so friday afternoon, october, i push a deploy and it kills the checkout flow for forty minutes. paying customers cannot buy anything. my manager is on a VP call. i am sitting at my desk wishing i had gone to trade school instead. that deploy is actually where this whole thing starts but not for the reason you'd think, it ended up being my answer to like four different behavioral interview questions and Priya had to scream at me before i understood why
ok wait. Stripe first. also october but earlier. interviewer goes "tell me about a time you dealt with a difficult coworker." i have nothing. i start inventing something and midway through i just blank on where the fake story was supposed to go. four seconds of nothing. said "yeah we uh worked it out" and the guy writes on his laptop and the air in the room changes. rejection, two days. texted my friend Priya, she goes "dude that question shows up in literally every loop how did you not have a story" lol
Priya had been keeping a google sheet. every behavioral question she got asked, which company, which round, her answer, did she advance. she nagged me about doing the same and i ignored her for two solid months because i am stubborn and a little dumb. i finally started my own in december and when we compared our spreadsheets at this bar in hayes valley one night, laptops open side by side, eighty percent of our questions overlapped. different companies, same questions. we were dying laughing, the bartender looked concerned
then i sorted mine and i swear i just sat there staring. sixty one questions from twenty three interviews. ten categories. that was it. TEN. coworker conflict was the biggest one, eight of my twenty three companies. Priya had six. "tell me about a disagreement with a teammate" and "walk me through when your manager saw things differently" and "describe pushback you gave on a decision." same question in a different wig
Priya had figured all of this out before me obviously. she was already getting final rounds while i was memorizing a new answer for every slight rephrasing, which, looking back, incredibly dumb approach
the failure category is where i was doing the worst damage to myself. i had been telling interviewers about requirements shifting mid-sprint and the timeline slipping. Priya called me and was not gentle, she said that is a blame story in a nice shirt not a failure story and she was right. so i went back to the deploy incident. friday afternoon, checkout dead for forty minutes, paying customers locked out, my manager on a VP call while i sat at my desk considering a new career in farming. and then the good part: what i did after. i wrote a pre-deploy checklist. moved risky deploys to tuesday mornings. paired up with another engineer so we double-check each other before pushing anything. the after part is the whole answer and i had been leaving it out because i was too focused on making the screwup sound less bad
leadership questions, i kept saying i am an IC with no management stories. Priya goes "they don't want management stories you dork, they want when you pushed something through with zero authority." mine: a service at work dying silently, owning team not caring. i spent two weeks pestering every person on that team daily until they added monitoring. no title, no leverage, just being annoying on purpose lol
conflict: coworker merging code without tests, build breaking twice a week. i sat with him, found out his manager was pressuring him to ship fast. we made a deal, he writes the critical tests, i pick up the rest after merge. worked because i asked about his side before i brought up mine
the other buckets, deadlines where you pick what gets cut, ambiguity where nobody gives you direction, giving feedback, receiving feedback, going above your job, adapting when plans change, getting buy-in from another team, defending a technical choice. once i had the big three nailed, conflict failure and leadership, the rest came fast
i practiced all ten stories on a timer. Priya and i ran mock rounds over zoom but friends just say "sounds good" when it does not sound good at all. Marcus told me about InterviewMan and that was a different thing. it said my answer went two minutes and i never once mentioned a number. twelve bucks a month. blunt in a way your friends won't be because they like you too much lol
used it during real interviews. payments company, weird phrasing on an ambiguity question i had never heard before. three seconds of panic, grabbed the right prepped story, adjusted on the spot. made final round
seven rejections in a row after Stripe. asked for feedback every time. a startup in soma said "your failure story doesn't say what you changed afterward" and that one sentence is the reason i rebuilt the deploy story with the checklist stuff. one piece of recruiter feedback, probably the reason i got hired
Priya landed her offer first. she bought a drink with my card and said "october through december you owe me." fifty behavioral questions sounds massive but it is ten topics wearing costumes. two minutes of notes per interview and by number fifteen i wanted to build a time machine and slap past me for not starting earlier
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