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Behavioral > Technical Leadership > Flashcards

Technical Leadership Flashcards

1
Q

Tell a situation where you had conflict with your manager

A

Layoff for data infra team - we are losing almost all engineers. I spoke to my manager to understand his reasonings. He was trying to protect the senior engineers and mentioned it was hard to justify infra cost.
I appreciated his attempt to help senior engineers, and also got an opportunity to fix the issue for my team I realized leader ship did not fully comprehend the requirements for the projects we are doing .
I created a two-year roadmap explaining the project we are doing and why it was critical to the company we were planning on migration of one of the most critical system that would reduce our on-call and also only one engineer, currently know about the system. This health report for Rakesh to my leadership why not to lay off.
Eventually, we still lost two engineers but they do ship agreed to make my team full by internal transfer.

  • Kickstarter: Central platform is needed.
  • LightRight (can be used in disagree and commit)
  • Soul DU (handling conflicts)
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2
Q

Tell a bad design decision you made

A

SMRHistory logging to BQ
LSP required redis

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3
Q

Tell a situation where you used your influence to get things done

A

Hiring - Remote, EU, APAC
Superset
Kickstarter

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4
Q

What are you most skilled at? (superpower)

A

Solving a problem
Kickstarter , event tools

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5
Q

Describe a situation in which you were able to use persuasion to successfully convince someone to see things your way.

A

Why, to migrate from tableau twist, single bi tool
BQ on demand pricing not an issue
BQ timezone decision
Runes V2
Kickstarter
DI layoffs

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6
Q

Describe a time when you were faced with a stressful situation that demonstrated your coping skills.

A

Recent superset release
Data deletion during BigQuery migration

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7
Q

Give me a specific example of a time when you used good judgment and logic in solving a problem.

A

Juan performance management
Todea x-team issues

Kickstarter
Superset release issue
US remote hiring
WD docker issue

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8
Q

Give me an example of a time when you set a goal and were able to meet or achieve it.

A

Find successor WD - prepare WD for continued profitability.

Recreate our game server in new architecture - improve based on our learnings.

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9
Q

Give me a specific example of a time when you had to conform to a policy with which you did not agree.

A

Moving WD engineers -> Chef
Separation of tech stack by manager.

Not relevant for EM
Reducing CI staffing post Chef - I agreed and focused on wrapping up and migrating projects to free up more folks for when the time comes.
We are focusing on automation, improving our low level libraries whenever we get time. We are getting ourselves battle prepared.

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10
Q

Please discuss an important written document you were required to complete.

A

SS Release documentation
Estimates for Avatar/Days Gone/Apple?
International hiring proposal

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11
Q

Tell me about a time when you had to go above and beyond the call of duty in order to get a job done.

A

Contract negotiations in India
WD outsourcing

Training for BQ
Seasons hack fix - weekend and working with players

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12
Q

Tell me about a time when you had too many things to do and you were required to prioritize your tasks.

A

WD transition - prioritize hiring
DI team issues - fix prioritization

Superset feature request prioritization
Dragon cost savings

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13
Q

What is your typical way of dealing with conflict? Give me an example.

A

Conflict with DU
Issue with marketing and superset
Design conflicts
- LSP shard vs batching
- BQ timezone issue
- BQ data deletion

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14
Q

Tell me about a time you were able to successfully deal with another person even when that individual may not have personally liked you (or vice versa).

A

Jim

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15
Q

Tell me about a difficult decision you’ve made in the last year.

A

Layoff
Shutting down india effort
WD Outsourcing

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16
Q

Give me an example of a time when something you tried to accomplish and failed.

A

SMRHistory migration
India hiring

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17
Q

Give me an example of when you showed initiative and took the lead.

A

Kickstarter
Docker for local dev
Blog
India hiring

BQ migration
Event tooling
WD cost saving and outsourcing

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18
Q

Tell me about a recent situation in which you had to deal with a very upset customer or coworker.

A

Yu Guan LR
Soul DU

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19
Q

Give me an example of a time when you motivated others.

A

CI post chef failure
WD during staff reduction

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20
Q

Tell me about a time when you delegated a project effectively.

A

Deleting a project effectively is he responsibility for a manager whenever I assign some project to someone, I make sure it’s aligned with their career interests. The project should be challenging enough, but not too much for them to fail. 
PX tool - Engineer needed to learn stakeholder management and work with x-function

Server cost reduction - Engineer needed the opportunity to do r&d write tech specs and solve issues with ambiguity.

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21
Q

Give me an example of a time when you used your debugging skills to solve a problem.

A

Zombie Mapreduce
Superset scale issue

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22
Q

Tell me about a time when you missed an obvious solution to a problem.

A

WD local development- speed issue
Redis LSP
Redshift
Wd source, engineer tech stack alignment

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23
Q

Describe a time when you anticipated potential problems and developed preventive measures.

A

BQ cost quota
Superset Slicing
LSP

Managerial
- DI layoff
- WD profitability - operational efficiency

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24
Q

Tell me about a time when you were forced to make an unpopular decision.

A

Batching instead of Sharding - more time, drop current priorities
Superset feature drops

Managerial
- Layoff
- WD eng transition
- WD outsourcing

25
Q

Describe a time when you set your sights too high (or too low)

A

India hiring high
Server cost - low?

26
Q

Describe a technically challenging projects you led

A

Server cost reduction
BigQuery migration

27
Q

Describe a situation where you failed

A

BigQuery release data loss
Superset rebase issue
Server Cost - SMRHistory migration failed

Managerial
- Samantha situation
- SS Marketing
- todea project management issues?

28
Q

Describe a conflict you handled

A

Conflict with DU
Marketing Superset release
BQ data loss - difficult situations
BQ - timezone issue
LSP - sharding va batching

29
Q

Describe a situation where you disagreed and committed

A

LR - Manager convinced that JS isn’t that hard to learn and has the ability to hot deploy. I disagreed that this won’t be loved by engineers. He argued that we should train engineers as needed and focus on the ability to hot deploy as something beneficial to our players. I disagreed on the real benefits of that but committed to avoid continuing delays
Central infra reduction

30
Q

Describe a situation where you had x-team impact

A
31
Q

Describe a situation where you had x-functional impact

A
32
Q

Tell a project where you worked on performance improvement

A
33
Q

Explain how you resolved an issue in a Production system

A

Superset scale issue
Dragon zombie mr
AB test logging issue

34
Q

Did you ever work on a project involving orchestration?

A

Docker container orchestration
Mapreduce for game servers
Data Infra tasking system
Todea map reduce + tasking system

35
Q

Tell a recent technical nitty gritty thing you learned recently

A

Gae mr issue with zombie
NoSQL indexes aren’t really free
BQ json vs record type
HTTP vs gRPC

36
Q

Tell something that you wished you knew before you started working on it

A

Superset chart was being deprecated
BQ - Backup is gone if you recreate table
WD transition - TZ issues
Todea - x team work with close dependencies issue

37
Q

Tell a situation where you helped someone to fix their design.

A

Cron System: To support long running task, DRI wanted to build an async system where tasking queue closes the HTTP and keeps polling for completion. The issue was excessive polling, no way to terminate the task, faulty load balancer.
In our discussion, I suggested we should have the ability to terminate a task. Also brought up the issue with load balancer.
Suggested a design where we deploy a task coordinator in all instances that can monitor the tasks in their nodes. API will collaborate with this coordinator for start, status check and terminate. Coordinator creates individual processes for each task. We define custom load balancer via this coordinator.

Dataflow for leaderboard - use leaderboard id to delete rankers

LSP - Batch don’t shard

38
Q

Example where you mentored engineer in a project

A

Runtian (LSP): I had an engineer who wanted to gain more experience on leading a project as part of his growth plans. At that time, I was leading the project to improve our battle performance. One of our goal was to add an in-memory layer to improve our processing speed.
After discussing their career interests, I decided to assign this part of the project to this engineer. I worked with him to setup boundaries on what we want and how he should approach the problem. He needed to benchmark between Redis, Google Datastore and Memcache. And after that, present a design to the team on the implementation.
Over the next few days, I would meet up with him after our scrum to check his progress and give him suggestions on his approach. We brainstormed on what all features such as latency, reliability are important for us and make sure we cover them in the benchmark. After that, I let him prepare the design document and I reviewed it before he was ready to present to the team.
The team was quite impressed with his due diligence and he was able to foster a healthy discussion on his proposed design. Based on the scope of the project, I assigned another engineer to work with him. They implemented the projects over the next few months. I would randomly review a few of the pull requests to ensure quality.
After the implementation, I worked with him closely on the release process while he drove the coordination with our sister teams and product manager. He released the project without any major issues. This experience gave the engineer the opportunity to improve their technical leadership including benchmarking, leading design discussions, project management and working with stakeholders. The success of this project enabled this engineer to take on more responsibilities and grow to the next level.
This example highlights my leadership style on how I identified the career interest of my engineer and aligned him with the right opportunity. I continued mentoring him throughout the process while giving him enough freedom to train his technical and leadership muscles.

Zhendong: I had an engineer join my team last year. After the usual two weeks of onboarding, I placed him to work on one of our project. I noticed that he was struggling to meet his sprint commitments multiple times.
During our 1:1, I brought this topic to him and tried to understand why he is struggling. During our discussion, he explained to me that he was indeed struggling at his current role. Firstly, he never worked on Python and it’s hard for him to read code quickly and work on them. Also, in his previous company, he was functioning as a tech lead and as a result, had reduced coding experience last year.
After understanding his challenges, I decided that we should handle things bit differently. I reduced the scope of work he needed to do over the next sprint and suggested him a book to sharpen his python skills. I also realized that during onboarding he had to go through several systems at once but wasn’t able to digest any of them properly. I started mentoring him on a smaller section of the codebase, specifically the project he is working right now. My assumption was that learning Python and a smaller section of our codebase, he can become productive quickly. And working directly on the project, he will gain the experience and skill he lost previously.
My plan worked as intended. He was able to learn Python and get up to speed on the project and start delivering. The project took around three months to complete and by that time this engineer became quite adept at both Python and our working style. He then continued to become a successful senior engineer in my team.

39
Q

Given an example where you scaled up your team

A

Kickstarter -> Central Infra

40
Q

Give an example where you helped people become more productive

A

Todea logging -> No server setup, central monitoring system, schemaless

Setting up docker -> Joined team, noticed challenges with setup, py2 issues, lack of local development. I setup docker for the game server, integrated with all the teams, gradually increased it to include other systems like Jenkins, content pipeline etc and now everything can be tested locally and 0 setup issues

Event tools

41
Q

Give an example where you improved an existing system

A

LSP => Scaled up the system
Data pipeline => pull based architecture to push based, autoscale and reduced latency to 15m
Kickstarter

42
Q

Have you ever noticed a problem and solved it before it became an issue?

A

BigQuery cost issue => Added safety checks via dry run, warning message, notifying individual users and the team, implementing gradual quota increase per requirement, lots of training
LSP => realized the potential issue after atlas team gave a deep dive of their system

Superset caching for slicing

43
Q

Have you ever had to solve a problem on your own, but needed to ask help? How did you go about it?

A

WD outsourcing transition plan
Hiring international

BQ migration => We wrote some SQL migration but that covered 75% of queries. I needed help from data science and PMs to manually modify them. I reached out to one of the data science lead and a few PMs to discuss the challenges and requirements. They were already familiar with the work I was doing as I got everyone’s buy-in about the project early on. I then worked with them to discuss the project release timeline and how we can get them to try those queries for accuracy and eventually migrate them.

Cost reduction => I was exploring ways to reduce costs for our live games. I had several ideas but required a lot of trial and errors. I reached out to both the team leads for dragons and asked them to lend one engineer each. The reason I needed was - one I needed man-power to tackle the work, secondly - having someone from the team can also give insights on how to tackle different issues. I eventually created a mini-pod with 3 of us meeting every few days to discuss the investigations and results of the same.

44
Q

Have you ever owned up to a mistake?

A

BQ data issue
Recent A/B test release issue l
SMRHistory

45
Q

Tell me about a time when you had to work under pressure to meet a deadline. How did you handle the situation, and what was the outcome?

A

LSP => Detected when team presented. 3 months; asked for staffing, prioritized K8 first and Redis cache as V2
Todea project for Chef launch
Wd outsourcing

46
Q

Tell me about a time when you had to adapt to a change in a work project or environment. How did you handle the situation, and what was the outcome?

A

SS Rebase => Worked on NVD3 but during rebase phase, realized breaking changes. Grouped up with team to brainstorm. Decided to remove NVD3, rebase and then add it back as extension. We were able to simplify the rebase, completed our main requirement (take changes from open source community and retain our customizations). We did have to make some changes to the roadmap but the incremental gains we would have received is far lower than what we achieved now.

47
Q

What is your greatest weakness?

A
  • Stage fright
  • Direct feedback
  • Imposter syndrome
48
Q

What is your greatest weakness?

A

I am normally a restless type of person. The way it surfaces as weakness is that I can jump to solution quickly. I am well aware of my personality and challenges due to this. To get a better grab at it, I trained myself to not make immediate decisions unless absolutely necessary. I take my thoughts (and probably my solutions) and then think through that offline.
I do have a strength to analyze and identify edge cases by visualizing a problem. I channeled my weakness to take advantage of my strengths by giving myself the offline thinking time.
Due to this behavior, I ended up loving to create process and design documentation. This have helped me greatly in coming up with innovative solutions to problems at my workplace.

I used to be very direct. This is situation I struggled with a few yrs back. While few people do appreciate it, I definitely had some challenging situations. I reached out to one of our Sr manager and asked him to help me out.
He helped me gather the required feedback. I studied reading materials like “how to make friends” and “Navigating difficult conversations”. He also showed me a role-model, our COO who was also direct but no one seemed to have issues with his communication.
I started following our COO and analyzed what he was doing, matching with study materials I had. This helped me improve my communication greatly.
Currently, I am in the opposite side where I am mentoring a few engineers with communication and collaboration issues.

49
Q

Give an example where you had to manage up.

A

David <> Soul situation
BQ Cost management -> Manage DS director to ensure people’s behavior or the no of queries we can run won’t be negatively impacted
Di layoff
DI prioritization changes
Hiring india

50
Q

Give an example where you showed empathy

A

Marketing SS issues
BQ Migration challenges and how we handled
Atlas API

51
Q

Describe a situation that you later regretted

A

BQ backup issue - We relied on BigQuery’s data backup and time machine capabilities. We didn’t understand the full nitty gritty aspect of it - recreating a table erases all backups. Learning: If you are relying on a commodity system, make sure you understand the full working of it specially if you depend on them for critical systems.

Superset rebase issue - We started the project and didn’t fully integrate ourselves in the project’s roadmap planning. We faced a harsh reality when we tried to rebase and notify the community. They have deprecated a major system several of our features relied on. Learning: Wheter it’s internal or external team, keep frequent check-ins with sister team(s) to ensure breaking changes don’t surprise you.

LR decision

52
Q

What would you do with a key security risk?

A

Engineer ended committing service credential private keys in GitHub -> Code reviewer didn’t realize the significance. Our auto check triggered an alert. I immediately invalidated that auth and brought down the system. Notified the stakeholders ASAP of the downtime. Worked with IT to re-create the credential and re-deploy them.

Season chest bug?

53
Q

Give an example of a project that exemplifies your personal values

A

SuperSet project
Drive Results / Bias for action
- The challenge was ambiguous and needed someone to really take the lead.
- Working with stakeholders and guiding them to a consensus.
Take Ownership
- Foreseeing integration challenges (slicing of data latency) and building the right solution
Customer First
- Empathizing with customers and prioritize accordingly -> build the right set of migration tools
- Onboarding and mentoring of customers for adoption
- Delaying planned release partially to support customer pain points (marketing)

54
Q

What are the most important thing to you as an engineering leader

A

Deliver strong results.
Build an inclusive culture of trust and respect.
Grow people.

55
Q

What is your technical goals

A

Contd learning in distributed system
Lead project involving several teams

56
Q

What is your personal goal

A

Understand the working of a business and how to grow team/product

Save enough money to secure family finances and explore entrepreneurship

57
Q

What engineering values are important to you

A

Bias towards action
Be curious
Be efficient

58
Q

What eng practices are most important for you?

A

User & Tech Documentation
Peer review
Automation -> Anything that can be automated, should be automated if ROI is +ve in mid-term.

59
Q

Tell a situation where you felt the review was unjustified

A

Not unjustified but reviews where I didn’t agree with and needed to dig deeper to find the truth
- Communication issue: Intimidating
- SS Marketing: Putting too much pressure

Behavioral (3 decks)

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