How do you ace those behavioral interview questions? What kind of questions should you expect?

It can be easy to look past this part of the interview. Yet, it's often the deal-breaker that lands you the job! I recently saw on Reddit that tech giants like Meta place an emphasis on the behavioral side during interviews. It can be an opportunity to really highlight your communication and soft skills that you don’t get to showcase in the technical portion.

When prepping for my Amazon interview, I dove deep into the Leadership Principles and used the STAR method to answers some very popular questions.

Popular prompts:

• Tell me about a past mistake.

• Tell me about a time you made a bold and difficult decision.

• Have you disagreed with someone for a project?

Here is an example I used for the prompt:

Tell me about a time you missed a deadline.

Situation:

This full-stack project was developed using test-driven development, with the requirement to complete all tests within a week to ensure comprehensive coverage of the project specifications.

Task

In the first stage of the project, I wrote tests according to the specifications.

Action

I started off by just writing generalized tests that covered basic cases without clear and descriptive titles.

Result

I found myself with over 100 test cases and I spent several hours looking through all the tests and to find the edges cases I missed. My undescriptive titles resulted in a lot of overlapping cases that lead to me spending more time than necessary.

I learned that it is valuable to have a test plan before you start writing tests. This will help you visualize certain edge cases you may be missing.

Before the next checkpoint, I made sure to organize my test cases into folders and I used descriptive titles.

New Video!

Be sure to check out my latest video titled: Day of a computer science student at UBC! This is my very last year at university and join me on a day where I try not to skip class :)

See you soon!