Behavioral Questions Flashcards
Tell me about yourself
I currently work at a communications tech company called Twilio where I’ve been a full-stack engineer for almost 3 years. I’ve worked on a few of Twilio’s different products over that time. I work with React and Node almost on a daily basis, most of which is in Typescript. (Use AWS). The majority of my experience has been on the frontend, but I do spend a significant amount of time on the backend as well. I’m happy to go into more detail on the work I’ve done there and the tech stack I’ve used but I’ll move on for now.
My background was originally in finance. After graduating with my masters I spent about 9 years working in different finance roles. Over that time I transitioned to working more specifically on financial systems where I would customize 3rd party software to meet the needs of finance teams.
I originally joined Twilio as a Manager of Financial Systems. I managed two senior analysts in that role and our team was responsible for configuring the software that the whole company uses for budgeting, financial analysis and reporting.
I had always been interesting in software development and had used Python most of my career up to that point. During Covid I decided to officially make the transition from finance to software engineering.
Outside of work I like to code different side projects. I also like to build things with my hands. A couple years I built a deck and right now I’m converting a cargo van to camper.
I was really excited to see this role posted. It seems like a really good fit for what I’m looking for.
List projects you’ve worked on
Mobile push - initiative to add mobile push as a channel to engage. We already had email, sms, and whatsapp as channels. I worked with product, design and other engineers to scope out the work and create all the tickets. I took my 4 week recharge and team still completed work ahead of schedule. Manager credited my thorough planning for the fast execution.
Secure onboarding - year-long initiative at SendGrid to improve customer onboarding and limit bad actors from sending spam and phishing emails. There was a delicate balance between making it hard for bots to create accounts and making sure we didn’t negatively impact real customers. I researched and implemented more secure recaptcha. Also researched and implemented hidden honey pot fields (without negatively impacting users with screen readers). We also required 2FA at signup. That was the trickiest part since signup was on a separate subdomain from the app.
Experience with observability/monitoring and diagnosing problems
CloudWatch
Datadog
Grafana
Experience mentoring other engineers
Peer reviews of PRs; frame suggestions in terms of questions
What are some frontend best practices?
1) DRY, 2) write tests, 3) up-to-date documentation, 4) keep it simple / refactor, 5) lint (consistent formatting), 6) organized codebase, 7) good CI/CD tool (eg husky), 8) use semantic html (like header, nav, section, article, aside, footer, etc), 9) responsive design, 10) *accessibility, 11) *performant
What are some frontend performance optimizations?
1) CDN & browser caching, 2) pagination or infinite scroll, 3) code splitting, 4) bundle & minify (webpack), 5) virtualize long lists / windowing, 6) use the profiler in React Dev Tools, 7) keep component state local when possible (make sure you’re not re-rendering components unnecessarily), 8) lazy loading images, 9) limit http requests
College Board
SAT (now digital), PSAT, AP, CLEP, Big Future
Like a startup or tech company in terms of tech stack (cloud native, hackathons to learn new tech, always innovating)
Why I like education? Economic mobility - very important for my life, progressive social views (inspired by students, especially acceptance of different people)
Heard great things from friend
Questions for recruiter
What do you like about working at this organization? What’s one thing you would change about working there?
What’s the team like that this role is on?
*Can you tell me about the interview process and timeline?
What are the most important skills for the job?
What’s the company culture like?
*What’s the hiring manager/team like?
What’s the budget range for this role?
*What does day-to-day look like?
Vimeo
The Frontend Platform team - builds tools & libraries
Components should be composable/modular and accessible
Code should be clean, tested and performant
- Goal: help people express themselves (simplify what it takes to make, manage, and share video; the everything video platform)
- Principles: (1) Ask why, (2) Start with users, (3) Own it, (4) Be real, (5) Aim high
- ECGs (Employee Community Groups)
- 1200 employees; 350k videos uploaded daily; >300M users; 1.5M+ paid subscribers
- spending less on marketing; self-serve is shrinking (focusing on product-led growth); enterprise vertical is growing; focusing on profitability; revenue is declining single digits
- the old design system was Iris, I think (noticed misalignment on sidebar; need to update padding and remove justify-content: start)
- https://juliewongbandue.dev/ (in footer: remove width: 100% or need box-sizing: border-box)
Principles:
- Example of “Ask why”: Feature flag for AI-generated audiences
- Example of “Start with users”: Bulk delete audiences
- Example of “Own it”: Paste Sidebar component; agile capacity calculator;
- Example of “Be real”: For initiatives, use epics to org by quarter
- Example of “Aim high”: Updating dependencies (created version conflicts, especially deprecated Webpack plugin)
Questions:
- **Iris appears fairly complete already (I looked at Storybook), what components are still missing? What’s the roadmap?
- How much work overlaps Enterprise and Self Serve or are they two completely separate products?
- Where does Vimeo Central fit in? Enterprise?
- What kind of things do you work on? Video editor? Analytics? Video library? Collaboration tools?
- **Do you interact much with other engineering teams? Do you feel isolated from engineering?
- **Do you have a designer? PM?
- What tool do you use for designs? Figma?
- **What are you doing in PHP, Bash and Rust?
- *Is all of Vimeo app using Iris components or is there a different UI component library they’re migrating off of?
**Most of my questions are around what it’s like working on a design system team instead of on the product itself
- What does the roadmap for Bokeh look like?
- Vimeo is (simplifying) focusing more on self-service, appealing to creators, and making significant progress and a few things instead of a little bit of progress on lots of things. What does this look like in practice?
@@- Sounds like frontend and backend are tightly coupled right now using PHP. What sort of engineering challenges/frustrations does this present day-to-day and what’s the timeline/plan for decoupling them?
@@- What does interaction between engineers, PM, and designer look like for a design system? - Is there on-call rotation? Any kind of observability or monitoring?
@@- What would onboarding look like on the team? - What’s the most frustrating part about working at Vimeo?
- What do you like about working at Vimeo?
@@- How has shrinking top-line and focus on profitability affected career development (eg variable comp, raises, promotions)? (eg at Twilio they’ve significantly scaled back RSU grants and replaced with bonuses, smaller raise pool, and fewer promotions). Growth opportunities? - What does success (meets expectations +) look like in this role? What would an over-achiever / top rating look like?
@@- What is Tyler’s management style like?
@@- What does process look like for deciding what to work on next? - What does internal mobility look like? Is there much?
- What are the weaknesses of the team?
@@- Who would I work most closely with? Is the work fairly independent or collaborative? Describe the team that I would work with in this position - PRs, code reviews, CI/CD pipeline / deployment cycle? Or just publishing to npm? What does DevOps look like for your team?
- Core working hours? (given that team is spread across time zones)
- What does the full tech stack look like? What tools do you work with day-to-day? Storybook? Jest? CI/CD tool? GitHub? (backend, interacting with APIs?). Time spent on frontend vs backend?
- Is there budget or opportunities for continuing professional development?
- Work laptop? Mac?
@@- What does agile process look like using kanban? Do you have sprints or sprint ceremonies? What does planning look like?
How to meet Web Accessibility Standards?
Site must be:
1. Perceivable: visitors must be aware of all content on your site (eg alt text)
2. Operable: visitors must be able to use every part of your site (eg well organized navigation menu)
3. Understandable: All content should be easy to understand (eg clean & concise language and uncluttered pages)
4. Robust: HTML should be optimized for assistive technology (eg screen readers) and various devices (eg phones and tablets)
Examples:
- Alt text for images
- Keyboard navigation
- Sufficient color contrast
- Descriptive link text
- Captions/transcripts for video and audio
- Consistent navigation
- Don’t have content that disappears quickly
- Don’t use complex language or jargon
- Well structured, semantic HTML
Aria properties
- aria-label
- aria-labelledby
- aria-description
- aria-describedby
Aria states, like checked, disabled, expanded, hidden, selected, etc
Tell me about a time you didn’t agree with…
Flip
- I liked the line “those ‘tech layoffs’ you see in the news aren’t happening here!”
- Job description felt like it was written by a human
- **What happens if you can’t raise a Series A in 2024? If Flip is profitable, why raise additional funds? What investments will they be used for? (already had a $2M pre-see and $6.5M seed round at $30M valuation)
- Type hints / static type checking for Python
- Shared service(s) between verticals?
- CI/CD? PR reviews? Unit tests? DevOps / deployment process
- What does tech stack look like?
- Containers? Serverless?
- What does the day-to-day work look like? What sort of things would this person be working on?
About
- Company provides automated IVR using AI
- 25 employees?
- 200+ customers
- Founded in 2015 as RedRoute; rebranded to Flip CX in 2022
- 1.5M calls per week in 2023 * $1.5 per call * 40% automation rate * 4 weeks/month = $3.6M MRR, $43M ARR? But my notes say $6M in revenue
List of STAR examples
- Organizing epics by quarter: Co-led initiative for AI-generated recommendations; difficulty answering status of initiative; approached co-leader suggesting we org epics by quarter; he had concerns about not knowing what was in-scope for next quarter; ended up re-org and team committed to do same going forward
- Feature flag: Co-led initiative for AI-generated recommendations; needed way to test backend integration without training model, which was manually time-consuming to delete; co-lead suggested using feature flag; I raised concern we’d only ever be testing locally so makes more sense to hard-code;
- Update package versions: use npm package to share features across code bases/apps; needed to update peer dependency versions; noticed one of the packages depended on a deprecated package; I decided to find a workaround than ignore; after researching, came up with 4 options with pros/cons and recommendation; created stand-alone node server to test it out; ended up going with my proposal and didn’t have any issues;
- Bulk delete: PM said we needed to provide bulk delete for items; I raised concern that it’s a very destructive action and could lead to unintentional data loss; proposed bulk disable or db field to hide (and delete later) or feature flag; PM decided to implement bulk disable for now and see if that satisfies customer needs
- Filter/sort by audience status: users can currently sort by several fields but not status; after investigation, discovered status is computed in real-time, dependent on a couple micro-services; provided estimate of engineering effort to scope; PM decided to pause for now; proposed we could fetch all audience ids and calculate status async and save to cache, which would be available after initial load; (couldn’t filter and sort in browser because getting all the data would hit timeout);
- Improved Jira process: sprint planning took a while; I re-created capacity calculator which was accurate, easy to adjust variables, and easy to add new dates or team members, and included workstreams; we used it going forward; also kept Jira filters up-to-date;
- Rigorous documentation: kept doc with detailed notes on how to access services, set things up like feature flags, how to dev and test services locally, etc; updated wiki when appropriate
- Disabled button tooltip: Designs included disabled button with tooltip; disabled button isn’t focusable so it’s not accessible for assistive technologies like screen readers; raised issue and brainstormed alternatives with designer
- Missing components in design system: designs included component that wasn’t yet available/published; could wait for it, create our own, or use old design system; we ended up creating our own
- Example of wishing we did something differently: content template preview didn’t render liquid js
