not I would much rather you ask questions and I spend time ask spend time answering your questions I'm not asking you questions back I'd rather be answering your questions than just you know kind of going through my uh my Spiel because uh I otherwise could just be recording YouTube videos and I'd rather have this be interactive and kind of uh you know answer questions for you so with that said the um the focus of today's conversation is going to be about behavioral interview questions um I usually do these streams and kind of reflect on my previous newsletter article uh oddly enough it seems like substack is down right now I don't know if it's just a me problem or not but if you do want to check it out again it might be down right now it is I'm just putting in the chat weekly. deev L.C that is the newsletter um if you're joining on different channels you might not see it I do see Eve has joined on Instagram good to see you thanks for joining man uh might not be something you love but it's good to good to see you uh so yeah I put the the the newsletter Link in the chat if you're on Instagram or Tik Tok it's not going to come through hello hello Eve uh so that is what I'm going to be going over it is about behavioral interviews and I'm going to remind folks that uh Ryan Murphy and I if you if you're on LinkedIn and you you know followed me from LinkedIn you might also know Ryan Murphy we're kind of uh teaming up to deliver a course on behavioral interviews in big Tech so we're excited to get that launched hopefully by the end of the month we're certainly on track for it which is great and then we figured that we'd try releasing some content ahead of time to try and get people uh familiarized with like the topics we're going to be going over so like I said this newsletter article and this live stream are going to be about uh behavioral interviews so I'm going to kick things off kind of go through like what behavioral interviews are why we do them kind of thing and uh like I said please feel free jump in the chat ask me questions uh if it has nothing to do with behavioral interviews that's totally cool as well uh I absolutely don't mind I would rather spend the time answering your questions so with that said um behavioral interviews right so when we're talking about software engineering I think you many people have probably noticed that when people are trying to prepare to become a software engineer the focus is always on technical things right right if you're you might be one of these people who's aspiring to be a software engineer maybe you are a person who is online or uh you're helping out other software Engineers trying to um kind of get into the industry the most common types of questions are like you know what's the best programming language what's the best tech stack how do I like what's the shortcut for becoming a good software engineer it's always about technical things people are always focused on what is the technical thing that I need to focus focus on and I feel like the reality is that you have so many opportunities to be learning and practicing technical things that unfortunately a lot of people forget that there are other sets of skills and other Focus areas that you need to be good at and it's not just writing code so I'll say that again software engineering is not just writing code I know some people don't like to hear it because as software Engineers we love to write code and there's nothing wrong with that you do want to be good at writing code there's nothing wrong with that but you need to make sure that you have other skill sets so why we do behavioral interviews for Tech roles is because we are focused on those other skill sets right so it's pretty typical in a big tech company and this isn't just limited to Big Tech it's just kind of like the framing that I'm going to be going over is primarily because big Tech has a much more like common structure I would say across bigger tech companies and usually what you'll find and I'm going to kind of explain how this might vary from rooll to roll in level to level but you will have some type of like coding interview you will have behavioral interviews and you may or may not have like system design interviews so most people are probably familiar with the concept of a coding interview and this is where you'll have questions and and unfortunately kind of like leite code I'm not a huge fan of this style of question but I feel like it's very common in big Tech but these are the types of interviews and stuff that people are seemingly are the only ones people are thinking about it's like how do I make sure that I can find the trick in these problems and answer these coding questions it's going to be like your your coding interview uh I am finding and I'm still hopeful that more companies will move away from sort of lead code style questions that aim to get you to solve the question with like a trick for the optimization cuz I don't think that's great I am seeing more movement away from that which is nice um but I I think there's a long way to go so you get coding questions like that you will get uh system design questions where this is generally more where we're talking about like distributed systems and what that will look like is being able to have generally like an open-ended system that someone wants you to build so they'll say something like make me a um an Instagram clone so I want to be able to have a website where people can upload and post pictures and have like a news feed uh or I want a ticketing system built where people can go online and purchase tickets for concerts or like you know whatever system it might happen to be and generally you can think about big systems that already exist and try to model things after that like how does Uber work how does Twitter work how does Netflix work like all these different types of things because they have very interesting sort of design decisions that you have to make given the scale of them so you have those two types of questions plus behavioral interview questions now what I would say is that uh for sort of like a midlevel role and and up you would expect to have all three at a more Junior role um you may not have smaller sorry smaller at a more Junior role you may not have uh system design questions I don't know why I said smaller of all the words it doesn't even fit in at all you you may not have system design questions because you might not have experience doing that it's kind of like if you're brand new to it it would be weird to kind of test you on it if we're not expecting that you have that skill set but sometimes you still might get a more basic question to to try and navigate it um and thank you on LinkedIn for the congrats on the course launch for some reason the chat name isn't coming through so I'm just going to see if I can refresh on my side and see a comment coming through uh oh that's from Taha awesome um actually it looks like from from two people that's so weird on LinkedIn it shows two comments Taha is from two days ago and Elena uh is from like a minute ago so I don't know what's going on with the chat I can't see the name so um thank you uh and I appreciate the congrats on that so more Junior folks generally won't get system design questions just because it's not something that you're necessarily expected to know but the more senior you become you get more and more of those and if your role is different so for me as an engineering manager the focus for me was uh like one coding question and sometimes none uh most places were still trying to give me one to make sure that I was technical which is weird I don't program at work program every day outside of work and then more system design questions and um and more uh like behavioral interview questions I think when I was interviewing at Amazon I think almost all of my questions were just behavioral I don't even know I didn't have coding and I don't even think they gave me a system design question could be wrong I can't remember now but uh certainly extremely heavy on the behavioral interview questions now we're trying to focus on behavioral interview questions because we think that there is a big gap in the sort sort of availability of information or at least how much people are promoting this type of content and it's extremely important because you're going to have behavioral interview questions regardless of the level regardless of the role and as you become more senior I think there's a higher expectation on these behavioral interview questions because you're expected to have more experiences interacting with people so um that's going to bring me kind of like the last part of the why behavioral interview questions and it's honestly because like I said in the beginning of this the focus in software engineering is not just writing code so behavioral interview questions are going to focus on usually what we're kind of seeing is like key competencies or like values that companies have and you can find these published in a lot of places right so like Amazon has their leadership principles they have like 400 different leadership principles I'm exaggerating a little bit but these are a lot of the sort of the traits that they're looking for and they want um you know in their culture they want people to embody these things so they test for them in their interview process Microsoft has some Google Facebook every company that's at least the larger ones will have them and have them published and even smaller companies maybe they don't have their um their key competencies and their core values published in the same way but they will have these types of things as part of their culture they will have them as part part of their company these are the things they want employees to have so as they're hiring people they want to make sure that they're finding people that align with those things so for example like one key competency that's very common across companies is customer focus right they want to make sure that people are looking into this kind of thing they have this lens where they can try to make sure that they're building software for the customer how do that how does that look how do they test for that and if you if you were someone that like just seemingly didn't care about it or had zero experience and couldn't kind of navigate the interview around it a company might say well this doesn't feel like a good fit because it clearly seems like this person doesn't you know acknowledge that customer focus is important or they have zero experience with it and it seems like from what we gauge like it's not going to be a good fit as a result of that so they're testing for things that they are interested in you embodying so hopefully that makes sense uh again if you have any questions as I'm going through this or you have comments if you've seen things work a different way please jump into the chat feel free to be interactive um I will say that Twitter is usually the audience that is dominating the chat so if you're on a different platform and you want to prove that you are better than the Twitter or ex people just send more messages than them and show them who's boss I would say a close second is generally twitch um I find that twitch folks come in a little bit later but when they come in they're usually keeping up with the Twitter people um LinkedIn LinkedIn used to be pretty strong but I find I don't get a lot of people from LinkedIn coming anymore and I feel like it's because LinkedIn is like they don't uh unless you're a Creator there we go twitch gang infected FPS welcome um I feel like on LinkedIn they stopped promoting like my lives which is super weird so I'm going to pause for just a second on the the behavioral stuff if you're not a content creator this might not be like an obvious thing uh it doesn't really matter how many followers you have but just for the numbers on LinkedIn I have 17,000 people that follow me and if I make a post a lot of the time I'm not even getting like a thousand Impressions on a post so it's not even going to like what is that like it's just over 5% of my audience maybe maybe and when I post a link in event I get like 100 to 200 Impressions which is totally Bonkers because these platforms want to keep you on them so if you put a link in your post they generally limit The Impressions they don't want people to see links click and go off the platform I am literally putting an event on the platform and trying to attract people to it and they don't give me impressions for it so it's completely Bonkers um I don't understand it but anyway I feel like that's why the LinkedIn crew is um kind of dwindling compared to when I first started these I used to get like most of my audience from LinkedIn but now I feel like people don't even see them on LinkedIn so twitch gang is here Mr Cammy thanks for joining from YouTube I appreciate it um yeah rough time slot I know this is probably the only slot that works for me like regularly so it's 9 o' on a in Pacific and I get that um I don't know if there's going to be a good Eastern Time unless I do the morning um and lately when I do coding live streams in the morning it's supposed to be like 7:00 a.m. tomorrow um I've been doing CrossFit in the morning so now that's kind of screwed things up so I need to find like and whatever tomorrow was supposed to be the day but I I literally couldn't sleep properly last night so I had to skip the gym today and then I have to go tomorrow because I have other stuff going on this week so anyway I got to find a better slot to add in uh but this is probably not changing unfortunately so I apologies for the East Coast peeps but I got to find something that works okay so um before I get into some of the example questions I want to remind people I shared this on a stream before this is totally free um so just a heads up I'm going to put this into the chat and uh if you don't want to click the link or whatever if you just go to products. D.C it's literally completely free uh so if it it think when you go through gumroad it will say hey like do you want to you know name your price you can put 0 into this and like I recommend you do because you can pay Z the link that I put is a um it's just a PDF to a bunch of example behavioral interview questions and there's prompts that you can use with chat GPT or anything else and just generate more questions to practice with so um I put it together because I'm not trying to to say like hey look like this is so Advanced like you you need my resource to do it I'm doing it because you can literally just use AI to give you example questions and I'm just trying to prove how simple it is so totally free if you check out that link or go to products. Dev leader.com Road it's just how it works you can put in Z please don't pay anything for it I want you to take it for free then I want you to take The Prompt and then I want you to change it I want you to change it so you can tailor behavioral interview questions for your situation and I'm seeing on Instagram uh from kav joined in parallel to my morning stand up meeting awesome well welcome thanks for joining I appreciate that that's super cool um pay attention to your standup that's important I don't want to distract you but um yeah once you're done with that make sure you're you're tuning in here um jumping back over to chat is C used more in Europe or Middle East zones um honestly ly I know there's a ton of people that you see sharp in in Europe uh like I don't have stats on it and I'm sure there are stats somewhere um that someone could dig up I don't have knowledge of it but I do know there's a lot of net and C content creators that come out of uh the UK uh and Europe in general so uh I think that there is a lot of usage there um volume wise though like I I mean maybe in the US just because of population there's a lot um I do know that uh especially I Well India has a very large population in general so I I can't say comparatively to other programming language but I I feel like uh India for sure I have a lot of people that uh get in touch for C and stuff so um I don't know like if you if your question is like Europe versus Middle East or India or other countries um I don't think I have many people that contact me from from China or anything um so I actually I don't know if one is more than the other but I do know that there is a ton in Europe so kind of curious but I don't know if anyone has answers to that um LinkedIn user what's going on with my chat let me jump back over to LinkedIn on my other tab here because I want to address you I'm sorry that it's not coming through give me one sec it's refreshing um oh from Meena as well okay I'm actively searching for jobs but I'm not getting any interviews what should I do to improve my chances okay step one latterly doio um so John Vander is awesome he has a lot of information uh for this kind of thing and it's very data driven uh I I just I love shutting out John because he does an awesome job uh and I say awesome because he backs up literally everything with data he's got a PhD in economics and I think that he just leans into that super hard and it's like it drives his like need to have data for things so um I'd recommend checking out his content and uh tune into what he has to say CU he can give you some solid guidance that's backed by data mine is backed by my opinion and my experience but I can't necessarily say that my opinion is going to be applicable everywhere so uh searching for jobs but not getting any interviews so uh channeling John here John literally suggests applying to 80 jobs per week that's not you didn't hear that wrong like 80 80 jobs per week uh which is probably more volume than anyone is expecting so his recommendation is 80 he says for that a couple reasons one is that if you need to be sort of doing some like tuning of your resume to see how things are working like AB testing you almost don't get enough signal to know what's working versus not so that's one thing um the other thing is like aside term just volume you want to make sure that you are networking on top of that because um you can be doing more uh targeted Outreach you know connecting truly networking not just messaging people and the first message is hey can you refer me because that doesn't really work well so I would highly recommend uh you know having conversations with people getting engaged and just literally having genuine interactions that path is a lot longer term it's more work it's a bigger investment but I can imagine that longer term you will build better relationships for potential jobs so volume networking and then I think ultimately you have to consider that given how much competition there is you need to find ways that make you look different so just as an example and I'm not trying to pick on languages or Frameworks here like a lot of people are learning JavaScript in front end and there's nothing nothing wrong with that but if you and a million other people say that I'm learning JavaScript and frontend and HTML and CSS and there is nothing that looks different from a million other people like literally just by statistics you'll probably get lost in the noise and then it feels a lot more randomized so nothing wrong with those things that's not what I'm saying but you want to find ways to stand out amongst those people so you need to be thinking okay if I'm a recruiter and I'm going through resumes or I'm a hiring manager going through rumes what's going to stand out if I imagine that I'm seeing tons of resumés that look very similar what things stand out to me so I don't necessarily think that it means oh you must have like a a master's or a PhD I think those days are kind of I want to say they over um does it help sure maybe that's nice but I think my opinion I like just seeing that people are building stuff I don't mean that you have a business for it I had a bit of a debate with someone on this on LinkedIn I had more likes on a PO on a comment I got like A50 plus likes on a comment and my average post doesn't even see 10 so I mean good for this guy for having good visibility on his post but um I basically said in response to his post I don't think that when you making uh stuff for your resume and like you want to learn how to program and stuff I don't think you need to be demonstrating that you're running a business his point was like uh people only get hired if they they can demonstrate business value and personally I kind of say bull crap um like to be honest I'm not looking for someone who's like they're running their own business like that's cool that's great I'm just more interested that people are learning so like demonstrate to me that you're building things and learning uh if you're eager to learn you like to problem solve and you can showcase that to me personally that's more important because I don't expect you to go solving all of our business problems but I do expect that I can teach you about the domain the business needs and that you will pick that up fast that's all so hopefully that helps for some advice it's not perfect but hopefully it's helpful uh is freelancing good for making money um yeah if you can get jobs uh I think there's a handful of people on on LinkedIn uh why can't I remember his name uh sorry his his handle William Ray uh is it it's not that I can't remember his YouTube handle it's going to really bother me um so William Ray uh you can probably search him on YouTube too I think he's got way more subscribers than me now after doing it for a very short period of time but uh will um will was searching for a job and kind of you know I don't want to say struggling because that makes it sound like he wasn't doing a good job or something but uh someone's saying where is sound is there no sound on Instagram there should be sound um I don't know maybe they're muted on their phone um so yeah Will was kind of like hunting for a job and kind of you know I don't want to say killing time but like will was basically saying awesome thanks Archangel I'm I'm glad that that worked and Glory 159 excellent excellent um so will was like okay like I got to keep busy I got to keep building my portfolio I got to keep searching for jobs and then he just started Ed Landing freelance jobs and then realized I don't need to go get hired by someone I can just freelance so now he's trying to share information for other people how to freelance like it's totally doable um so it's a different set of skills it's an entirely different set of skills and the reason I say that and I just want to be transparent about it um I've been programming for 21 years been managing teams for 12 years like if so someone gave me a technical problem to go solve I can probably build software for it and I don't say that to be cocky I just mean like I've been around it for a while I can probably do it but if I wanted to go out and try to get customers on my own I think I would struggle like crazy because I am not good at being a salesperson uh doesn't mean that I couldn't learn it but it's not a skill set that I currently have so I would have a very difficult time I think for will uh I don't know how much experience he had before doing that but that's something that he's been able to um Mr C scun yeah boom uh no uh but will I think kind of had this skill set ahead of time um or or discovered that he had it in him which is awesome uh for me it's very unnatural I feel uncomfortable doing it so I need to work on that kind of thing so uh even as I'm building brand ghost which is my SAS on the side for for social media content uh I have a difficult time pitching it to people it's be I don't it feels pushy to me it feels kind of gross it's uncomfortable but I need to get better at it so for freelancing I think you need to have that skill as well um infected FPS oh so back to an earlier point about standing out even little things like using angular over react help helped me with my last time interviewing a few years ago yeah it's so finding ways to stand out can help in general so seems kind of weird like obviously you want to have skill sets that are like people are looking for but I would say like if you if you know if you know um JavaScript you can figure out typescript right so okay focus on typescript or if you can do react like can you do angular probably right so the text stack you can move between but being able to have some experience with these like peripheral stacks and putting them on your resume and Building Things on them and just being exposed to them can just help different iate you which is pretty cool so hopefully that helps okay so shared the free resources I wanted to go through a couple of questions um that I just I put in the newsletter uh if you do check out that PDF again uh if you go to products. deev leader.com the price is0 so don't pay um the questions that I have for my uh my newsletter I just cherry-picked a couple of them so I could write about them and kind of give you some perspective on like okay what is the question why are we asking that type of question what can you try to focus on things like that so the first one that I picked was from like a teamworking collaboration key competency and again going back to what I said earlier a lot of these bigger tech companies and companies in General have key competencies that they focus on so teamwork and collaboration if you were to generalize from a bunch of different companies teamwork and collaboration generally shows up and why does it show up any ideas because software is built by ourselves no it's built in teams right so we build software in teams maybe not if you're freelancing interestingly enough right so maybe maybe you don't you don't need teamworking collaboration you probably need to collaborate with your uh your stakeholder a little bit though which is maybe on the communication front but anyway teamworking collaboration is a huge one uh it's very difficult to do well in your career as a software engineer if you are not collaborating with others because seemingly you won't be able to get any work done maybe in the very beginning because you can at least just put your head down and get some some you know work items done but very quickly you'll notice that it's a it's not a good strategy so the question I wrote as an example was describe a time when you had to work closely with a team to complete a project what was your role so the the points I wrote down about this one um so you can think about this from a couple of different angles right so describe a time when you had to work closely with a team to complete a project so if you were more Junior as an example might have been doing some work on your team and you had to go partner up with another team if you're more a junior some of the work that needed to get done might already be figured out and someone's kind of uh split up some tasks and you're you're assigned those but and you're kind of you know working alongside a partner team if you're more senior maybe you are the person who is doing more of the coordinating with the partner team and helping split up some of the work and kind of leading it from your side right so this could look very different uh depending on how you want to answer it um but it's going to depend on a bunch of things right so like if you have a very small company you might not not even have this opportunity which is okay um so not a huge deal but this framing for this question is trying to focus on a handful of things right so how do you communicate just general operations right so your status updates things like if you have blocking issues how does that come up uh clarifying questions so if you're working with another team and something's not obvious there's ambiguity like do we just guess do we say well we don't know but we're going to do our best effort right like probably not um you probably want to be able to service these types of things so um I'm going to go through a couple of these points right but I want you to be thinking about this is what the interviewer is trying to get out of you when you answer this question right all behavioral interview questions have a goal or they should if they don't have a goal then maybe it's not a good question but the interviewer is trying to extract information from you they're trying to learn from you and your experiences so in this case like I said they want to understand how you navigate like status updates and just general like operations right um so good opportunity to be able to figure out depending on other questions they might have asked how does this change when you're working with your team versus another team right so especially if you're becoming more senior so not just a junior engineer but you're starting to have more exposure working with other teams do things change for you when you have to start partnering with other teams are you in a position now where you're outside of your comfort zone and suddenly it's too difficult you can't really get Buy in from people um you can't seem to find the right uh you know subject matter expert to communicate with these things might be more challenging when you go outside of your team um how do you work with different roles levels personality types all these things so you can highlight some of these things when you're answering because this is an opportunity for the interviewer to learn this about you I don't know if I sound very Canadian do I do I sound Canadian when I say about I've heard every American that I've talked to since coming to the US they go oh yeah I knew you were a Canadian you said about I think they're hearing a boot but I don't say a boot but yeah I'm very curious if you're watching this let me know if uh if I sound Canadian or if that's that sounds like a normal about how else would you say it it's a it's an ouu sound that makes an out sound anyway um when you're working with different teams you may be exposed to different roles and like levels personality types like I said so perhaps on your team um you're you don't work close see with a PM just as an example but when you're coordinating with the other team they bring in a PM to be able to help coordinate some of these things again I'm just kind of making this up uh the scenario but that might be a new role for you to interact with or maybe there's someone who has to do some type of external Communications and you're coordinating with them maybe you have to work with their engineering manager and that's a whole different role that you're not used to interacting with outside of your own Em Right so um these are you know just different things to consider and an interviewer is looking for you to be able to talk about these different types of experiences um Richard hi am 30 minutes behind watching at 1.5x hope to catch up before you end that means I got to start talking at Double speed now um so and Darren Lee sounds good to me awesome awesome a I don't know what that's all about uh Glory 159 on Instagram so the Instagram CH doesn't come through so I apologize to folks uh I wish restream made that work and they don't but uh Glory 159 says for big Tech I recommend prompting Behavior questions that align directly with their leadership principles yes yes yes and practice answer in the star methods 100% yes so um the if you check out that PDF that has the AI prompt and you can you can write your own there's nothing special about the prompt I used I'm not trying to I'm not giving you selling you free steak oil about my my prompt engineering skills but literally um if you pick a company right if you go find their key competencies or like like Amazon has their leadership principles go take those off the site put them into chat gbt or whatever other llm you want to use and then say like give me 20 example behavioral interview questions based on these leadership principles and then indicate like you know if you're familiar with prompting you want to be like spefic specific so I am a you know aspiring engineer hoping for my first role and then that way the llm might give you questions better Geared for that if you're more a senior you're an engineering manager a product or project manager just tailor tailor what you want out of the llm but uh yeah great uh advice from Glory 159 uh and the star method so I don't know I think I talked about this uh two streams ago um we talk about it in our course as well uh that'll be launching on dome train but uh like we didn't invent star anything I'm not trying to not trying to say that but uh as a as a guideline for how you can approach answering questions because if you're anything like me you ramble and I've interviewed people and it's very common where just to give you an example if I go back to the question I asked and it was describe a time when you had to work closely with a team to complete a project what was your role generally what I see people do and I'm not making fun of anyone for this cuz it's just very common is that people start they forget what the goal of the question is okay and that's common because they're just trying to think of a scenario how do I answer this and you're stressed like it's not a natural thing it's okay you got to practice these things but what'll happen is they go okay well when did I work with a team okay I worked with a team on this project okay what was the project let me just explain okay well I worked with this team we were building a a desktop software and I was responsible for working on part of the user interface and what this product did was that it was going to take orders from the customer and then we were going to send it over here and then we had to do this thing and I had to write these tests and your interviewer is going cool but like all they wanted to know was like they they have a goal with the question they're trying to figure out how you're interacting with your different teammates this other team what does this look like how do you communicate so using something like the star method just helps you get focused right so uh you can literally just Google Star method there are other variations of the star method uh to be able to sort of frame up and keep you on track with what you're trying to answer so I like using the star method at least as a guiding principle in our course we talk about this idea that when you're trying to do all of this practice for your behavioral interviews the one thing that you don't want to lose like you don't want to become a robot which sounds kind of funny but like you want to be able to practice you want to make sure you can use things like the star method to keep you on track but not at the expense of being like I can't be me anymore because it'll be obvious like if you're having a conversation with someone and the whole thing seems like it's rehearsed your interview is going to be like what's wrong with this person like why is this so weird you still need to be a person so um I get it I am not comfortable interviewing I get anxiety I talk fast I ramble like interviewing is not easy for me just like writing exams in University isn't was not easy for me it's it feels very artificial but I I do think that the more you practice the more you use things like the star method the better off you'll be so thank you for that Glory 159 um the other thing that I wanted to call out with this example question about like you know when you're partnering up with another team is um I wanted to call out some like things to watch out for I kind of gave you an example of one of these already was like giving just too much context and sort of chewing up all of your time to answer this question and not actually getting to the point that the interviewer cares about right so do keep in mind there is a goal with every question and probably for behavioral interview questions the goal is probably not to hear every detail about the cool product or service that you were building even if it is cool it's it's probably just not the goal of the question being asked so just a heads up uh something else to watch out for is uh being negative right so if you're talking through this applies to any of these questions but especially when we think about collaboration communication and things like that you can be put on the spot where someone will say like tell me about a time when you had to work with someone who was challenging right like that you don't want to start and stop with oh I worked with this team there's this guy Joe Joe was such a pain in the butt to work with never listen to anyone I hated working with Joe we never got anything done and honestly the project was delayed by four weeks I'm blaming Joe for it cuz he sucked so much and we couldn't couldn't work with them and yeah I hope I never work with another Joe like that's not good I'm sorry if you had a bad experience with Joe and I'm sorry if anyone watching this is named Joe I'm not trying to pick on you but the if you have situations like that you don't want to spend your time with your interviewer just badmouthing people or talking about something that it was purely negative you can take any bad situation and literally just focus on the positive Parts which could would just be the things you learned and the things that you started applying after and all of the results you started seeing right you can very much limit the negative interaction so if you were working with a team and it wasn't great and the project was going off course you don't have to say they sucked it's their fault you could say we were working on this project things started to get behind schedule and here's how I identified it here's what I did to help chorus correct it and here is the result result that it had in the end suddenly that was a bad experience that went to being a very good thing to talk about because there's lots of awesome things that you were able to do because of that so just something to watch out for okay uh next question that I had in the newsletter and by the way I'm thinking I might only go to 10 tonight which is another 20 minutes or so but we'll see if there's more questions and stuff I'm good for it uh but because I missed the gym this morning and I have to wake up at 5: in the morning to go to CrossFit I don't know why I shouldn't have started CrossFit um but uh yeah I I'll stay up if if there's questions and I'd rather answer your questions but in terms I usually try to go to Reddit after I get through this stuff probably not doing it so next question is on communication um so the question itself is describe a time when you had to explain a technical concept to a non-technical stakeholder and I like this question a lot um I like this because uh I've had experiences where I've like I've been the third party listening to people try to communicate things and you can you can like almost feel it in the conversation when people are trying to communicate like things to to different people and the other person is just not getting it and it's not the other person's fault for not getting it I think communic communication needs to be owned by the communicator you need to be aware of these things so um I wrote down for the goal of a question like this I said communication for software Engineers is like one of the most important skills you can have if you think about it in general writing code is a form of communication yes you are writing code to solve problems but guess what other people got to read that code you have to read that code in the future so you better hope that you're communicating it effectively we have to write emails read emails write design documents read design documents do poll requests we have to review poll requests we are always communicating always so when you have uh inefficiencies in communication or you're uh you have like communication errors it's like one of the most common ways that we have problems in software engineering because we're always communicating it only takes a little bit of a mess up to have like a cascading effect so it's incredibly important to be effective at communicating what I like about this question uh when we talk about uh technical Concepts to non-technical stakeholders is there was a ton of value in being able to understand the audience that you're speaking to and some people don't practice this I you know like in my case like one thing that I practice all the time is the fact that and like this is a bit of a selfish thing but I I I want you to think about it for a sec I make a lot of videos and I put them on YouTube right I am constantly practicing being able to explain something that does not seem as technical to me anymore because I've been practicing it to an audience that just might not get it and I expect that they don't get it that's why I make the video for them right so I'm constantly trying to practice how can I take something that I understand this technical concept and make it accessible for other people and you need to be doing this in your role as a software engineer all of the time um so I want you to think about that and you can take it in all sorts of different scenarios right because you might have a situation even talking with another technical person just let's walk through this example for a moment if you're let's go back to the first question which was you're working on something in software engineering across teams you might be a software engineer working with another software engineer on a different team they might be very technical just like you that's great but they might have zero domain knowledge about the thing that you're talking about they might have zero experience in your code base and if you started to work with them and try to communicate things to them you can't assume that they know those things they might not have ever seen your code right so you even if someone's Technic Tech you still need to figure out a way to explain Concepts to them but this problem compounds the further away someone is from your domain and the further away they are from your level of like technical expertise in the area so um just to give you another example because I think this one's very common I've heard many people talking about uh engineering managers I think this probably happens with product and project managers too but like I hear people complain online about the engineering managers like this guy doesn't know anything this girl doesn't know anything and like they basically don't have respect for them because their manager seemingly doesn't you know understand these technical things but some of these stories I'm like okay but did you try to communicate it at a different level and obviously from the other side the more Technical and engineering manager or any of these roles are the easier it is to kind of meet people at a level of communication everyone understands so back to this type of question though I think that it's incredibly important because it demonstrates that you have that ability to work with other people effectively because miscommunication is a huge problem so if you need to be collaborating with other people we already talked about collaboration how do you know the right way to communicate things to someone right how do you gauge your audience gauge like whether or not things are landing with them that's a really important thing to to do um and then the other thing is like how do you adjust that so if you're talking with someone I can give you a great example of this um and I I won't call out anyone's name or anything I've had an an a manager in the past I won't say what role or level or whatever they were or what company it was at I had a manager in the past and when I would talk to this person because they would ask me questions hey like how is you know this project coming along and i' give them some details on it and I could tell if I was getting too Technical and they want like they asked for the details but I'm starting to realize it's not exactly what they meant I could tell because this person they their eyes would start to literally gloss over and I could tell they were just like trying not to fall asleep in the conversation with me like I can see it on their face and I'm not insulted by it I mean maybe a little bit but like I think that they're just trying like this is just over my head so I'm looking for signals when I'm talking with someone to be able to figure out like are they asking me questions back like are they trying to are they saying oh like let me repeat that back to you like so you're saying XY and Z is true or did I did I understand correctly that we should be expecting this feature by X date like when people are doing these types of things um it's it tells me a little bit more clearly that they're following along when I see someone's eyes literally gloss over or I can tell people are trying to hold in yawns and they're like making faces like holding it in I'm like okay I'll pick up the pace I'll move things along or I'll change what I'm trying to say um because people like they're literally falling asleep it's crazy um so it's a good reminder to me okay this person needs communication a different way so yes I'm kind of teasing in this situation but my point Point here is like if you're aware of these things you can adjust your communication and I think it is your job as the communicator to pick up on these things and adjust your communication style I will say that I think it's important that both sides try to own some part of the communication but take some responsibility you can always adjust um yeah so Glory 159 on Instagram here saying communication is especially important to pass a recruiter phone screen and get invited to any onsite interview yeah because guess what odds are you're going to be well it depends on the company but you know phone screens are extremely common could you imagine if you were rambling on the phone and someone on the other end is like dude I have no idea what you're going off the rails about they're like I'm just I'm ready to hang up this phone and move on to the next one CU they just they're not getting the value that they need to extract from you they're not able to learn the information they're trying to get so again all of these questions have a goal in this case it's making sure that you can communicate I can't even communicate effectively can't speak they're trying to see that you can communicate effectively they're trying to see that you can understand your audience and sort of tailor the message that you're trying to give and uh I guess the second part to that was really just like being observant right and making sure that it does get adjusted so um kind of that's the Spiel there uh I do think that it's super important to get right um I'm just checking if there's any watch out fors that I wanted to call out um oh I think one of the the points I wanted to make about some of these is like I kind of talked about it earlier that you don't want to go off the rails just specifically talking about the technical details of a project or something in a behavioral interview question like yes provide the context but you don't need to be telling them about the unit test code you were writing online 152 and miss the semicolon like it's just it's too much detail so the other thing that I wanted to mention though is that even if you're not giving too much detail you want to try and pick stories from your experience that emphasize this type of thing so for example this question what did it say exactly uh describe a time you had to explain a technical concept to a non on technical stakeholder when an interviewer asking you this they they want you to if you can right provide evidence that you number one knew this person was a non-technical stakeholder number two that you knew that you had to adjust your Communication number three that you uh delivered it number four that you observed that the person understood right so they're looking to make sure in your story your communic this number five is even better and there's a variation of this question but it's like like tell me more about how that had a positive impact like your effective communication literally led to a positive impact so what my point here is is like when you're picking stories try to see if it's not only just you know answering with the scenario but it's emphasizing because you're trying to give them the information they're looking for with the question sorry I do repeat myself a lot and if you uh do check out courses that I create I literally say this in a small section in the beginning of every course I remind people that you will hear me repeat myself I will try to say it in different ways but people don't like to hear it but you need to hear it multiple times in different ways because a majority of people one time not enough some people it's totally enough and they're like why the heck does this guy repeat himself cuz I've seen I've seen YouTube comments I've seen people go dude like just move on like get on with it and I'm like look you're not the majority like other people got to hear it a bunch of times and got to put pictures and stuff up too it's just the way it is so sorry if uh sorry if you're annoyed by me repeating myself but deal with it um okay so the where was the last question I wanted to have leadership um so the question I put under leadership was describe a time when you provided guidance or mentorship to a junior team member and I like um like one of the things that really stands out for me in uh software development especially as people are becoming more senior is like I really personally look for a lot of informal leadership and mentorship and I do that because I'm a strong believer that if you just like over index on becoming more and more technical as a senior developer and you know moving beyond that that there is this huge missed opportunity to be leveling up the team around you so again just to kind of say it from like a team perspective I I strongly believe there is more value and trying to bring up the whole team with you then you just kind of doubling down on your own technical expertise and not not being in a position where you can level up those around you um I I think that you have a better multiplier effect when you do this it's not to say that you just give up on being technical or you never code again not what I'm saying but I think that there is a huge benefit to mentorship and informal leadership so uh with this question describe a time when you provide a guidance or mentorship to a junior team member if we back up and think like maybe you are a junior team member right so can you not like so maybe you can't answer this question then well not quite so you can always go outside of work scenarios so maybe maybe in boot camp or maybe in college or university school at some some part maybe there was someone who just happened to know less about a subject than you or had less experience in an area than you right how did you try to guide them through how did you give them mentorship going through through that so they struggled less so you help level them up through that okay maybe maybe you're new to A A Team okay and you've been there for a little bit whether you're junior or not like this still applies if you're junior say a team member joins after you they might even be more senior than you but the fact that they join the team after you they might have less experience with some of the team things so like you could talk about a time where you were trying to help someone that just on boarded to the team how did you make their learning experience goes smoother how did you make sure they had the resources they need even if it was you know what repositories and stuff to clone how to make sure that they had uh authentication for some of the tooling and stuff like that uh that you could Point them at the wiki pages that you you updated recently that were at a date like these are all things that you could be doing even as someone who is more Junior the more senior you are I think hopefully I would really hope that you have more and more examples to draw upon and what's cool about this is like I think when I'm asking questions like this like what am I trying to get out of this like how did you balance things right so if maybe something that doesn't look so great is if someone's like well say they're a senior engineer so well okay I'm a senior engineer on the team I'm responsible for these areas but we we added a lot of new people to the team and basically I couldn't write any more code or get any more work done because I was just was constantly just kind of like answering questions for people like to me that's not a great answer like yes I think it's nice that you were trying to help but like the thing that I expect the more senior someone's getting is that they're able to balance these things and again if you're trying to help people and constantly what's happening is you help someone and they just come back and they ask you more questions on repeat odds are you're just giving them answers and not teaching them right you're you're kind of creating the Vicious Cycle you're not teaching them to problem solve obviously there's different situations and context for all this but I want when I ask questions like this I'm trying to see that you could be proactive helping other people I'm trying to see that you could balance things properly and trying to see that you're helping promote problem solving with others and that genuinely you're helping level up those around you without being forced to do so by your manager ideally so that's kind of what looking for when I ask these types of things um you know as as a manager if I'm thinking about the team I'm trying to build I want to make sure I have people on the team that are helping level up the whole team what I really don't want to have is a team of just highlevel individual contributors that are just like in silos CU that's not a team that's just a bunch of individuals uh and it makes a huge difference makes makes a huge difference when you're trying to deliver stuff when people work together versus just a bunch of people working in silos as a heads up okay so what to watch out for um I kind of talked about a few of these already uh one of the things I wrote was like you know limited experience and I kind of touched on that at the beginning already um and I I just said that when you're communicating this stuff try not to um try not to to relay it like everyone is a burden to me like I I would have been such a great engineer if only it wasn't for this burden of of the new people or the junior Engineers it's not supposed to be a burden they're on your team you're all working together um yeah and then so this is a a really good comment from Glory 159 so they say in any question where you might be a uh my goodness I can't even read um in any question where you might be week remember to show your coach ability yes so um maybe to kind of close out on this thought right so some advice that I would try to impart upon you is like you can take any negative scenario literally any negative scenario and turn it into something positive you can uh as Glory 159 here is saying like if there is a weakness in something that you've done right like even if you had feedback in the past at like hey like this was challenging um like show how you were able to take uh feedback and that you were coachable and that you're driving all these positive uh changes as a result you're growing right so one of the things that we touch on in our course and I think I have the section for this because I've already recorded it so my mind is turning into jelly um I have a section in our course on behavioral interviews where I talk about like difficult questions and difficult questions can be a whole bunch of different things but there going to be questions where you're like oh crap like how am I going to answer this one and uh as Glory 159 is saying like when you have situations where it's like highlighting a weakness you can talk about coachability and then the other advice that I'm trying to give you here is that if it looks like a failure looks like a mistake looks like it's painting you in a bad light you don't need to hyperfocus on that and just like say yeah like I did this bad thing it really sucked and everyone hated me the end like no I so you could say I pushed up this feature and I didn't realize that I missed a test scenario and I ended up um causing a bug in production but uh I was proactive as soon as the monitors went off I took responsibility made sure it was reverted and then what was really cool about that is with the whole team we did a post incident review uh I led the um the five wise investigation and I came up with a couple of repair items and then something that was really awesome is that as a whole team we talked about different ways that we could uh look out for this type of thing on our poll requests right so something that was like an oh crap like this was a bad experience into look at all of the awesome things that I started doing as a result of this so when I hear an answer like that I'm not like oh forget everything you said man you broke the you broke prod you broke the build like what an idiot like no like the literally like every single one of us statistically will probably break something in a build or in production at some point so it's going to happen right um AIT Desai USA happiness index debt $36 trillion extreme poverty I don't know what this is in context to um so neat I guess uh there's no contact so anyway so folks I think that was all I had to kind of go over so uh what I like to do is before I sign off if there's any other questions and stuff like because there's a delay in the chat and what I'm saying please uh feel free to to write any questions I'll answer them before I sign off I'm going to do my little marketing kind of thing here so uh I like to jump over this is my newsletter article usually it's on substack but I think you'll notice if I go to weekly Dev leader CA this part worked but now it's working I look like an idiot now so this wasn't loading earlier um we do have our trailer if you want to see this is Ryan Murphy um so we had a little trailer for our course sorry Instagram folks this is going to be uh kind of crappy for you just because of the vertical video feed so I apologize but you can check out um everything that I was talking about in this issue uh every newsletter issue I also post like uh the Youtube videos and stuff I post through the week so for example every live stream does get posted up here in the weekly recap so you can check that out um the courses are going to be available on dome train so the behavioral interview one is there um for now I just have my C courses that are on dome train so the one I just launched recently was reflection in.net so if you are a c developer or want to learn car a bunch of courses here um I do have the getting started in Deep dive courses that I'm very proud of it's a it was a really cool opportunity to be able to build those for Dome train because um it's something that I think is super important and like again having I guess like having that uh that capability to like to be the person that can have the audience for the more Junior developers something I'm passionate about cuz I like teaching people that are trying to break into the industry um so the other thing to note is at the very top of this screen you'll see that there are back to school discount codes so uh pretty awesome so until the end of September you get huge discounts this isn't my site I don't get to ever pick when the discount codes come so they're live right now I would try to capitalize on that uh something else podcast that I have sorry I should have said flashbang warning I apologize I don't think there's a dark mode oh it's so bright um I do interviews on my YouTube channel as well um and those are with software Engineers uh from the industry there's uh I have an exciting one coming out on this Thursday they're all exciting I don't mean for that to sound like they're not um but I'm I have my interview with Ethan Evans going up who's an ex Amazon VP um he went viral the past couple weeks for posting a LinkedIn uh for making a LinkedIn post that basically had a hook that was along the lines of oh man what was it like like my I worked for a CEO that uh that that seduced my wife and he won so his post started off something like that I might have butchered it but it was it got a lot of views across a lot of platforms so I I really enjoyed our interview we didn't talk about any of that um but it was it was super enlightening that comes out on Thursday if you want to check that out that'll be on Spotify as well as my YouTube channel um I'm I'm just kind of going through a bunch of stuff that I'm doing so uh code commute is another YouTube channel I started this is me driving to and from work if you want to hang out with me it's not um it's not live so when I say hang out with me it's me just talking at you kind of like I'm doing right now so so if you do want to check that out that's awesome it's a good way to kill time if you don't want to listen to the podcast and finally the last thing I'll plug here is the uh the SAS that I am building called brand ghost so if you see my content Post online if you came here from Twitter or from uh Instagram or from LinkedIn uh all of my content is posted through uh my tool called brand Ghost and the goal of brand ghost is that it lets me focus on just creating content and I don't have to schedule my content every single week I haven't scheduled content in like over a year I just create content I put it into brand ghost and it publishes it to every platform which is sweet and it's uh it's works on a Cadence is how I would describe it versus a schedule so some people carve out some Sunday time when they schedule their post not this guy I just add the content and it goes so um I'm excited about this this is what I've been using uh myself and building it out so uh if you are interested in content creation this is an opportunity um just Richard Au Chimes back in just made it to the end at 2x W welcome welcome back to uh to the end sorry uh but yeah so for example if you are you're not a content cont Creator what we're finding is working really well for folks is if you have a small business so for example if you or your your your spouse your partner if you work in real estate or one of you is operating a small business we don't have time to go posting stuff on social media and run the business at the same time so brand ghost is really awesome you create the content you put it into brand ghost and it will run it on a Cadence for you to all of the platforms that you want you don't have to touch it you can spend time on your business and you can spend time engaging in the comments where you want to be building your network you don't want to spend time going and scheduling posts copying and pasting posts across platforms no one wants to do that we'll do it for you so I think that's it folks uh I did want to say thanks again for tuning in uh I see one question um from from 9 or I guess it's strong ninja I think is how it's supposed to look on Twitch what's the use of C so C is a uh general purpose programming language It Is by Microsoft Once Upon a Time uh designed to sort of replace Java it was the uh the Java replacement at Microsoft so it gets a it's always got a bad rep since the beginning because everyone loved Java everyone hates Microsoft because they're big and scary uh C Works across every platform so it works on Mac it works on Linux it works on Windows uh it is extremely performant despite what people want to believe there's lots of benchmarks proving that it's very fast uh it is a strongly typed objectoriented language uh there are text Stacks that allow you to build web applications very easily so asp.net core there is crossplatform uh mobile development with Boi there is a front-end framework called laser that's relatively new so lots of different options uh you can use it on embedded devices like it's there's lots of potential um to give you some context because people will say oh C's not that performant um I'll give you a little spoiler alert I work at Microsoft surprise um I work in Office 365 I work in the routing plane we serve trillions of requests per day we have C code that helps with the routing of those requests and I did say trillions with a TR so it is performant it does do the trick you don't have to be Microsoft to have a performance C code there's lots of people that write great C code so um I think that's all folks I hope that answers your question strong ninja uh Glory 159 thanks for tuning in on Instagram and participating in the chat I definitely appreciate it I will try to get the Eastern Time Zone streams going those ones will be live coding so probably not tomorrow I'm so sorry um and Darren Lee uh on YouTube enjoy your live streams and podcast while working thank you that's super cool I appreciate that um I know like obviously it's me talking at you folks and like you're not talking back to me so it's not quite a conversation but um I'm glad that I'm glad that I can be part of your day and I appreciate the the messages in the chat so um thanks again uh next Monday tune in and of course if I can get back to the the coding sessions next Tuesday Morning 7 a.m. PST is when I'm aiming to do it so