8 most common interview questions and how to answer them

Questions to help you prepare for your next interview!

Interviewing is a skill - it takes practice to become better. The better you are at interviewing, the higher your chances of getting the job of your dreams! Here we talk about just the interview questions you might be asked, but interviews are much more than just the questions asked. That's why it's so important to prep!

To help with that, we have compiled some commonly asked interviewing questions to help you prepare for your next interview. According to Jean, TRIIIO's Senior Consultant, one of the biggest gap that our interviewers find in interviewees is their inability to articulate their thought process.

Note:

We advocate being truthful during the interview. This guide is to help you prepare for interviews by practicing. Lying may help you get the job but may be detrimental in the long run.

What do interviewers look for?

An interviewer's goals is to evaluate how you think. To them, it is more important to understand how you arrived at the answer than the answer itself. One most useful framework is the STAR method which stands for Situation, Task, Action and Result. This framework helps you organize your responses in a concise manner.

Questions with sample answers

1. Tell me a time when you had to deal with conflict?

At my work 2 years ago, I had to manage work with a vendor to deliver a mission critical application. [Situation] They were responsible for a specific module whilst I was responsible for integrating it into our core system. [Task] The conflict happened when we were in disagreement on how a particular solution was to be implemented. In addition to that we were in danger of missing the deadline. How I dealt with this situation was to personally meet him to understand his point of view, then I shared with him my challenges. [Action] From there, we came up with a solution that was implemented well. [Result] The best part was after that incident, my relationship with the vendor improved and became better.

2. Tell me a time when you had to solve a complex problem

The most complex problem that I worked on was when we had to rebuild the pricing engine from scratch. As an e-commerce site, the pricing engine is one of the most important parts of the application. [Situation] My role in the team was to rewrite the pricing algorithm.[Task] It was one of the most difficult problems that I had to solve because there were so many variables to consider. In the end I contributed to the project by researching and creating the new algorithm[Action]. The new algorithm helped our company generate an increase of 7% in revenue [Result]

3. What was the biggest failure that you faced?

My role right now requires me to mentor and guide junior engineers when they enter our company. In 2021, I was assigned a new engineer to guide.[Task] At that time, I was just promoted into a Senior Engineer hence, mentoring and guiding engineers were relatively new to me. My failure to guide the engineer led him to resign from the company citing me as one of the reasons.[Situation] Since then, I have taken extra measures to improve my leadership skills [Action] and so in our company's 360 appraisal, I frequently receive commendation of my mentoring abilities.[Result]

4. What is the biggest achievement in your career so far?

The biggest achievement in my career so far is when I led a team of 10 to develop a new login and registration flow to help grow to over 5 million accounts [Task]. It was the largest project I have ever taken on, but the company was growing quickly and needed our product to evolve quickly [Situation]. As a result, I often worked overtime with a small team to complete much of the initial logic, so that the rest of the team could complete robust codes as efficiently as possible [Action]. This work impacted our thousands of users, giving them a faster and more frictionless user experience [Result].

4 more questions to help you prepare!

• Explain your experience using Reactjs/Nodejs/etc

• Please describe how would you handle critical issues/inefficient code bases

• How do you ensure good quality of codes

• Could you describe the features and functionality of said technology

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