Tell us about a time when you made an unpopular decision.

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

While I was working at the insurance company, I was implementing an application
that would let users submit an application to the underwriters for receiving
quotes.This was mainly for users that not approved in the first round of
application but were referred for underwriter referrals.This application would
receive sensitive data from the users to determine their eligibility. During the
implementation of this  new software application, we encountered a critical
security vulnerability related to authentication and session management. Our
team had initially planned for a smooth rollout, but this issue disrupted our
timeline.
Action:
 * Discovery: While conducting thorough testing, our QA team identified the
   vulnerability. Essentially, the application was not properly invalidating
   user sessions after logout, leaving the door open for session hijacking.
 * Impact Assessment: We quickly assessed the potential impact. If exploited,
   this vulnerability could allow unauthorized access to sensitive user data or
   even compromise the entire system.
 * Revised Priorities: Recognizing the severity, I immediately shifted our
   priorities. Instead of proceeding with feature enhancements, we focused
   solely on fixing the authentication flow.
 * Collaboration: I worked closely with developers, security experts, and
   stakeholders. We implemented proper session management, including secure
   session tokens, session timeouts, and robust logout mechanisms.
 * Communication: I kept all stakeholders informed about the situation. We had
   to adjust the project timeline, which meant communicating the delay to upper
   management and end-users.
 * Risk Mitigation: Beyond the immediate fix, we also reviewed other parts of
   the application for similar vulnerabilities. This proactive approach helped
   prevent future issues.

Result:
 * Successful Mitigation: By addressing the vulnerability promptly, we ensured
   that user sessions were secure. The revised authentication process was
   thoroughly tested and validated.
 * Project Impact: Although the change disrupted our original timeline,
   stakeholders appreciated our commitment to security. Their trust in our team
   remained intact.
 * Process Improvement: We incorporated stricter security checks into our
   development workflow, ensuring that such issues would be caught earlier in
   future projects.

Anonymous · Answer

Once while running shift, I was given a challenge on cutting down on hours to
cut cost. So therefore I was voluntarily cutting associates down. After doing so
I had my manager scrutinize my decision to let go of people early and was told
that I had made a bad decision.

Anonymous · Answer

When I need to make a unpopular decision - I try to anticipate the pushback I
can get and see how I can mitigate that.. At Auctane, I noticed that there was
no unit tests on the legacy code, I knew I had to improve on the engineering
standards. When we had a plan to migrate to monlotith  - I proposed we add unit
tests in our sprint cycle, I got a push back from the established team members
as they did not want to change thier approach to development. So I apporached
new devs on the team, they were onboard with this idea, after 2 sprints the team
saw the code with unit tests were less buggy and more modular. This encouraged
others to adopt units test while development phase well. In the end our team
achived at least 75% code coverage.

Anonymous · Answer

At Auctane, we were following a out dated deployment process. That is inspite of
we moving to monloith services.. we followed a single . It caused a big
bottleneck in our release time frame and I challenged the need for such a train
- as one of the philosophy in Microservice is independently deployable. The team
was relectant to make changes to the process (for e,g we needed to create a
seperate github repo, come up with a artifactory repo) - the team was initially
reluctant to make changes but I convinved the team that this was a good move in
the long run as it would eliminate unnecessary process and speed things. Even
though the team did not agree initially, they saw the value after we migrated to
new process. My philiopy was short term pain for long term gain.

Tell us about a time when you made an unpopular decision.

Answers