How do you handle feedback, especially when it’s critical or unexpected? Can you share an example of how you’ve used feedback to improve your performance?
- At my last job, I mostly was given the feedback that I was doing good and to continue doing what I was doing. But my manager had a very bad mindset and did not contribute at all.
- When I had a pretend performance review, my manager's manager told me that I got along with everyone, and told me to keep working on my technical skills. I thought that my technical skills were a lot better than my interpersonal skills, as I sometimes felt bad leaving meetings feeling that I had been too abrasive sometimes.
Feedback in code reviews. I carefully consider feedback, and if I agree with it, then I will incorporate the changes. I believe that just because feedback on code is given does not necessarily mean it is correct, so if I disagree, I believe the best approach is to continue the code review with discussion.
Can you describe a time when you had to explain a complex technical concept to a non-technical stakeholder? How did you ensure they understood it?
- At my last job, there was a period where I was going to support engineering meetings where we discussed the production issues. Since I was resolving the issues, I oftentimes was the first to uncover bugs and I had to explain to the group often. I could not ensure that everyone understood what I was trying to say, but I used patience and would explain the same thing a few things if I had to.Â
- Could not explain the implications of moving customers from the Assembly API integration to Groupcall
- When I explained to the IT person about the soft deleted records
Describe a successful team project you were a part of. What was your role, and how did you contribute to the team's success
- The dashboard for managing user groups and stuff, I think my biggest contribution was emphasizing understanding the necessary database design. It was a complex feature
- S - I was on a scrum team given the task of building out a dashboard which would be used to manage the permissions of all users across schools of a school district from a centralized place, which involved many different types of settings.
- T - We had to build the feature
- A - My main contribution was to emphasize understanding the data structure in the early/planning stage, and proposed a user group template table where all of the settings would have database relationships to it that mirrored the way they were connected to user groups. Then the user group templates would be used to control the user groups at the school level
- R - The entire work was completed in 2-3 sprints, with only one or two small bugs which were fixed, and it was considered a great improvement to the product saving the district administrators who were using the software a lot of time.
Tell me about a challenging situation you encountered in a previous role and how you handled it. What did you learn from that experience?
- The groupcall situation
- The situation where I was treated badly by senior developers I was working with - not sure about that as resigning from the job ended up being a regret. But I learned that I need to separate myself from my job, and never resign from a job without a different job already.
- The situation where I was treated badly by senior developers I was working with - not sure about that as resigning from the job ended up being a regret. But I learned that I need to separate myself from my job, and never resign from a job without a different job already.