Behavioral Questions

Question 1

What Strengths do you have & Weaknesses that you have worked upon?

Answer 1

Strengths:
1. Biggest Strength: Adaptability which needs Continous Learning
2. Growth Mindset: People need Desire
3. Strong Action Oriented (workaround limitations)

Weakness:
1. Ability to Switch b/w micro and macro view.
Sol: To have Short-term and long-term goals reviewed frequently.

Question 2

What metrics do you look for while hiring, coaching, and performance improvement?

Answer 2

ACT - DOT
1. Ability
2. Coachability
3. Critical Thinking
4. Desire
5. Ownership
6. Positivity (hiring) / Team Player (coaching)

Question 3

Interviewing: How will you find out if someone is coachable?

Answer 3

Handling of unpleasant things:
1. Taking and incorporating feedback in the interview?
2. Tell me about your biggest failure.
3. Tell me about a conflict with a colleague. E.G. Candidate said he will go to HR.

Question 4

Interviewing: How do you find out if they have a desire to grow?

Answer 4

How do you spend your time outside office hours?
To check attitude towards learning.

Question 5

Interviewing: How do you ensure they care about quality?

Answer 5

1. The way they write code (taking care of self-review, edge cases).
2. What are the weak areas in your SDLC life cycle? Why do they exist?

Question 6

Interviewing: How do you check their positivity index?

Answer 6

What are the things they will like to change in their current job?

Question 7

Promotion: What metrics do you look for promoting “Engineer level” employees?

Answer 7

1. Consistency usage of SDLC processes
2. Ability to solve real problems.

Question 8

Promotion: What metrics do you look for promoting “Senior Engineer” level employees?

Answer 8

1. Skills to work on multiple components or technologies
2. Ability to guide junior team members.
3. Enforce SDLC processes.

Question 9

Promotion: What metrics do you look for promoting “Staff Engineer” level employees?

Answer 9

1. Ability to design components
2. Ability to lead or own components.

Question 10

Why Netskope?

Answer 10

1. My vision: “Leader in Cloud & Security Domain”.
2. Security: “always-important” & “always-evolving”. Cloud: “increasing importance”
3. What I have done (pivoting & NSE 3000)?
4. Why current role is not sufficient?
5. How will the new role help?

Question 11

Tell me about yourself.
or Why shall we hire you?
or What’s your vision and how it aligns with your new role?

Answer 11

1. Who are you? Software Engineering Manager primarily focused on the backend. I have 18 years of experience with 3 years in management and leading 7 people team which includes backend and frontend teams.
2. Three notable achievements (4 new products, NSE 3000, AVC)
3. Pivots in Career (Wi-Fi to 60GHz Leadership to Cloud pivot)
   Highlight, Customers’ delight in Wi-Fi.
4. Skills (5) impactful for the new role: Cloud, Security, Scale, Leadership & Networking

Question 12

Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with your colleague.
Tip: Anchor up as much as possible. E.G. Ajay not Bhavin

Answer 12

Ajay tried to take away PON and asked me to focus on NSE only.
Note: Talk about conflict with a senior colleague not with a junior.

Question 13

Talk about a time when you had to deliver on a tight deadline.
or
Tell me about a project that had people-related challenges.
What are things to look out for?

Answer 13

Explain cnMaestro as a platform. Interfacing with the device team.
Change in the approach. Start regression on a fixed date.
Doing 5 features. Bishal felt sick.
Two features falling behind. Talked to stakeholders. Sacrificed one for quality.
Retrospective: Ask the device team to clarify the feature within a given time.

Things to look out for
1. Communication, Mitigation plan
2. How did you respond internally and externally?
3. Proactiveness, Transparency in Communication
4. Course Correction
5. Retrospect. Can you put it as a process?

Question 14

Talk about a time when you had to resolve a conflict between two team members.

Answer 14

Senior Architect vs UI/UX Designer
Usability vs Consistency
Three Buckets
1. Global Changes
2. Product-specific changes
3. Pushed back or Postponed
Result: Better usability vs Signal “We are open to feedback”

Question 15

How do you stay educated on best practices/industry trends?

Answer 15

1. Online: Categories (customers, tech stack, tech blogs, analysts, cloud, security, tech titans)
2. Offline: Strategic Networks

Purpose: To understand technology trends, industry trends, and customers’ changed behaviors to discover new opportunities.

Question 16

Feedback as a manager?

Answer 16

1. Annual Engagement Survey by Glint
   Overall score: 87%
   To improve: Belongingness (80%)
2. Feedback from the Team to understand
   Remote teams with reduced interactions
3. Monthly: “Things Beyond Work”

Question 17

Tell me about a project that had resource or logistical challenges.

Answer 17

More work on the front end.
Sagar converted to full stack and I pitched for the backend.
Result: Release schedule derisked and Engineer also happy.

Question 18

Tell me about a time you significantly improved the morale and productivity of your team.

Answer 18

TLM
1. Training: Yocto which impacted 10+ people
2. Shift Left Culture: Bug Bash
3. Motivation: Nobody left the team till now. Understanding their needs, E.G. Somdeb elevation.

Question 19

How do you approach one-on-ones with your team and what do you discuss?

Answer 19

Remote Team: One-on-ones & Team Meetings very important
1. General Well-Being
Stuff from Personal Life
Happy with Work
Integrated with the team
2. Performance Remarks
3. Coaching / Development Feedback (ACT-DOT): Data-driven

Question 20

Tell me about a time you had to let go of a poor performer.

Answer 20

Ability & Coach-ability.
Vamsee
Retrospect: Isolation between different interview rounds

Question 21

Tell me about a time you successfully took a poor performer and turned them around for the better.

Answer 21

Issues: Absenteeism, Poor decision-making (shortcuts).
Reasons:
1. Toxic Relationships
2. Poor financial choices
Offered Suggestions & Isolation of Personal and Professional life.

Question 22

How do you identify top performers and manage them differently?

Answer 22

1. Somdeb: The front-end guy doing well.
2. Increased his exposure to the back end.
   Educated him about the backend, and
   data modeling.
3. Leading scrum and integration of new products.
   Save my time for doing more important things.

Question 23

How do you support diversity?

Answer 23

1. During Interviews: “No similarity Bias”
2. Rewards & Recognition: Based on Interviews
3. Opportunities assignment: Evaluation of fitment
4. Spending the right amount of time with each team member. Mistake: Spending time with Ganesh

Question 24

Tell me about the biggest team you’ve built or overseen

Answer 24

Team of 7 developers and 4 QA members.
Composition: 2 products, 1 Lead in each team.
Processes to support teams:
SDLC processes, JIRA Dashboards, Bug Bash for shift left culture, automation testing for APIs definition.

Question 25

Describe your leadership style/philosophy.

Answer 25

LGE
1. Very Good Listener: Encourage people to give their opinions. However, I make sure the best ideas win, which is not necessarily a democratic one.
2. I actively contribute to people’s growth. It is quite a difficult exercise as a coach. People don’t see blind spots many times. E.G. By default, a front-end engineer will not think about becoming full stack.
3. Empathetic: It reflects in the way you handle mistakes & deliver feedback. EPIC branch delete.

Question 26

How do you set the mission, vision, and values for your team?

Answer 26

Customer Centric.
Not Employee or Competitor or Company Centric.

Mission: Help customers to continuously reduce the effort of managing large-scale networks.
Vision:
Not more than 15 mins to configure a site
Not more than 5 mins to understand and drill down the anomaly.

Values: Driven by Company Values supplemented by my values:
1. Customer Delight
2. Teamwork
3. Innovation
4. Accountability
5. Grow People
6. Serve the Community