
Ask HN: How to respond to “whats the biggest technical challenge you've solved?” - ritchiea
I&#x27;m curious how people respond to this question, especially front end developers. I&#x27;ve been interviewing and struggling with answers for this. It&#x27;s not that I have never had challenges but many of them have been very craft centric such as &quot;this has to look and feel smooth on many different devices.&quot; And a lot of time the challenge is &quot;this needs to be done quickly by this date&quot; or &quot;we don&#x27;t have any tests so can you figure out how this API should work, document that and add test coverage.&quot;<p>I tried asking myself how would my colleagues answer this question about their work and I also can&#x27;t answer so I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s just a matter of me not taking on challenging work.<p>I think I just lack any context or framework for what would make a good answer.
======
mtmail
My take is the interviewer is looking for

\- did candidate ask others for help, or stayed quiet (team player)

\- did candidate finish the task even if was demotivating (self-motivation)

\- how did candidate deal with stress, e.g. a deadline or pressure from
management

\- how deep did the debugging go. Surprising number of engineers don't know
how to create smaller test cases, don't know how to do stack traces or run
debuggers (I'm also bad that this).

\- did candidate strive for an elegant solution, e.g. add test or
documentation so it never happens again, or got it done and moved to the next
task immediately (creating a stable infrastructure)

\- my personal bonus is: if problem could be solved by just spending money
(e.g. upgrade hardware, get consultant in, buy book, travel to another office
to talk to a person who build it) was this considered? Spending some (company)
money can be a fast-track compared to optimising software.

What the technical challenge was doesn't matter.

