Behavioral

Tell me about a time when you failed at work.

Product ManagerFull Stack Software EngineerBackend EngineerFrontend Engineer

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Answers

Anonymous

3.6Strong
During the beginning stage of a software design team project, I failed in terms of solid communication with my peers.
In the beginning, I laid out our plan for developing the front end and even assigned tasks to my peers so that we could tackle each one by one efficiently.
As the deadline closed in for the front end portion, none of my team did any work, so I took it upon myself to do the rest of the work.
After submitting the front end, I looked back and realized I was wrong. I shouldn’t have assumed my peers wouldn’t do any work. When situations like that occur, the right thing to do is to go to your peer and ask “Hey, have you made any progress on [so and so]? If you need any help or feel lost, I’m here. We can work together to tackle the problem.”
this was the right approach. It shows your peers that you care not only for delivering a solid product, but also showing that you care for their effort as well. This approach worked wonders and for the remaining stages of the project we worked together with great chemistry. As a team, I believe everyone should put in their efforts even if one member lacks more in skill than other. Collaboration and communication leads to the best results for team projects and it’s never safe to assume that someone will not do their work.

Anonymous

3.4Strong
during my first internship i volunteered and was tasked with researching options for a new framework for our graph component.
i researched and found a certain option which was more expensive than the others but i made a case it had much more needed features and would be worth it, using more of the excitement of being given autonomy and a chance to prove myself, than actually taking everything into consideration and tools like a swot analysis. after much resources and time and money poured into this we realised the framework wasn't compatible with the version of our aws deployment service we were using and would not be able to use the framework without rehauling every other component. altough a big failure, it taught me the responsibility that comes with these types of tasks and the importance of careful research, and being open with the team.
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Interview question asked to Full Stack Software Engineers, Program Managers, Cloud Support Engineers and other roles interviewing at Coursera, monday.com, Marchex and others: Tell me about a time when you failed at work..