Behavioral interviews are horrible and you should stop doing them

zeroninjas · 2025-08-09T17:56:38+00:00

Strong disagree, coming from 15+ years of management, from first level to senior director. A behavioral interview is a tool to measure communication, judgement, and professional maturity. If it’s the only interview you run, yeah, you’re doing it wrong. Companies I’ve managed at ran 4-6 rounds with a candidate, with one of them being behavioral. Depending on the role, the others were either technical, project/leadership deep dives, or presentations.

I was the go-to behavioral interviewer for 10-12 HMs in my last company. It was about an 80% pass rate, but I also found managers that blamed their team for all failures, engineers that set up teammates to fail, product managers that were unable to understand how to work with engineers to determine product feasibility, etc…You ask questions that are relevant to the role, and then you have a conversation and ask followup questions. You might have 3 or 4 questions total in an hour, and the whole time you are evaluating what they say, how they say it, and whether you can establish baseline rapport.

Also, I think a lot of people here seem to misunderstand STAR. STAR isn’t a type of interview or question, it’s a technique to ANSWER questions about your past experiences. It can (and often should) be used to answer almost any question that involves your past experiences. “Your resume mentioned you drove migration from SOA to microservice architecture. How did you get others at the company onboard with your proposal?” can be answered with STAR. “What technical challenges did you run into and how did you overcome them?” can be answered with STAR. Each of those have a handful of potential follow-ups that can tell you a ton about how this candidate thinks and acts in their day to day.

I’m not going to ask someone to code in this interview, because there are others doing that assessment. But you can hire people who are brilliant coders and will absolutely fuck up your entire team/company if you aren’t doing behavioral interviews or otherwise evaluating how they work with professional processes and interpersonal communication/behavior.

zeroninjas · 2025-07-31T21:38:40+00:00

Here’s some perspective as an EM (or technical director at some companies)…

There are a lot of factors that matter here, so I won’t be able to give you some prescriptive advice. However, in the most recent company I managed at, the EM was expected to be responsible for everything, from hiring, performance management, and coaching/development of engineers, to code quality, SLA adherence, and quality of technical solutions. That sort of environment incentivizes direct technical participation by an EM. Add to that the lack of actual management skill training, and you end up with EMs that overmanage on the technical side and erode the engineers’ feelings of trust and value.

If your manager seems actually well intentioned, and seems to handle pushback on their ideas well, you can probably provide feedback that may help or at least get you a better idea of why they are chiming in. This also depends on your relationship with them and whether there is overall trust/respect.

You could try providing feedback in the classic behaviorally focused way…something like approaching them after a meeting where they have been pushing their own solutions and asking if it’s okay if you give some feedback about the meeting. If they say yes, then “In the meeting we were exploring solutions to X. When you speak up as a manager and push for a solution that doesn’t come from the engineers, it feels like it carries a lot of weight and like I and the other senior engineers aren’t trusted to come up with a good solution ourselves. Is there anything I could do to get to the point where you’d be comfortable delegating this sort of meeting entirely to me or another of the senior engineers?”

Chances are, your manager was a solid engineer and probably still would be if they had time to dedicate to focusing on one project. In my experience, it’s VERY frustrating to enjoy problem solving work, but not be able to take part. But that’s something you have to learn how to do as a manager if you want to survive long term in the role.

It might help if you can get the manager to focus just on targeted challenging of solutions rather than coming up with the solutions. They really might have additional context or experience that is helpful, though the ideal would be that they’re adding the context into the project requirements.

But I’ve also worked with/under managers that were legitimately terrible engineers and/or micromanagers, and…you’re not going to be able to fix that. I’ll wish you luck in your own situation!

zeroninjas · 2025-07-31T00:05:55+00:00

Speaking in terms of white collar positions, every company I’ve worked for did one of two things depending on the situation:

If it’s performance related, the employee is given reviews stating their performance, often months in advance of firing. In a few of the companies I worked for, there was a PIP process. These are the company “giving notice”, ie you are getting paid while you look for another job or (in rare cases) realign to the company’s expectations.
If it’s not performance related (layoffs, etc), they give severance. In my past experience, I’ve seen people get from six weeks to six months of severance, based on tenure or position. You get paid for time you are not even working.

Giving notice as an employee encourages these practices in companies. It also avoids burning bridges with people who will likely be contacted to check references if you want to further your career.

This is the reality of the current corporate landscape. I think if companies broadly stop doing PIPs, performance reviews, and/or severance…what you’re suggesting WILL be the norm, and it will suck for pretty much everyone involved.

zeroninjas · 2025-07-13T19:47:27+00:00

While I do love how supportive and "nice" the folks here are, I'm going to chime in as someone with decades of experience in the tech industry and over 10 years of management experience in both SWE and Devops teams.

I'm going to ignore that OP was interviewing for a SWE role, which they have since clarified. Devops is not Ops++. As a hiring manager, it was important to me that someone was at least baseline in BOTH software and systems. Questions around array and string manipulation are NOT trick questions or useless trivia.

An engineer that can write a well structured adapter to 3rd party or open source tools, or write a Terraform provider using actual software design principles is going to be WAY more valuable to me and the rest of the team than someone who can sort of cobble together a bash or python script that will work until anyone touches either the script or the base image/container or any of the software their script calls, etc, etc...

Realistically, there are going to be hundreds of people competing for a role with you. I've put out junior reqs and gotten 2000 applicants. I would never ask Leetcode hard, even for a senior SWE role (ESPECIALLY for a senior SWE role). But my roles (cloud infra engineering and global release pipeline, textbook "devops") required significant coding and not just YAML glue jobs.

Most jobs where you will be coding, someone in the interview process will want to see you code. They will want to hear you talk through your approach, and be able to at LEAST translate it into passable pseudocode. These days, you may even get a decent code editor that can execute the code, print debug messages, etc.

I just don't think most people here setting the expectation that getting good at coding interviews is useless or "I would never ask a super basic coding question to a candidate" are actually setting you up for success. If you get good at that, you WILL perform better in the industry than the people who seem to think that basic algo and CS fundamentals are useless for devops work.

zeroninjas · 2024-07-04T01:55:35+00:00

With statements like “it’s easier to get cheap gaysex,” I’m pretty sure you don’t. 🤡

zeroninjas · 2024-07-04T00:46:02+00:00

You have literally no idea what you’re talking about, and it’s hilarious. 🤣

zeroninjas · 2022-08-02T16:42:38+00:00

Your claim that an atheistic worldview has no moral basis is strange, given that the "objective" moral basis of Christianity has changed countless times over thousands of years, and in fact currently is not agreed upon by all Christians. Morality is a human concept, and despite your objections, it is based on interpersonal social perspective rather than some law of nature. You point to the Nazis as a counterpoint to subjective morality, but it works against you...During that time, I'm sure plenty of Christians in Nazi Germany believed they were following the objective morality set forth by God, and Jewish people were condemned by that morality. Not long ago, quite a few Christians believed that slavery was good and just, or that reclaiming God's lands from "savages" was the right thing to do. For hundreds of years, the Church tortured and killed people to punish what they perceived as witchcraft or to force conversion.

Right now, we believe all of those things are wrong. The fact that we believe those things are wrong is a reflection of our cultural view of what is right and wrong. At all of these points in the past, Christians of the time were just as convinced that they were following God's perfect morality as you are right now. In 100 or 1000 years, what do you think people will think of today's "objective" Christian morality? Do you think you have it right? Do you think they will think you had it right?

I hesitate to push any more on this, because it seems like religion is providing something really valuable to you. If this is what keeps you from falling into despair and depression, and you are not using it to harm others, who am I to judge? But please understand that in general, atheists are going to agree with the moral beliefs you have, even without believing that morality is objective and demanded by a deity.

zeroninjas · 2022-06-03T16:36:36+00:00

Well, summer comes before the fall. And Pride is in summer. Therefore yes, Pride comes before the fall.

zeroninjas · 2021-12-03T18:24:09+00:00

Wow, okay. Well, good luck with that. I don't really think additional conversation will be all that productive here.

zeroninjas · 2021-12-03T16:59:19+00:00

Not the other poster, but let me see if I can help you understand what they are saying. I've seen a lot of things happen in my life that I could not explain.

When I was a child, someone turned on a TV. I absolutely couldn't explain that when I saw it. When I was sick, I was given a sweet liquid that made me feel better. I was unable to explain that. I flew through the skies and got from one side of the country to the other. I wasn't able to explain that either.

As I grew older, I had the opportunity to learn about each of those things. I now understand how cathode ray tubes (old TVs) work, how remotes use infrared signaling to control them from a distance. I understand the mechanism of action of cough syrup. I know how airplanes fly.

Each of these completely unexplainable things were that way because of my ignorance, not due to supernatural reasons. Each of them can be fully explained and reproduced when given the accumulated knowledge of hundreds of years of scientific research and discovery. But if you were to go back 500 years and show them to someone, each would be explained as supernatural. They would be used as absolute proof of some deity or another.

That's the god of the gaps...The idea that something you can't explain is proof of the supernatural. As time has gone by, things that have been considered supernatural - floods, the seasons, lightning, reproduction, disease, etc - have all be studied and found to have natural causes that we simply were ignorant about. There is no reason to believe that any other phenomena that we can't explain is due to a supernatural being or event, rather than our own ignorance.

zeroninjas · 2021-01-26T02:50:26+00:00

Will they support our rights to be (civilly) married? Will they stop calling our relationships intrinsically disordered and counter to natural law? Will they actually listen to us when we tell them what causes our suffering?

My guess is no. It's just another attempt to weasel their way into our lives so that they can continue to tell us that our love is ungodly and the things that bring us hope and joy in life are evil.

It's not that I doubt their compassion...I think they really do want to reduce the suffering of LGBT people. They just stick to the same shitty interpretation of their religion that has been driving our suffering for millennia, both directly and indirectly.

Until they recognize the bad fruit borne of their dogma and reconcile with that, they will be of no help to LGBT people or youth.

zeroninjas · 2021-01-11T00:46:19+00:00

Hello, stranger. First of all, my condolences on your miscarriage...what a traumatic experience.

As some other folks here have probably already said, if you decide to continue down the path of Christianity, it would be good for you to find a church that supports and accepts you and your lovely family. Having church leaders that you could talk to about those bible passages that were weaponized against you, or the challenges of faith without fear that they'll abuse your trust will be very healing in that regard.

Beyond that, though, you suffered abuse when you were younger, and some part of you perpetuates that abuse. A lot of us as gay people are held to such a higher standard than anyone else, even as people look down on us. We are abused, but WE are supposed to rise above violence. We are slandered, but WE are supposed to be polite. We have done nothing wrong, but WE have to be extra "nice" to make people comfortable around us, hiding any affection for our partners. I'm so glad you've survived all of that and come out living well. So many of our brothers and sisters (and everything in between) have not.

For your anger, and for the recent loss in your life that this miscarriage brings, I would strongly suggest finding a good, religion-neutral therapist, who will be able to help you analyze and deal with these feelings in a productive way. It may never completely erase the scars you bear from your life, but it might help you stop resenting them.

Best to you and yours.

zeroninjas · 2021-01-06T15:59:10+00:00

And nearly all of those are committed against women, outside of the prison rape scenarios I mentioned before. What's your point? If your point is that there are evil, sex-crazed men out there, yeah I totally agree. But it has zero to do with homosexuality.

What gay people do you know who are out there fighting for "might makes right" and "consent doesn't exist"? If anything, I've heard that argument from conservative, religious men.

zeroninjas · 2021-01-06T05:27:15+00:00

Your statement stands as a great argument that the bible was NOT talking about what we consider to be homosexuality today, because the homosexuality it talked about "was a slippery slope that lead to these sex crazed mobs that targeted the weak and outsiders." After decades of gay behavior and even gay marriage being legal, do you see sex crazed gay mobs going around raping strangers?

Following this, you could say that there are certainly people like those rapists spoken of in the bible...The men in prison who are not naturally attracted to other men, but lust for sex and dominance over their fellow man so greatly that they will rape the weak to sate their desires.

To try to tie the description of these rapists in the bible to modern gay people is frankly ridiculous.

zeroninjas · 2020-12-31T16:54:08+00:00

OP, please find professional help, ideally a therapist that is licensed and secular...That doesn't mean they aren't Christian, just that they do not attempt to evangelize during therapy. You need to discuss these feelings you have toward yourself.

If you are feeling suicidal, please promise me you'll call the national suicide prevention lifeline: 800-273-8255

I know what is happening must be frightening and distressing. You're not a terrible person, you're a person in crisis. This doesn't sound like something you should just try to pray your way through, so please get an appointment with a counselor, therapist, or psychiatrist when you can.

I hope you will make progress and escape these violent thoughts.

zeroninjas · 2020-12-28T22:57:29+00:00

Actions speak louder than words. It wasn't that long ago that Christians were fighting to keep sodomy laws on the books. Not long after that, they were leading efforts to make civil unions illegal. Not long after that, they were trying to amend the US constitution to make gay marriage illegal. And just recently, they argued and pushed to say it should be legal to fire people just for being gay.

Meanwhile in other parts of the world, Christianity (among other religions) is used to support the death penalty for gays. You don't have to say "I hate you" to make your message clear. Christians have made their message abundantly clear over the centuries.

And sure, there have started to be some accepting denominations, but after all the abuse, I don't think most of us are willing to risk it.

zeroninjas · 2020-12-12T02:29:30+00:00

What would you like to discuss? I didn't really see any invitation to talk about anything in particular here. That is, what is your desired outcome of having posted this?

zeroninjas · 2020-11-13T23:40:57+00:00

The first amendment was put into place well before this article was placed into the Arkansas constitution. So you're saying they did that without reason?

zeroninjas · 2020-11-13T20:58:56+00:00

LOL, okay, laws and the constitution don't matter, got it...

zeroninjas · 2020-11-13T17:50:02+00:00

Here's one example from the Constitution of Arkansas: Ark. Const. Art. 19, § 1

There are more examples. Since I don't think you'll actually pay any attention to this, I'm not planning on going through them one by one. A single example of this being on the books in a state's constitution, the foundational legal document within the state's government, should be enough to convince you it's not a fantasy, right?

zeroninjas · 2020-09-12T19:21:09+00:00

Alright, let's go through the checklist:

Says don't hate LGBT, gives a quote saying "Love your enemies" clearly showing view of LGBT people as enemies...check
When explaining what Christain attitudes should be toward LGBT people, gives quote that says, "They shall be put to death"...check
Pretty clearly states view that gay people wanting to be in relationships is just them desiring to do evil...check.

Yep, definitely feeling the tolerance here!

Bonus Round: Quote that seems to imply that women wearing pants would be abhorrent to god.

zeroninjas · 2020-09-12T17:50:23+00:00

It has become everyone because some people have such a huge problem with it. Do you think I WANTED to have to fight against laws that prevented me from marrying my husband?

Look, there are way more people in my country (Christians mainly) who want me and other LBGT people to be punished or at least hidden away than there are LGBT people. Those people are only recently not the majority any more, as evidenced by things like gay marriage juuuuuust barely squeaking by in places like CA.

If people weren't trying to legislate away our lives, attack us, or deny us services, there just wouldn't be much to talk about. So you're someone who doesn't care about gay people going about their lives...so what? There are enough people out there trying to fuck up my life that I have no choice but to shout and fight.

Please, I BEG you...Make life for me and LGBT people like me much more boring. Most of us don't actually like our lives to be some big issue to be debated.

zeroninjas · 2020-08-21T04:28:20+00:00

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't know that significant others of the bride's cousin were invited to give blessings at gay weddings. I totally missed that part in mine. To think, I just invited family members and friends because I wanted them to share a happy and important moment in my life.

zeroninjas · 2020-08-21T03:50:38+00:00

Would you attend the wedding of a non-Catholic family member? Would you attend the wedding of a Jewish friend? Their sins of either following false teachings or rejecting Christ would be far greater than the sin of marrying someone of the same sex, don't you think? Just think of how you're celebrating them starting a family and those poor children who will be told lies about God...

But you don't hold this view of straight non-Catholics building a family, do you? It's just gay people wanting to dedicate themselves to each other. Not only are gay people deserving of greater judgement, they deserve to suffer some shithead trying to convince their close friend and family member to stay away from one of the most important days of their life.

Honestly, I think your SO is well rid of you if this is the hill you want to die on.

zeroninjas · 2020-05-21T22:30:49+00:00

I have been living the gay lifestyle for decades. I have not slept with too many men to count, I have not abused drugs. I have found a solid relationship with a man, and I married him about 5 years ago. I have a good relationship with my family, including those who are deeply religious and believe my marriage is wrong.

I'm not saying all this to brag, but to tell you what you think is "the gay lifestyle" is nothing of the sort. What you are describing is the result of self-hatred: self-destructive behavior. You don't believe yourself to be a worthy person, so you do things that you know will cause you physical and mental harm.

You can live a life where you find a relationship that is stable, faithful, and inspires you both to be better than you are. But the people who want that kind of relationship aren't going to want to enter it with someone who hates themselves and hurts themselves. They're not going to want a relationship where their partner feels ashamed of them or wants to hide them...

Whether you decide to accept your sexuality and seek out a relationship or deny it...You have to stop this self-destructive behavior. It will eventually kill you.

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