Thursday, October 10, 2019

Behavioural/ Open ended Question


Behavioural or open ended questions are often asked in an interview. These questions are asked to evaluate the thought process of the candidate. It is necessary that you prepare well for these questions since these questions decide if you would be a good cultural fit for the company.

Prepare answers for these questions and practice answering them as you would in an interview. Even if the questions are not the same you would have thought through different scenarios which you would have faced and would be able to give those examples while answering the questions.

Another tip is to use S.T.A.R (Situation Task Action Result) method to frame your answer so that you are able to conclude on the answer without beating around the bush. 

Following are some of the behavioural Questions that get asked in different rounds of the interview.
  • Why you want to leave your current company?
  • Why you want to join XXX company?
  • What is the most complex problem you have done till now?
  • If you get magic stick, which engineering problem would you like to solve ?
  • What you would like to improve in you?
  • Single word which describes you?
  • How will you define a bad programmer and a good programmer ?
  • What is need to design a good system ?
  • How you ensure you are solving your daily coding problems in best way?
  • How do u handle disagreement with manager 
  • What is the size of the team and composition of team (technology wise) you are handling ?
    Sample Answer - I am currently managing a team of 8 members. There is one Senior Software Engineer, 2 Associate Senior engineer, 4 Software Engineers and a Test Automation Engineer. All the engineers work on various technologies - Java, C#, Angular JS, React JS, Restful Web Services and the Test Automation Engineer works on Manual Testing as well as testing automation via EggPlant.
  • What is your participation level in technical discussion / How would your typical day looks like ?
    Sample Answer - As the projects gets onboarded to the team I have discussion with the product managers to understand the needs of the project. I am responsible to decide the technical feasibility of the project and the technology stack to used to implement the project. I come up with the high level and detailed level design for the project. For the software engineers I provide the low level design for the task provided to them. My role in the technical discussions is the ensure the proper design for the problem is being considered, performance is considered, future extensibility is kept in mind as well as to make sure new changes are not going effect the existing users.
    On a typical day I do code reviews for the team, resolve any technical challenges that the team members are facing, having design discussions with the team on the iteration work, having design discussion with other stakeholders on the next set of projects, investigate client issues and provide short term and plan for long term fix.
  • Are you involved in code review ? Are you hands on with any programming language
    Sample Answer - On a daily basis I go ahead and do code reviews for the team. I am the primary gatekeeper for the projects getting merged to the master and being released to the clients. I am hands on with Java programming.

  • What are the stakeholders with whom you interact and Frequency ?
    Sample Answer - I have interaction with the Lead Senior Engineering Manager, product manager, project manager and US counterpart team. I meet with the Lead Senior Engineering Manager once a week, with product manager every alternate week, on a daily basis with the project manager and weekly with my US counterpart. Apart from this we have biweekly Client calls where we demos for the capabilities developed.
  • Have you worked on microservice architecture or any cloud based product?
    Sample Answer -  Yes I have worked on microservice architecture. I have implemented multiple microservices and few of the microservices are deployed in the cloud as well. 
  • How do you handle low performing associates?
  • How do you set goals for your team?
  • How do you set goals for yourself?
  • How do you handle conflicts between employees?
  • How do you mentor your engineers? What is your mentoring style ?
  • What do you look for when hiring an engineer?
  • What do you do to build the team?
  • How do you keep the team motivated ?
  • How do you drive culture cross your team ?
  • How do you help new associate fit into the current team ?
  • What are the Que's for re-architecture?
  • Metrics Ownership

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