Question: Tell me about a time you weren’t satisfied with the quality of something you worked on.
Answer: Angular 1.4 at the current company, they didn’t know what they were doing.
Q: What do you mean?
A: The team I was in was not following Angular best practices, anti-patterns.
They had created the application from scratch, without prior experience with Angular.
Q: For example?
A: You can access parent scope and modify it: $scope.parent.parent.parent.id
Q: What are the practical implications?
A: it’s fragile.
Q: Were there any bugs, etc., because of this?
A: In code reviews, I’d suggest another way, such as storing it in another store, or passing the element to the one that needs it.
Q: Did you face any resistance?
A: not really
Q: What things did you do to help the team “level up”?
A: Made myself available, show and tell on proper usage.
Question: Tell me about a time when you found a problem with your team’s process
Answer: At my last company: processes were really inefficient.
They weren’t very scrum-y, I added a lot of things that were getting lost in tickets.
Q: How did you prioritize what gets fixed first?
A: Whatever I felt was the most significant pain points.
Q: Do you have an example of a tough prioritization choice you had to make?
A: Scheduling retrospectives vs getting documentation visible.
Q: How did you make a choice?
A: I felt the documentation was the biggest gap, and other people could take on the retrospective.
Q: Like who?
A: The product owner.
Q: Did they wind up doing it? Who did you have to convince?
A: Mostly had to convince the other developers.
Analysis
Competency asserted: Insist on the Highest Standards
Job title: Software Development Engineer (SDE II)
Vote: Mixed
The interviewer had a concern about how he described other engineers at the company, such as “they were using angular 1.4 and didn’t know what they were doing”. The example of receiving feedback was limited to a small code-review choice about passing data – more SDE I than SDE II.
The interviewer gathered mixed datapoints. Some examples are improving the development process on the team, though they were fairly usual scrum best-practices, and improving code-quality with some angular specific code-reviews. It was not raising the bar for an SDE II level.
Learnings
The interviewer didn’t get enough datapoints with the first question. Instead of probing the answers further, he decided to ask an additional question altogether. The candidate more likely did not prepare multiple stories per Leadership Principle. Come up with 2 or 3 stories per Leadership Principle. Prepare for Amazon behavioral interview questions.
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