Behavioral Interview Guide for Software Engineers

So, you’re looking to improve your chances at getting that offer? The fact that you’re searching, already makes you well on your way! You’ve came to the right place. I’ll share everything I know about behavioral interviews here.

A bit of personal background - I’ve worked in FAANG, startups, mid-sized companies, been in engineering for 7+ years, and done my fair share of interviews. I share everything I know here that I wish someone told me earlier in my career in this blog. (which you can subscribe to btw)

Disclaimer: the information here is my experience and personal opinions.

So What’s the Point Of These Interviews Anyway?

The behavioral interview for software engineers, is just another way for the interviewers to get signal on whether you’ll be a fit for the role. Their aim is to access your career background.

Also, you can’t really memorize your way into it, similar to grinding LeetCode. Of course, that’s not to say you don’t improve your chances if you prepare.

At a high level, these interviews let the interviewer access your abilities holistically. They will be looking for signals that you are talking about topics and situations that a person with a similar role would have been through. They are looking to pick up on the nuances of the experiences that you said you have.

The other agenda of these interviews is to access how you are as a person. Like, will you be pleasant to work with? Do you handle conflict with your potential team mates well? Are you responsible? Do you take initiative?  They’re trying to gauge your emotional intelligence.

You’ve Already Been Preparing for This Your Entire Time

Behavioral interviews focus around your career background. So your talking points should be taken from your experience. Since you’ve lived through them, you already have all of the ingredients. Recall all the major projects, initiatives, wins, struggles, and losses that you had. Next, the way you come prepared is to convert them into a STAR (Situation, Task, Action, Result) format. This will help you be light on your feet and, at the right moments, answer from your basket of STARS.

The STAR System

STAR - situation, task, action result. Is a standardized way that a lot of tech companies expect candidates to answer behavioral interview questions with. The aim of this system is make the answers specific to real life events. It puts the focus on facts vs opinions, and removes any generalization.

• Situation - What was the problem at hand or a situation at work that you were part of.
• Task - What were the next steps to address the situation.
• Action - What did you actually do to move the task forward.
• Result - What was the end result.

Example:

• Situation
  • Our VP called out that there was an issue with the app. Too many teams are building features on top of it, and the app is getting slow. It’s hard to build new things. Users are overwhelmed and losing track of new features coming in.
• Task
  • I realized that the problem looks like a natural scope expansion for my team, and took the initiative at addressing the problem. The solution came in the form of a platform where features can be turned on/off per each user. This meets each unique need of the user. It keeps the app lightweight, features are developed in a standardized way by integrating with a framework, and our dedicated surfaces can render updates about new features to the user.
• Action
  • I led and took ownership over this initiative.
  • Handled engineering design, investigation, estimations, roadmapping, and resource allocation.
  • Supported colleague engineers and kept track of the work-stream against milestones.
  • Drove product decision alignment discussions.
• Result
  • Successful Alpha, Beta, General Access roll out.
  • Positive metric impact on app time spent and app time to load (ttl).

This is an example of how the format looks, but the contents themselves vary widely especially based on the role and the expected tenure, so don’t read too much into it.

Interviewers are People Too

This is a bit of personal take. It helps to keep in mind that on the other side is a person like you. When doing intros, and answering questions, it helps to have a little humor or share some things that you’re into outside of work. For them, these chats are often like a conveyer. So being personable helps them to remember you as a person.

If You’re Just Starting Out - Internships

Are you trying to score that software engineer internship and get your foot in the door? Since there’s not a lot of prior experience to pull answers from, think about what things you participated in that demonstrate taking initiative. What will show your natural interest in engineering? This includes competitions, side projects, any research, hackathons, etc. The interviewer’s goal is to see that you’re independently making progress towards engineering excellence, and mostly they’re just gauging whether you’ll make a good team mate.

If You’re Already Cooking

You already have a couple years of experience. You’re doing awesome work and delivering value. Part of the behavioral interview is to validate whether you’re pleasant to work with, professional, and responsible. At this point you also have a good amount of experience to form your project based answers. It will help formatting these using the STAR system ahead of interviews. The expectation here is for the interviewer to pick up on your ability to execute on tasks end-to-end, communicate issues and blockers, communicate proactively with steak holders, on-time execution, taking initiative, engineering excellence.

If You’ve Been Around the Block

You’ve been in the industry for a while. Your day to day is more towards dealing with your team’s problems and synthesizing the actual projects that end up on the roadmap, tracking its pace, then keeping everyone aligned though out the process. You’re probably reading this to refresh your memory. Perhaps, reading interview prep materials is a weird hobby of yours? 👀 (no judgement).

The behavioral interview, in my opinion, swings the most weight for senior positions compared to other interviews. A number of nuances can come up in the discussion because, as a senior software engineer, you’ve been through a number of teams, projects, and situations.

Things that interviewers look for

• Ability to clearly explain complicated technical problems and topics in a non technical way.
• Self agency in your organization to identify gaps and spin up solutions.
• Ownership moves more towards the problem or team need, which is often directional and vague, over being project based.
• Examples of driving decision alignment among steak holders.
• Personal conviction and willingness to pushback.

Software Engineer Behavioral Interview Questions

A good way to prepare is to also review common behavioral questions and form your stories to those. Often, a lot of questions are re-hashes of the same popular ones. Here are the ones I’ve encountered along the way. These should be a good start to get the brain juices flowing!

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• Think about your career transitions. What motivated them, what went well, and what could have gone better.

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• Why do you want to work at X company?

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• Tell me about your largest, most successful, most difficult, least successful projects.

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• Tell me about of how you’ve taken the initiative on teams you’ve been part of. Where have you gone beyond expectations.

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• Consider the most difficult work relationships you’ve encountered. How did it go?

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• Tell me about a disagreement with your manager.

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• Tell me about a disagreement with your team member.

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• Tell me about a time when you were not meeting deadlines or expectations from partners. How did you deal with that?

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• Write about what roles you’ve played on recent teams. How did you end up playing those roles? What has worked out well and what hasn’t been the best fit?

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• Tell me about a project that you initiated, how did you come up with the project, how did you present it to the team, and how did you convince it was worth it.

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• Tell me about a time your project got scrapped, how did it happen, how did you react?

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• What are your expectations from a PM? What’s your ideal relationship with them like?

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• Tell me about a time your broke something?

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• What is your weakness.

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• What is your strength.

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• Tell me about yourself.

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• Tell me about a time you received difficult feedback.

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• Tell me about an ambiguous task you received.

Did This Help?

I hope you found this information helpful. If you want to stay tuned to more engineering content like this, subscribe below. It also helps me get the signal that I should write more on the broader topic.

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Cheers! ☕