Technical

Can you share the processes you use to identify and prevent engineering mistakes from happening? Tell me about a time when a mistake was made on a project you were working on. What did you learn from that experience?

Engineering Manager

Apple

Chime

Netlify

Novartis

Mitto

HubSpot

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Answers

Anonymous

4Strong
Well mistakes are inevitable but i believe in following processes which can reduce mistakes and also we can foresee and plan to avoid them.
Engineering team should follow below processes:
1.  Thorough Requirement Analysis
2. Design and code review
3. Incremental development and testing
4. Automated testing
5. Monitoring and alerting system on production
6. Post deployment support with retrospective and RCA
I was handling one project where we were integrating a 3rd party api for payment processing and we misunderstood a crucial part of their rate limiting policy of api and didn't implement exponential back off correctly.
During high traffic event, out application hit the rate limit and instead of retrying with exponential backoff we keep retrying immediately which caused a spike in failed transaction and customer complained.
We immediately halt affected service and rollback previous stable version.  We had analysed logs and confirmed that issue and changed logic and implemented exponential backoff retrying and simulated testing with high traffic and documented this as lesson learned .
We learned a lesson that rate limiting is resilience not performance and also not to assume api behaviour based on doc. try and check edge cases to avoid such issues. we have  added this learning in onboarding manual for new developers.
  • Can you share the processes you use to identify and prevent engineering mistakes from happening? Tell me about a time when a mistake was made on a project you were working on. What did you learn from that experience?
  • Can you share the processes you use to identify and prevent engineering mistakes from happening?
  • Could you describe your approach to error prevention in your engineering processes and give an example of how you have implemented it?
  • How do you ensure that your engineering processes are robust and that mistakes are caught before they become serious issues?
  • Can you walk me through a situation where you had to deal with a mistake made by an engineer on your team and what steps you took to resolve it?
  • Tell me about a time when you had to prevent a mistake from happening, and what processes or tools you used to achieve that.
  • How do you ensure that your team is following established procedures and guidelines to prevent mistakes from happening?
  • What measures do you have in place to identify and mitigate risks in your work?
  • How do you balance the need for thoroughness with the need to complete
  • What are some common mistakes that engineers in your field tend to make? How do you prevent them from happening in your work?
  • What methods do you use to ensure that your work is accurate and free from errors?
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Interview question asked to Engineering Managers interviewing at Chime, Mollie, Apple and others: Can you share the processes you use to identify and prevent engineering mistakes from happening? Tell me about a time when a mistake was made on a project you were working on. What did you learn from that experience?.