Behavior Question

Introduction

Behavior questions are very common in every interview. It is an important part to evaluate you and company if both are fit in culture aspect.

Typical Questions

Why our company?

Keypoints:

• Look through the website of this company, 'about' page.
• Learn about the area, marketing trend around the product of this company.
• Promising area, especially combined with technology and big data.
• Product is amazing. handle those scalable problems.
• Engineer-driven environment, respect to technology and engineer.
• Start-up, enthusiastic young people.

Why this position? (Why Software Engineer?)

Keypoints:

• Because love engineering, love creative work, since childhood.
• Coding is an art or craft, not just engineering.
• Also, the academic background and experience make it so.
• Techniques matched or you're interested in techniques in this company.

What would you want to acquire from this position?

Keypoints:

• Knowledge, learn more about cutting-edge technology, talk about you like learning.
• Sense of achievement, conquer those tough problem.
• Improvement on personal ability on multiple aspects.

What should you do if you have different opinion with your colleague?

Keypoints:

• Talk about your opinion, do not hide your idea.
• Make sure your idea is reasonable, has enough resource to support it.
• But the way to talk should be careful.
• Show your opinion and discuss or compare the trade-off on different idea.
• Think about another side, consider if you were that person.

How would you convince other people to adopt your suggestion?

Keypoints:

• Think wider, diversity of solution.
• Evidence search.

Example:

I think I'm not a person like to convince somebody. I don't like to judge something. I prefer to provide different aspects or solutions to other people instead of giving them a judgment. There are lot of cases from me. But I think the most important thing is trying to think more wider and more potential solutions. Do more evidence research on that. Of course you can choose one aspect or solution you most prefer, but firstly you need have more evidence to support that. Think about how to convince yourself, then convince other people.

What would you do if your boss did something 100% wrong?

Keypoints:

• Depend on the character of your boss
• Different way for different boss
• But final purpose is point it out. Because you cannot veil the wrong thing.

What's your most challenge project or achievement?

This question is very common and almost every company will ask this question. It could be an attempt to see how will you identify weaknesses that you had and what did you do to overcome them. While figuring something out is how you see a challenge, this question is aimed a bit at seeing where did you grow the most from being pushed to your limit. Here would be the main points of the question:

Keypoints:

• Background of where you were at the start of this project.
• General nature of the project.
• Results from the project, so that this is concluding the basics of the story.
• Explain where I had problems and difficulties in getting this done, what did I do to conquer them and what other changes I'd make if I was in a similar situation now.

Example:

I'd like to talk about the experience when I did my research assistant. The following are typical difficulties:

1. Took a project totally from other people's idea and build the program upon the given prototype: It looks normal. Because when you enter a big company, this is the similar scenario. You'll start to build something sophisticate from others' idea and for others. But the idea on this project are based on many ideas from previous research. Not only about the programming, but also some user behavior and psychological research. Before everything start, you have to read many paper then you can start to do something but you cannot make excuse for slow progress. So quick learning across multiple fields to keep making progress.
2. Deadline and requirement from professor: The retrieval process speed is not ideal. When I almost finished the system, I need to reconstruct the system architecture. Then I figure it out by using a kind of user profile and action driven pattern. The data which concerning about user profile is loaded when user login and the task and topic data indexing start when user begin to choose their search task. So when user start to search, our indexed data is already loaded and also only partial data which only support the current task is loaded instead of load too much unnecessary data.

What would you do if you're facing something impossible? For example, a chanllenge thing but near the dealine.

• Communication, don't avoid difficulties, don't beat around the bush

Have you did more than was required during doing a project?

Yes, but not too much than required. You shouldn't forget this is a team project. Y

Have you did something creative?

Did you do something simplify?

Please describe what's your daily work look like?

What's your future plan?

• Learning on this field
• Learning outside of this field
• Interest