Software Engineers On Behavioral Interviews: Individuals Not Teams

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all right I am just leaving CrossFit here I got a topic from Reddit let's get these windows cleared up it's a super super foggy morning um and then I'm sitting in the car after CrossFit so my windows are already a little mangled but yeah it's crazy out this morning there's just so much fog but anyway you're not here for the fog you're here for the software engineering topics so um the topic from Reddit is about collaborating in teams and specifically this person's asking about the idea that um they're talking about behavioral interviews and they're saying that uh it feels like this is my my sort of understanding from their question that they're being asked in behavioral interviews things like tell me about a time when you worked in a team and I think they're kind of curious because it seems like maybe from their experience

they've been working on teams that are more like indiv like a group of individuals working on individual tasks and less like a sort of cohesive team working together uh on things so they it seems like they're looking for some insight into like if that's been my experience how do I go about answering behavioral interview questions like this uh so I wanted to talk about this um I made a video recently on uh talking about my experiences leading teams and some of the different Dynamics I've seen where uh sometimes it's felt like we're entirely cohesive teams working together on the same thing and other times where I have teams that kind of feels like uh we're making progress but everyone's kind of got individual things they're working on uh so it's more of like a broad approach um to tackle a bunch of different uh surface

area and um I have like my own personal preference about how I like leading teams and sometimes based on the amount of work and stuff that's coming in we don't uh have a lot of I guess like say because if all of it has to get done then things have to be spread a little bit more broadly um but from the perspective of the engineers working on the teams like how can you like Translate this into things to talk about in behavioral interview so I think the first thing I should say before I even go into explaining some thoughts on this is that if you want questions answered uh please just drop them in the comments and uh happy to try and navigate that with you if you want something answered that's a little bit more uh detailed or you want to keep it Anonymous

look for Dev leader on social media uh I'm basically on every platform just send me a message or Nick centina one LinkedIn my my LinkedIn profile is uh it's a premium profile so it should allow you to message me if I've had other people do it so please go ahead and do that if you're interested um but my thoughts on this so I think the first thing is that um as an engineering manager who's been interviewing Engineers for like 12 years um you have to understand that behavioral interview questions are are to serve a purpose to like to to measure Behavior right uh and the idea is that as interviewers um we want to be able to figure out what it's going to be like for you to work on the team and um the reality is like there's different ways that you could assess

this but with behavioral interview questions it's kind of like if we understand past performance then hopefully we can use that to sort of uh what it would be like in the future so with that said sometimes like in behavioral interview questions it seems like at least this person who posted this on Reddit seems to understand like hey look I think someone's looking for something in this question and I'm not sure if I'm able to like provide that and uh so I mean that's a good Insight because I think some people and when I say some I mean from my experience a like majority of people almost um seem to get into like the technical details far too much in behavioral interview questions and like I don't blame people right like as software Engineers we're describing Technical Systems we've built um you know someone will say

you know talk talk me through this project or whatever so uh you know you're you're trying to say like oh like I used uh post grass and then like we had this technology and like I built this thing like and you're getting into very very specific details about the system and often that's really not the point of the question right um it's a behavioral interview question not like a let me Grill you on on like the the technology you pick now someone might get you to try and explain the technology you picked and maybe what they're trying to do is see how you can like articulate some of these things um to an audience that was not part of building the system right so they might be looking for some of your communication skills and things like that but um when we're talking about these

types of questions like tell me about a time where you worked on a team doing whatever um I think that this person's uh like kind of like thinking about it the right way where they're saying I want to be able to talk about a like a team like where I was working on things together but um even I would say even if a lot of the work that you're doing feels more individual um I would hope that that you can try to find ways to think about things uh in a sense where like the team is brought together so what I mean by that is like there's a few different angles I want to look at um and I I'll just kind of go over them quickly as I'm as they're coming to my mind but one of them is like the um the actual

sort of physical team that you've been assigned to that's probably how this person's thinking about it but the other thing that I would mention too is like um people work on different projects potentially in different teams right sorry I got to move Lanes here and I thought this person was trying to merge into my lane but you might be working on a dedicated project for some period of time and like you're collaborating with other teams and like you could think about that team as sort of like a virtual team and and navigate some things that way um so those are two like sort of high level ideas I want to kind of chat through um especially if you find yourself working in these situations where um you're like yeah I'm on this team but we're kind of doing individual work so um if you find

that you're on a team doing individual work and you're like I don't really know how to answer a question like this because uh anytime I go to talk about stuff I've done on this team it was almost like working in isolation you could try to think about things from a different angle and um instead of looking at I don't know um specifically the projects being being done you could look at the different parts of the deliverables so for example um I'm assuming on your teams you do PLL requests and code reviews like these are going to be something where you're collaborating with other people on the team uh design document reviews um you could be doing retrospectives on things so even if you're working on individual things do you do Sprints with retrospectives could you talk about some of the things that happen in the

overlap there so these might seem like maybe contrived or silly examples but my point is that if the regular coding work that you're doing I got to turn my my window defogger on it's nuts um if the regular coding work you're doing you feel like there's not a ton of overlap with other team members can you start to find some of the other stuff that you're doing where there is overlap okay so you could probably chat through some of this because odds are it's not just tell me about a time you worked in a team right like that's like what about it if you were to think from an interviewer's perspective like that's not going to tell them very much but if they were to say work in a team where and then they give you some constraint you could say like where um where

a deadline wasn't being met right and then they're trying to see like how do you bring the like how do you navigate this how do you bring this kind of thing to the surface how do you uh you're on a team how do you bring awareness to other people on the team do you take leadership in trying to make other people aware and driving progress well if you you I'm just making up some of the examples from earlier with like the code reviews and stuff right you could say like hey like I was working on this thing you don't have to highlight necessarily to the interviewer that uh it was a little bit more in isolation but if you were doing the code reviews right so you have teammates that are not participating or they're falling behind they're not engaged on the poll request like

you might have some sort of timeline that you're working towards how did you raise awareness to those teammates how did you get them engaged right it's like it's less about the specific of the problem and the scenario and more about like what you did if that makes sense so it's not like they're going to say tell me about a time like where you were using SQL and programming in c and then had like a deadline that was looming like that's those things have nothing to do with the the behavioral part so the fact that they're bringing up a team is like they're giving you some context that they're trying to think about how are you interacting with other individuals that are probably your peers potentially different types of stakeholders uh they might even ask you specific question questions about you know working in a team

and uh Missing deadlines or like looming deadlines and talking about different stakeholders and stuff involved so I think that you just have to kind of look at potentially the different phases or aspects of the work that you're doing um if you're finding that your teams are kind of disjoint like this so that's kind of one way to look at it and again the I I think the best way to kind of prepare for this kind of stuff for interviews is is kind of like I mean it's what this person's doing it's kind of going through the thought exercise of saying look I know I'm going to get questions about working in a team and I feel like the work that I've done on teams is uh is disjoint in terms of like kind of working in isolation and like sometimes that kind of thing's a

little bit outside of your control right like I'm even thinking about some of the teams I have right now um I have some in some cases individuals working on just very different things within in their space and I have some where people are like literally working on the same thing together so there's both but you might find from your experience it's been very kind of isolated within the team and sure that might feel challenging but the thing that I'm saying here is like before you go interview anticipate some of these questions right if you can if you can think through ahead of time I'm going to get teamwork based questions I don't really understand the team Dynamic that well from what I've been doing like spend some extra time ahead of your interviews to try and think through these scenarios um and that's going to

lead me to the second kind of example I wanted to walk through was with like uh working on projects with other teams so again you might say okay in my dedicated team that I've been assigned to there's eight of us I'm just making this up right there's eight of us and most of my work is done kind of in isolation within the team and then I got assigned to this project none of my other teammates are on it I'm kind of representing my team as I contribute to this other cross team initiative so the nice thing is that you're actually being given this additional opportunity to talk about a team and generally I would say in Cross team initiatives um like if you've been working in isolation it's probably a little bit easier to find uh the collaboration points when you're doing cross team stuff

and if you're like well no they still assign me some dedicated work okay but like who assigned you that how did the requirements come up how did someone explain the requirements how did you explain how you were delivering those requirements to the stakeholder of that other team right there's a lot more of these potentially obvious points where there's Crossover with other people sometimes in our day-to-day work it's like well it's only really when my PLL request goes goes up or it's only really when we were doing the design dock otherwise like I'm kind of just working in isolation but like those are still good examples of doing stuff in teams it's just that they might not like stand out to you but when you're doing cross team stuff the fact that these other individuals are potentially not on your team they might stand out as

more like obvious opportunities but the same kind of concept applies right it's always going to be tell me about a time where you're working on a team and so there's your constraints and then like what was the scenario so looming deadline it could be and someone wasn't picking up the pace it could be that you had a conflict within the team it could be like there's always a scenario that they're trying to get you to explain but the fact that you're on a team is just framing it up right and that framing the constraints that they're generally talking about is that you have peers with you because sometimes in like some interview questions um they might frame it like hey you're you're the person who's leading something okay so we're looking for how you lead in in a position where it's a little bit more

obvious that you have leadership expectations right it could be like tell me a time you were mentoring someone on a project could be a time where you were the team lead on a project right they they're putting these constraints on the question for you to navigate them that way CU they're looking for that perspective where you were leading something now it's not that they're not looking for leadership examples when they ask you about times are you're working on a team but they actually might be trying to gauge like do you take initiative right so tell me about a time you're working on a team and the the the idea there is probably just like you know you're working with people that are your peers on something and then some constraint so then and then there was a you know a difference of opinions like how

did you navigate that so let's go back to the code review example right because like I said probably most people are doing pull requests and code reviews at least within their teams so the project specifically just because other people weren't directly contributing to that you were doing it mostly in isolation Okay code review comes up now someone's disagreeing with how you design something or how you're doing your test coverage or that you started refactoring stuff and maybe you should have done that in a separate poll request whatever right so now the they're basically just framing up like you had a disagreement with peers what did you do the reason I'm kind of explaining this to you with examples where you're like oh that might seem kind of silly like whatever is because in my opinion is someone who's interviewing the specifics don't matter that much

the specific about what the project was or what you know that scenario I don't need the details of that I don't need you to get hypers specific what's going on here oh there's like I guess there was a little accident or like cars pulled over but there was also like a utility truck in the in the ditch and it looked like it was part of it but I think it was just coincidence it was pulled over there anyway so I used like that code review example just in this conversation because like that's probably something common you've experienced right and the point is that I'm curious in understanding how you navigate conflict or there might be situations where there's like indecisiveness on teams right so like okay people can't make like people can't come to an agreement not necessarily that they're like arguing but it's like

hey there's three paths forward like all all of them seem okay what do we do right like okay well someone's got to make a decision did you step up and say okay we're going to go down this path take sort of a initiative on it and then own the responsibility so they might follow up and say okay so within your group within your team because that's how we're framing the question you took the initiative did you go do it and if so like did it work out because if it didn't did you own the responsibility of that did you say okay I was someone who called the shot on going down that path uh we ended up trying it it didn't work and did you just say ah well not my problem now and kind of walk away or did you own up and say

yep that didn't work but we had these two other ideas we considered before so I propose we tried uh one of the other ones and that seemed to work and you can kind of chat through how you know you went and implemented that so my uh I mean this is probably easier for me to say than it is for some people to to understand as as directly as I mean it but like I think it's really important to understand like why people are asking certain behavioral interview questions so again that's a good practice thing is um like so I have a whole course available on this kind of stuff on dome train so if you watch my main Dev leader Channel um I basically I introduce my courses in every single video so I'll say hi I'm Nick I'm an engineering manager at Microsoft and

then before I get into the content I I mention chuses so that people know they're available at least it's like you know two seconds to say it and that way if you're not interested great move on if you are you know they exist but one of them is on behavioral interviews and um honestly the um I think the the biggest opportunity with some of these things is kind of on two fronts one is like just get comfortable being able to tell stories and I don't mean like make make them up I mean be comfortable with stories that you have from your career or if you're like if you're new in your career from like school from boot camp from projects you worked on like get comfortable knowing those things recalling them being able to talk about them because if you can do that part and

then the second part which is like understanding what people are trying to inquire about when they ask you a behavioral interview question I find what you're able to do is you hear the question you go okay I know that the interviewer is trying to extract this kind of information about me right they're trying to say how do you work in teams they're trying to say how do you act as an informal leader they're trying to say how do you handle conflict so they have a goal with their question so now you can extract that and then you fall back to okay I have all of these different scenarios for my experience right projects I've worked on I can talk about challenges in teams like I got all these different things can I find one that I feel comfortable bringing up that I can align with

the question that's being asked and do it clearly and succinctly because if you can do it but it's going to take you 20 minutes to like kind of build up to getting to that point in the story like that's maybe not a good option so I think it's a really important to have a high level of comfort with your stories from your career and then um you know a clear understanding of what these types of questions are after and this takes practice right like especially for some people um if you're not used to doing this like I could totally understand why like I said in the beginning of this why people fall back to okay someone asked me about a project I've worked on so I'm just going to tell them all the technology choices and like like you feel you're answering the question right

they said tell me about a project but you're missing the fact that they said and and their focus is actually where you were you know at a difference of opinions with the lead right so you might go okay I know I I disag agreed with Jimmy on this project but let me spend 90% of the time talking about the technology and then 10% of the time is like and there was this guy Jimmy and he had a different opinion and he was senior and we went with his choice like that's not it's not really the way you go about it um they they're interested in like the other direction 10% about some of the details 90% about um how you navigated that situation with Jimmy so um I find like for myself when I was interviewing um after leaving the startup that I was at

going to Microsoft I applied to to Google Facebook uh Amazon Microsoft um basically just the big tech companies and what was nice was that because I had been spending a long time interviewing was like um the the behavioral questions like understanding what people are after that seems mostly I don't want to say obvious to me that's not like fair to say but it feels it's more comfortable for me to go I know what this person's trying to get at I think but um what I really had to practice for myself was making sure I had my scenarios ready and there would be times where like uh in an interview I'd be like they'd ask me and I'm like I know I have a really good story for this and it's just I blank on it right so in my opinion if you want to be

really prepared have a lot of different stories because if you're like me and you blank on this kind of stuff like I don't do well um like writing exams I'm very bad at or I shouldn't say bad it's not a good way to to describe it like I'm very uncomfortable when it comes to writing exams and I think that interviews are similar like in a a high stress kind of thing that's uh not common for me um you know I'll do things like blank out or just get nervous and it's just because I don't practice doing them so if you're like me and you want to prevent that kind of thing from having a really big impact spend more time getting more examples together that way if you blank on something it's like okay well I know I had a really good story for that

but like instead of being like I can't answer your question now it's like okay well what's what's another example I know I got a bunch so um I hope that's kind of helpful and thinking through like again I know what started off talking about working on teams working more in isolation versus cohesively but when it comes to interviewing questions I think um there's just different ways to navigate that you can explicitly try to look for the different touch points in your team interactions or on projects where you are doing this kind of stuff and and highlight that it's I in my opinion if I were interviewing someone uh I feel like they could completely and not like in a malicious way but they could completely Dodge the fact that they were working mostly on individual items in fact you could even potentially bring that up

depending on what the question is you might be able to even say like hey the last team I was on um I actually did notice that we worked mostly on individual items but uh to answer your question specifically when we were working together here is part of this project where we did this and here's how I navigated whatever the scenario is right the the conflict between team members the uh the team lead we couldn't agree with the tight deadlines the other stakeholders so there's ways to do it right um so hope that helps interviewing is tricky uh definitely something you want to practice um and kind of build up that Comfort level so thanks for watching I'll see you next time