Behavioral Questions

Questions

1. Tell me about a time you had to take hard feedback.

(- Generally better to choose a story that’s more recent). (- Good to point out how you improved out of this).

• Be humble, positive, conscientious, and take it in stride.

2. Tell me about a time you improved a process.

(+ Improving Wiki Notes). (- Probably better to quantify it).

• Talk about the best interests of stakeholders and colleagues
• Monitored the result of the new process
• Enthusiasm to improve

3. Tell me about a time you were tasked to do the impossible. How did you do it?

(+ How did you work extra in the same time frame?) (- Working extra/on the weekends + long days isn’t that great). (+ Probably better to be clearer on tasks/description).

• Be a team player to keep people in the loop, and focus on learning/mentorship.

4. Tell me about a time you received mentorship. What did you learn from it? What would you like to continue to learn?

(+ Probably better to point out some takeaways, it’s important to spread and delegate the work + grow the team).

• Shows if they work well in a team, and how much they care about learning.

5. A project keeps slipping past deadlines. What do you do?

(+ Ask questions for why the project is slipping, and create a process to keep stakeholders in the loop.)

• Ask for details about why the project is slipping past deadlines. Work with stakeholders to resolve problems. Be respectful of other teams, but take it in stride.

6. How would you deal with the case where there are lots of dependencies on other projects code?

• (Make sure to communicate with stakeholders + why the feature was being slowly deployed.)

7. You are given the choice to make a product more efficient at the expense of accessibility. Which do you choose to do?

(+ Good to ask a clarifying question) (- Is it a management question? Accessibility is important for all sites). (- I would say that we should require accessibility, we understand the requirements of our users).

• Do they value being inclusive? What matters? Ask clarifying questions.

9. Tell me about a time you had to leave a task unfinished. What did you do?

(+ Left a faulty certificate on a staging server). (+ Had to leave a lot of tickets open which counts against our team). (+ What would happen if something major happened which was customer facing)? (- I think its bad to mention that staging/dev should be broken, since it helps to debug some more important issues). (+ Communicate + prioritize).

• Explain the cost of leaving tasks unfinished.

10. Tell me about a time you had to deliver a harsh truth to a coworker. How did you do it and why?

(+ Teaching a coworker about testing better instead of doing a brute force solution). (- Probably better to have a stronger story).

11. Tell me about a time where you had to defend an unpopular decision. Why did you do it? What was the impact of that decision?

(+ Why are old web components bad? Why is server-side rendered bad? We weren’t familiar with the codebase isn’t a great reason.) (+ Highlighting wins that happened from using a more familiar web framework). (- Would like more detail about quantifying it).

12. Tell me about a time where you made a product better for the user. What was the feature and why was it important?

(+ Infinitely loading loop). (+ Adding error handling + error pages, + better accessibility for our users). (+ Analytics would be useful to tell a story).