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!

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.

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?

They don't really care what the most interesting bug is anyway, they just want to have a conversation surrounding bugs. You can also turn it to "well, in general [..]".

Also don't be afraid to say "ehm, let me think for a second", instead of feeling obliged to answer right away.

Edit: I say something along the lines of "Oof you put me on the spot now haha. What was one of yours? Maybe something comes back to me when I hear you"

I think people generally ask that in hopes to break the ice or to connect with the other person. So, either they will answer and it might nudge a memory (if they prepared/remember) or they'll blank as well and you'll have a laugh over the question and move on.

It's an interview, not an interogation! I know your livelihood depends on it, but being natural/relaxed helps your odds IMO; as it's less likely you'll get flustered or tilted. I realise this is easier said than done as I'm also plagued with anxieties and phobias, but I never saw interviewing as a stressful situation. At best, you get a job, at worst you forget about eachother in a few days lol.

Surprise, your boss' boss just decided to drop in and is asking your new guy some pointed questions about the deadline. ~Tada~, the IRS is sending someone over who wants to interview a few people. Oops, that lawyer that your clients hired are going around and subpoenaing previous employees.

"So, uh, we need you to tell us your biggest weakness. And bonus points if by the end of your story the entire interview team is crying from laughing so hard."

So ideally, the most interesting bug story response would be a story about how awesome you are at finding bugs that are introduced by other organizations than the one you were working in AND make the listener like you.

* Look this candidate can fix bugs. * Look this candidate knows not to talk about the dirty secrets of the org they are (were) a part of. And is able to defect blame to another entity. * Look this candidate makes questioners like them which will hopefully keep too much scrutiny from being applied to them.

Like write down 5-10 of these questions and answers that are somewhat common.

Write down some anecdote and more or less use the same all the time.

The same with telling about yourself write down 5-10 sentences and use that every time. Of course you probably have to update it from time to time but remember that you don't have to come up with everything on the spot.

You might not get exact same questions but if you have some things written down you can still start by rehearsed anecdote to get yourself going. Because if it is open ended question it might be more important to keep conversation going than "being correct" on your answer.

Was a shame. But I guess I should really rehearse my "STAR" stories :-|

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.

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.

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).

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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."

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.

The recommendation for interviewers is to select a mix between past stories and hypothetical scenarios.

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.

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.