• Speak slowly. Pause before you respond to anything.

Story telling tips (for behavioral rounds):

  • STAR technique - very important. In most cases, the technical details (of the situation or actions) don’t matter too much, so no need to delve into those unless cross-questioned.
    • As for actions, try to answer in numbered bullet points: I did 3 things: One, …
  • When asked a question, pause a few seconds and think what the actual underlying question is or what exactly the interviewer is looking for.
    • For example, a binary question doesn’t need to be answered by a yes/no.
  • Some behavioral questions require you to show how you collaborate. So, talk about 2-3 stakeholders you worked with to answer those. (Escalation should be the last resort: don’t bring it up unless absolutely required.)
  • Phrases to use:
    • One of my teams.
    • But … therefore. (Conflict and context.) Don’t use and then.
    • Drove alignment.
    • Calculated risk.
    • Build relationships with people.
    • Build trust.
    • I > we.
    • I learnt XYZ from this engagement/project.
    • I collaborated vs I told junior SDE to do X.
    • Bring in engineering perspective by saying something like, I analyzed how the requirement would fit into our current architecture.

Project retrospective:

  • Safer to talk about some big product launch as those are easier to explain.
  • This is different from biggest technical challenge. In fact, project should have 1-3 big technical challenges within.
  • Trade-offs:
    • Good example is where I did something unconventional.
    • Technical:
      • Monolith vs micro-services.
      • Build vs reuse?
      • Latency vs ?
    • Not the same as coming up with an innovative idea. There needs to be a hard decision-making between two (equally valid) approaches.
  • Pick one giant project and center most leadership/behavioral answers around it. (That way, I can also explain the context once per interview and waste less time.)

System design:

  • Both functional and non-functional requirements.
  • Collaborate with the interviewer: this is very important. Do you think this makes sense? or am I on the right track?
  • Trade-offs: maybe just explicitly say the word.