Leadership Principles & Behavioral Interview Prep

Technical skill alone can only help you reach up to SDE2 position. Beyond that, if you want to crack interviews for Senior Software Engineer or Staff Software Engineer or Principal Software Engineer, you need to demonstrate ability to:

1. provide strong technical leadership,
2. deal with ambiguity,
3. take an initiative,
4. resolve conflict,
5. lead a team and drive a project to success end-to-end
6. create clarity on the outcome of your project or initiative, and quantify the success metrics.

Often when you are downleveled, it is because your behavioral interview(s) did not go very well. While telling stories of your impact and contributions, use STARR method, as discussed below:

• Situation: Describe the situation or the problem you were solving.
• Task: Talk about the task that you took responsibility for completing or the goal of your efforts. Describe what your responsibility was in that situation. What goal were you working toward?
• Action: Describe the actions that you personally took to complete the task or reach the end goal. Highlight skills or character traits addressed in the question.
• Result: explain the positive outcomes or results generated by your actions or efforts. Here, it is important to highlight quantifiable results. You may also want to emphasize what you learned from the experience or your key takeaways.
  Mention:
  1. what was the outcome of your actions?
  2. how did you measure success? how did you quantify the impact?
• Retrospection: Retrospection is looking back and reflecting on past events, memories, and actions. It's often done to learn from past experiences and identify patterns in one's behavior and decisions. With all the data you have today, what do you think you could have done differently in your project?

Before we go into more details, let's get ourselves familiar with the values and leadership principles at some of the well known companies below. I urge you to go over them really well so that you can get a hang of what most companies are looking for while assessing culture fit and leadership skill. Remember that in behavioral interviews, more than WHAT you have delivered, the interviewer is interested in knowing HOW you have delivered. Reading below articles will help you identify your past projects that would help you demonstrate the values and leadership principles that the companies are looking for:

• Netflix culture
• Amazon Leadership Principles
• Microsoft culture attributes
• Wayfair culture
• Expedia Group Values

In this complimentary course (FREE with all other courses) we will be presenting some of the best contents available for Behavioral Interview Prep. These are the same resources Abhishek Dey has used in past to crack Technical Leadership interviews at Amazon and Microsoft for Senior Software Engineer role. We are confident that if you go over all the resources below, you will be well prepared for your upcoming behavioral interviews.