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I hate hate hate questions that are "tell me about a time when..." My mind literally goes blank. The pressure of sitting down with someone you've just met and

I hate hate hate questions that are "tell me about a time when..." My mind literally goes blank. The pressure of sitting down with someone you've just met and they are testing your memory. I don't remember times, I remember the lessons. Kind of like I can't remember any source material unless I have an intuitive understanding of it. Ask me about what I learnt when x happened - or what lessons you've learnt previously that apply. You might suggest that's what they're asking - but not in my experience. They want the actual story. Basically I now prepare fake stories before hand. Seems pointless. Give me hypothetical scenarios any day of the week. It's a me problem for not optimising for interviews, but the thought of gaming the system feels dishonest. Basically, these interview warm up questions would be incredibly useful for people like me. If I ever go for an external interview, I would make use of this. Practising for something that is useless.

consilla 4y ago
I find it useful to have 2 or 3 real stories to hand that can be modified to suit most of these types of questions.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  My problem is I usually don’t have a story, my career has been boring and stagnant. I had one of these questions tossed at me in an interview last year. Something a long the lines of a “time I faced a difficult technical challenge and how I managed to solve it”, but I didn’t have any. Well… ok not exactly true. In my professional career I’ve done more sitting around staring at the screen while bureaucrats debates than I have working on challenging technical problems. Any true difficult problems I’ve faced professionally have been predominately organizational. However I’ve been programming in general for a lot longer, and in recent years, despite finding a continuous lack of interest in programming, I am very interested in things that end with me writing code and that’s created some of the work I’m most proud of l. Ofc the interviewer wasn’t interested in any of that, as they wanted something from a position off my resume.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - ezsmi 4y ago
    > Any true difficult problems I’ve faced professionally have been predominately organizational. If I was the interviewer I would love to hear that story. Much like in political debates, answering the question asked is not required to persuade the voters. And in an interview, the end goal is to convince the voters.
avnigo 4y ago
> My mind literally goes blank. This has been exactly my experience with questions like this. My brain just doesn't archive memories in that way at all and feels totally backwards to me. To answer questions like those, I'd have to sit down and think for some minutes to re-index all my past experiences to fit the framework of that specific question. I don't know if this is a shortcoming of my memory or character, but all this has done in the past was to make me sit down and prep examples for every possible "tell me about a time when..." question, which I find an absolutely grueling exercise. It's not that I'm not an introspective person or learn from my past experiences; I just don't frame them in my mind in a way that I'd be able to single out specific past situations for an immediate retelling, especially during an interview. I would go as far as to guessing that most people are probably like that, but we've accepted this is how interviews work, hence all the interview prep for questions like that.
- deleted 4y ago
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alimov 4y ago
I agree with you. Those kinds of questions feel awful, and it doesn’t feel great to make one up either. In the past I’ve tried to be honest and said that I don’t have a particular story (or w.e they called it in the question) but that I have something that I can to a similar situation and like you suggested I would also talk about what I learned / took away from that experience.
wilde 4y ago
It’s similar to how whiteboarding is an inaccurate but useful model of coding ability. I’ve had candidates who could answer in general detail how they would implement an algorithm, but struggle to produce working code. The purpose of these behavioral questions is to get you to produce details about how you actually act at work in challenging circumstances. If we reject these models I think we’d be stuck with contract-to-hire as our evaluation model which seems more stressful for both sides.
- deleted 4y ago
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- wutbrodo 4y ago
  > The purpose of these behavioral questions is to get you to produce details about how you actually act at work in challenging circumstances. I think the idea is not that these are low-signal, but that the _recall_ of stories like these is not a given. I think the whiteboard example is apt, as both are nonzero-signal exercises that can be torpedoed by a lack of preparation that has nothing to do with your actual problem-solving ability. It's universally-known that you need to practice for whiteboard-style coding questions, but I guess it hasn't yet seeped into our cultural knowledge that you need to do the same for behavioral-style questions. I'm currently in the middle of a jobhunt and I feel like I just independently discovered it.
strikelaserclaw 4y ago
Modern interviews are mostly just an exercise in preparation.
coverup 4y ago
I find these types of questions invaluable as an interviewer, at least for mid-level to senior roles. And you're right, I am looking for an actual story, not just the lessons learned. The problem with just asking about lessons learned is that anyone can memorize and rattle off a set of best practices they found in a blog post somewhere. That doesn't tell me whether they have relevant experience or not. Asking to tell me about a time when X happened and how they dealt with it cuts right to the chase, and I'm afraid there's a big difference in a response that comes straight from memory and one that's fudged or invented. The initial story might be great, but most people visibly struggle to keep inventing answers to probing follow-up questions about what happened. ("Did you consider Y as a solution? Would it have worked in this case?") I sympathize, though - it's not like our brains have all our work experience indexed and readily available. The interviewer's choice of X is crucial. If the prompt is too specific, most candidates genuinely won't have a good answer. Too general and it won't help select for this role in particular. An incidental nice thing about this type of question for candidates is that it can give them a sense of what this role at this company is actually like without their having to ask. I often even phrase it as "One of the challenges we're facing as a team is X. Can you tell me about a time when you faced something similar?" The discussions that follow tend to tell me loud and clear whether the candidate is a fit for the role. Now, although I'm claiming fake stories are easy to spot, I don't know what I don't know. It's possible someone has taken me for a ride and I ended up giving them the 'strong yes'. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If you're able to craft a sufficiently detailed fake story and talk about it off the cuff for a while in depth, then you probably have enough relevant experience anyway!
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  I can't say whether this would help GP, but as someone who also struggles with these questions the main thing I'd ask for from the interviewer is time to think. I may need to pause for a solid 60+ seconds to go through my memories, please don't take that the wrong way.
  - AyyWS 4y ago
    I agree 100%. Also write down your star answers before an interview. I had 3 pages (took ~12 hours) of STAR stories/answers before anyone asked me a question.
kageneko 4y ago
I had the same problem with these questions. Then one day a recruiter said to me, "kageneko, your engineering skills are on top, but your question answering is really bad. I think it would help if you wrote down some questions and answers beforehand." So, I did. I tried to remember every question every recruiter had asked me (and started taking notes from then on). I wrote down 1-2 paragraph answers for each question. I found that just the act of writing down these answers and reviewing them later helped even when the interviewer would ask questions that were not on my practice sheet. It would nudge my memory and keep things fresh and a lot of things could be used for related topics.
ravenstine 4y ago
Those questions can also work against you if your career has been relatively drama free. Like yeah, there have been some incidents during my background as a software engineer, good and bad, but they were pretty straight forward events. Incidents were simple to correct. The further I got into my career, the less often anything memorable has happened. I'd struggle to remember the last time I had to put out a fire or struggle to implement a novel solution. As you say, I have lessons I've learned, but my memory doesn't linger on a lot of individual events. I think I've gotten pretty good at handling said interview questions, but internally I'm shrugging my mind's shoulders.
belter 4y ago
GPT-3 for Interviews?
objclxt 4y ago
> Give me hypothetical scenarios any day of the week. Hypothetical scenarios are just that, hypothetical. Competencies are much better evaluated through evidence, rather than speculation. A classic example here would be conflict resolution: if you ask someone “how would you solve a conflict at work” you typically get a very standard - and often rehearsed - answer, whereas if you ask “tell me about a conflict you had at work” you end up with something much rawer and more revealing. The way we imagine we deal with conflict is often not how we actually behave. Of course, not everyone has an answer to these questions. If I’m interviewing someone who’s only a year or so out of college they’re unlikely to have a wealth of work related stories to pull from. A good interviewer recognises this, and adapts the questions to fit the background. Perhaps you’ve never experienced a conflict at work, but you definitely will have elsewhere (perhaps, for a college grad, at a student group or team project).
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bg24 4y ago
Yes, sir. 6+ months of diligent preparation. Else you are competing w/ candidates who are doing those preps.
rascul 4y ago
Interviews are part of why I work for myself now, and partly because of these questions. I might remember a specific implementation detail from 15 years ago but I can't even remember if I ate breakfast today.
- rascul 4y ago
  So after thinking about it for the past 45 minutes, I don't think I ate breakfast today, nor do I recall stopping at any of the traffic lights that I would have had to stop at on drive this morning. But I recall a shell script maybe a decade ago that behaved differently between POSIX compliant shells due to the differences in how they handled processes in a pipeline. That's when I discovered POSIX was not unambiguous.
wutbrodo 4y ago
> Basically I now prepare fake stories before hand. Seems pointless. Give me hypothetical scenarios any day of the week. I'm with you on this, as I find on-the-spot recall pretty hard too, especially depending on my mental state. I've just started doing a career retrospective before every job hunt, with an eye towards extracting communicable takeaways that can be communicated in interviews. It's actually a very useful exercise, excluding the part where I have to find a way to articulate the takeaways. But I've found that, surprisingly, getting decent coverage of the stuff I learned from my job makes it a lot easier to answer arbitrary recall questions
bogwog 4y ago
Someone once asked me what was the most interesting bug I ever fixed. How the hell do I honestly answer that on the spot? Human memory is notoriously weak, and I don’t write down my bug fixes into a diary. I ended up just making up a fake story on the spot that was uninteresting and barely coherent. That was the first question I was asked in the interview, and made me nervous for the rest of it. Didn’t get the job. Clearly I should have taken an improv class in preparation. But yeah, I learned the same lesson as you: prepare and rehearse a bunch of fake stories in advance. Completely stupid waste of time, but necessary. It could be an interesting part of the interview that reveals a lot about the candidate, but realistically it’s going to favor the people with rehearsed fake stories. What are the chances that your genuine real-life experience is more interesting than someone else’s fake one specifically crafted to be as interesting as possible?
- wollsmoth 4y ago
  Yeaaaah. I got nailed with something like this too. I actually started talking about one bug and kind of confused it with another similar bug. I probably sounded like a moron or a liar and they passed. Was a shame. But I guess I should really rehearse my "STAR" stories :-|
- allenu 4y ago
  To me, it looks like questions about things like "most interesting bug" are unintentionally going to be biased towards more junior developers. Once you have a lot of experience under your belt, bugs and fixes sort of all look the same. They're no longer novel. I don't know how I'm supposed to wade through 20 years of experience and recall "the most interesting bug I ever fixed". Now, if I had 2-5 years of experience, that would likely be super easy to recall.
  - izacus 4y ago
    My experience is exactly the opposite: I've never met a senior engineer who wouldn't have one of those bizarre bug debugging / implementation stories.
    - 4y ago
martius 4y ago
I'm a Googler and, like many googlers, I ask this type of questions during interviews. The recommendation for interviewers is to select a mix between past stories and hypothetical scenarios.
time_to_smile 4y ago
I'm really struggling to understand how telling someone about the things you've done in the past is a tough ask. "Tell me about a time when a project didn't turn out as expected" or "Tell me about a time when you disagreed with your manager" are common variants of this question, and honestly if you don't have these experiences you just might not be experienced enough for a role. Telling stories about the things you've done is an essential part of human communication, not some weird "game" that hiring managers have come up with to mess with you. In a very practical sense, if you can't explain things that happened to you it's going to be really hard for you to communicate issue involving solving problems with software. What does make sense is plan old interview anxiety. Rather than make up stories walk though your resume and just refresh your memory of how projects went, what lessons did you learn from the projects, what was surprisingly easy, surprisingly hard etc.
- Rebelgecko 4y ago
  I'm inclined to agree with this. I often rant to my friends about weird bugs I've been hit by or the one guy I worked with who went out of his way to create drama. I can't imagine that's a unique practice. If I'm talking about these things in an interview, I just repeat stories I've told before but with toned down profanity. On the flip side, I'm super skeptical if I'm interviewing someone and say "tell me about a time when a project didn't go well" and they insist that all of their projects have always gone smoothly, even after I prompt that they to go far back as high school group projects.
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ineptech 4y ago
Just ignore the question and tell a story you wanted to tell anyway. "Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a coworker" == "I know you have some stories about great things you've done in your career. I want to hear those stories - that's the whole point of this interview - but I don't know what to ask, so I am giving you a very open-ended prompt, on the assumption that at least one of your stories included some kind of disagreement with a coworker." edit to add: don't make something up. Besides dishonesty being generally bad for a variety of reasons, it's very likely that the interviewer is better at spotting liars than you are at lying.
xen0 4y ago
Most of my interview prep when I was last looking for a job was basically how to handle these type of questions. It took me a while, but I ended up with a lot of notes describing my past experiences. That way there was no memory test; all the hard work had been done. I really recommend preparing for them; think hard about your projects, things you've done, why you did what you did, and so on. If you need prompts, I found Amazon's leadership principles (cringy though they may be) to be a good starting point. In fact, having prepared for Amazon's, everyone else's was easy. Now I ask these questions and it's super obvious when people haven't prepared for them. I feel bad sometimes. I personally prefer them to the hypotheticals, but people do tend to freeze up.
akhmatova 4y ago
My mind literally goes blank. Understandable, given that you are a mere human being. But if it's helpful, what they're really telling you is: "Look, we're just ticking boxes here. Go home and think up, or just use our search engine to look for a sufficient number of fake, but expected answers to this question. Then re-apply in 6 months."
wildrhythms 4y ago
"Tell me about a time when" is the bottom of the barrel for interview questions. I have never had a good interview experience that included that particular question.
dominotw 4y ago
> Basically I now prepare fake stories before hand. I think interviews these days expect you to do prep before the interviews. Reciters even give you a list of these before hand. People practice (semi)fake answers to these and get the job.

consilla 4y ago

I find it useful to have 2 or 3 real stories to hand that can be modified to suit most of these types of questions.

the_only_law 4y ago
My problem is I usually don’t have a story, my career has been boring and stagnant. I had one of these questions tossed at me in an interview last year. Something a long the lines of a “time I faced a difficult technical challenge and how I managed to solve it”, but I didn’t have any. Well… ok not exactly true. In my professional career I’ve done more sitting around staring at the screen while bureaucrats debates than I have working on challenging technical problems. Any true difficult problems I’ve faced professionally have been predominately organizational. However I’ve been programming in general for a lot longer, and in recent years, despite finding a continuous lack of interest in programming, I am very interested in things that end with me writing code and that’s created some of the work I’m most proud of l. Ofc the interviewer wasn’t interested in any of that, as they wanted something from a position off my resume.
- deleted 4y ago
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- ezsmi 4y ago
  > Any true difficult problems I’ve faced professionally have been predominately organizational. If I was the interviewer I would love to hear that story. Much like in political debates, answering the question asked is not required to persuade the voters. And in an interview, the end goal is to convince the voters.

avnigo 4y ago

> My mind literally goes blank. This has been exactly my experience with questions like this. My brain just doesn't archive memories in that way at all and feels totally backwards to me. To answer questions like those, I'd have to sit down and think for some minutes to re-index all my past experiences to fit the framework of that specific question. I don't know if this is a shortcoming of my memory or character, but all this has done in the past was to make me sit down and prep examples for every possible "tell me about a time when..." question, which I find an absolutely grueling exercise. It's not that I'm not an introspective person or learn from my past experiences; I just don't frame them in my mind in a way that I'd be able to single out specific past situations for an immediate retelling, especially during an interview. I would go as far as to guessing that most people are probably like that, but we've accepted this is how interviews work, hence all the interview prep for questions like that.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

alimov 4y ago

I agree with you. Those kinds of questions feel awful, and it doesn’t feel great to make one up either. In the past I’ve tried to be honest and said that I don’t have a particular story (or w.e they called it in the question) but that I have something that I can to a similar situation and like you suggested I would also talk about what I learned / took away from that experience.

wilde 4y ago

It’s similar to how whiteboarding is an inaccurate but useful model of coding ability. I’ve had candidates who could answer in general detail how they would implement an algorithm, but struggle to produce working code. The purpose of these behavioral questions is to get you to produce details about how you actually act at work in challenging circumstances. If we reject these models I think we’d be stuck with contract-to-hire as our evaluation model which seems more stressful for both sides.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wutbrodo 4y ago
> The purpose of these behavioral questions is to get you to produce details about how you actually act at work in challenging circumstances. I think the idea is not that these are low-signal, but that the _recall_ of stories like these is not a given. I think the whiteboard example is apt, as both are nonzero-signal exercises that can be torpedoed by a lack of preparation that has nothing to do with your actual problem-solving ability. It's universally-known that you need to practice for whiteboard-style coding questions, but I guess it hasn't yet seeped into our cultural knowledge that you need to do the same for behavioral-style questions. I'm currently in the middle of a jobhunt and I feel like I just independently discovered it.

strikelaserclaw 4y ago

Modern interviews are mostly just an exercise in preparation.

coverup 4y ago

I find these types of questions invaluable as an interviewer, at least for mid-level to senior roles. And you're right, I am looking for an actual story, not just the lessons learned. The problem with just asking about lessons learned is that anyone can memorize and rattle off a set of best practices they found in a blog post somewhere. That doesn't tell me whether they have relevant experience or not. Asking to tell me about a time when X happened and how they dealt with it cuts right to the chase, and I'm afraid there's a big difference in a response that comes straight from memory and one that's fudged or invented. The initial story might be great, but most people visibly struggle to keep inventing answers to probing follow-up questions about what happened. ("Did you consider Y as a solution? Would it have worked in this case?") I sympathize, though - it's not like our brains have all our work experience indexed and readily available. The interviewer's choice of X is crucial. If the prompt is too specific, most candidates genuinely won't have a good answer. Too general and it won't help select for this role in particular. An incidental nice thing about this type of question for candidates is that it can give them a sense of what this role at this company is actually like without their having to ask. I often even phrase it as "One of the challenges we're facing as a team is X. Can you tell me about a time when you faced something similar?" The discussions that follow tend to tell me loud and clear whether the candidate is a fit for the role. Now, although I'm claiming fake stories are easy to spot, I don't know what I don't know. It's possible someone has taken me for a ride and I ended up giving them the 'strong yes'. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If you're able to craft a sufficiently detailed fake story and talk about it off the cuff for a while in depth, then you probably have enough relevant experience anyway!

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
I can't say whether this would help GP, but as someone who also struggles with these questions the main thing I'd ask for from the interviewer is time to think. I may need to pause for a solid 60+ seconds to go through my memories, please don't take that the wrong way.
- AyyWS 4y ago
  I agree 100%. Also write down your star answers before an interview. I had 3 pages (took ~12 hours) of STAR stories/answers before anyone asked me a question.

kageneko 4y ago

I had the same problem with these questions. Then one day a recruiter said to me, "kageneko, your engineering skills are on top, but your question answering is really bad. I think it would help if you wrote down some questions and answers beforehand." So, I did. I tried to remember every question every recruiter had asked me (and started taking notes from then on). I wrote down 1-2 paragraph answers for each question. I found that just the act of writing down these answers and reviewing them later helped even when the interviewer would ask questions that were not on my practice sheet. It would nudge my memory and keep things fresh and a lot of things could be used for related topics.

ravenstine 4y ago

Those questions can also work against you if your career has been relatively drama free. Like yeah, there have been some incidents during my background as a software engineer, good and bad, but they were pretty straight forward events. Incidents were simple to correct. The further I got into my career, the less often anything memorable has happened. I'd struggle to remember the last time I had to put out a fire or struggle to implement a novel solution. As you say, I have lessons I've learned, but my memory doesn't linger on a lot of individual events. I think I've gotten pretty good at handling said interview questions, but internally I'm shrugging my mind's shoulders.

belter 4y ago

GPT-3 for Interviews?

objclxt 4y ago

> Give me hypothetical scenarios any day of the week. Hypothetical scenarios are just that, hypothetical. Competencies are much better evaluated through evidence, rather than speculation. A classic example here would be conflict resolution: if you ask someone “how would you solve a conflict at work” you typically get a very standard - and often rehearsed - answer, whereas if you ask “tell me about a conflict you had at work” you end up with something much rawer and more revealing. The way we imagine we deal with conflict is often not how we actually behave. Of course, not everyone has an answer to these questions. If I’m interviewing someone who’s only a year or so out of college they’re unlikely to have a wealth of work related stories to pull from. A good interviewer recognises this, and adapts the questions to fit the background. Perhaps you’ve never experienced a conflict at work, but you definitely will have elsewhere (perhaps, for a college grad, at a student group or team project).

deleted 4y ago

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bg24 4y ago

Yes, sir. 6+ months of diligent preparation. Else you are competing w/ candidates who are doing those preps.

rascul 4y ago

Interviews are part of why I work for myself now, and partly because of these questions. I might remember a specific implementation detail from 15 years ago but I can't even remember if I ate breakfast today.

rascul 4y ago
So after thinking about it for the past 45 minutes, I don't think I ate breakfast today, nor do I recall stopping at any of the traffic lights that I would have had to stop at on drive this morning. But I recall a shell script maybe a decade ago that behaved differently between POSIX compliant shells due to the differences in how they handled processes in a pipeline. That's when I discovered POSIX was not unambiguous.

wutbrodo 4y ago

> Basically I now prepare fake stories before hand. Seems pointless. Give me hypothetical scenarios any day of the week. I'm with you on this, as I find on-the-spot recall pretty hard too, especially depending on my mental state. I've just started doing a career retrospective before every job hunt, with an eye towards extracting communicable takeaways that can be communicated in interviews. It's actually a very useful exercise, excluding the part where I have to find a way to articulate the takeaways. But I've found that, surprisingly, getting decent coverage of the stuff I learned from my job makes it a lot easier to answer arbitrary recall questions

bogwog 4y ago

Someone once asked me what was the most interesting bug I ever fixed. How the hell do I honestly answer that on the spot? Human memory is notoriously weak, and I don’t write down my bug fixes into a diary. I ended up just making up a fake story on the spot that was uninteresting and barely coherent. That was the first question I was asked in the interview, and made me nervous for the rest of it. Didn’t get the job. Clearly I should have taken an improv class in preparation. But yeah, I learned the same lesson as you: prepare and rehearse a bunch of fake stories in advance. Completely stupid waste of time, but necessary. It could be an interesting part of the interview that reveals a lot about the candidate, but realistically it’s going to favor the people with rehearsed fake stories. What are the chances that your genuine real-life experience is more interesting than someone else’s fake one specifically crafted to be as interesting as possible?

wollsmoth 4y ago
Yeaaaah. I got nailed with something like this too. I actually started talking about one bug and kind of confused it with another similar bug. I probably sounded like a moron or a liar and they passed. Was a shame. But I guess I should really rehearse my "STAR" stories :-|
allenu 4y ago
To me, it looks like questions about things like "most interesting bug" are unintentionally going to be biased towards more junior developers. Once you have a lot of experience under your belt, bugs and fixes sort of all look the same. They're no longer novel. I don't know how I'm supposed to wade through 20 years of experience and recall "the most interesting bug I ever fixed". Now, if I had 2-5 years of experience, that would likely be super easy to recall.
- izacus 4y ago
  My experience is exactly the opposite: I've never met a senior engineer who wouldn't have one of those bizarre bug debugging / implementation stories.
  - 4y ago

martius 4y ago

I'm a Googler and, like many googlers, I ask this type of questions during interviews. The recommendation for interviewers is to select a mix between past stories and hypothetical scenarios.

time_to_smile 4y ago

I'm really struggling to understand how telling someone about the things you've done in the past is a tough ask. "Tell me about a time when a project didn't turn out as expected" or "Tell me about a time when you disagreed with your manager" are common variants of this question, and honestly if you don't have these experiences you just might not be experienced enough for a role. Telling stories about the things you've done is an essential part of human communication, not some weird "game" that hiring managers have come up with to mess with you. In a very practical sense, if you can't explain things that happened to you it's going to be really hard for you to communicate issue involving solving problems with software. What does make sense is plan old interview anxiety. Rather than make up stories walk though your resume and just refresh your memory of how projects went, what lessons did you learn from the projects, what was surprisingly easy, surprisingly hard etc.

Rebelgecko 4y ago
I'm inclined to agree with this. I often rant to my friends about weird bugs I've been hit by or the one guy I worked with who went out of his way to create drama. I can't imagine that's a unique practice. If I'm talking about these things in an interview, I just repeat stories I've told before but with toned down profanity. On the flip side, I'm super skeptical if I'm interviewing someone and say "tell me about a time when a project didn't go well" and they insist that all of their projects have always gone smoothly, even after I prompt that they to go far back as high school group projects.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

ineptech 4y ago

Just ignore the question and tell a story you wanted to tell anyway. "Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a coworker" == "I know you have some stories about great things you've done in your career. I want to hear those stories - that's the whole point of this interview - but I don't know what to ask, so I am giving you a very open-ended prompt, on the assumption that at least one of your stories included some kind of disagreement with a coworker." edit to add: don't make something up. Besides dishonesty being generally bad for a variety of reasons, it's very likely that the interviewer is better at spotting liars than you are at lying.

xen0 4y ago

Most of my interview prep when I was last looking for a job was basically how to handle these type of questions. It took me a while, but I ended up with a lot of notes describing my past experiences. That way there was no memory test; all the hard work had been done. I really recommend preparing for them; think hard about your projects, things you've done, why you did what you did, and so on. If you need prompts, I found Amazon's leadership principles (cringy though they may be) to be a good starting point. In fact, having prepared for Amazon's, everyone else's was easy. Now I ask these questions and it's super obvious when people haven't prepared for them. I feel bad sometimes. I personally prefer them to the hypotheticals, but people do tend to freeze up.

akhmatova 4y ago

My mind literally goes blank. Understandable, given that you are a mere human being. But if it's helpful, what they're really telling you is: "Look, we're just ticking boxes here. Go home and think up, or just use our search engine to look for a sufficient number of fake, but expected answers to this question. Then re-apply in 6 months."

wildrhythms 4y ago

"Tell me about a time when" is the bottom of the barrel for interview questions. I have never had a good interview experience that included that particular question.

dominotw 4y ago

> Basically I now prepare fake stories before hand. I think interviews these days expect you to do prep before the interviews. Reciters even give you a list of these before hand. People practice (semi)fake answers to these and get the job.