I hate the "give me an example when" questions because as soon as I hear them I forget everything I've ever done lol. Also, they can be so ridiculously stupid, "Tell me about a time you worked well under stress?" Like, why can't I just tell you that I'm not going to lose my shit when it hits the fan instead of playing stupid word games.
Second this. I've taken to studying a list of previous examples because I frequently can't dig up ideal examples from memory on the spot. A touch of adrenaline from nerves, even if not obvious to others, really affects my performance in this way.
The merit of a 'give me an example' question is that it evidences a degree of self reflection in the candidate. Specifically, that they can abstract their daily circumstances to produce general truths regarding themselves. This we should all be doing regardless of whether we are preparing for an interview.
I passed a 5 round mostly behavioral interview loop at AWS (cloud consulting), I could answer any of these questions except 6 (I’ve never been a manager) and 15 and 16 (they are new) based on my prior experience.
While they are grouped by the Amazon LPs, they are more or less standard soft skill behavioral questions. Almost all of these questions have been relevant during the latter part of my career as the dev lead (2 jobs ago), the de facto cloud/enterprise architect (my last job) and my current job (cloud consulting department).
These are also the standard type of skills you need in most senior dev positions where they are filtering on “scope” and “impact”.
My last three jobs since 2014 before my current one have all been based on my ability to navigate behavioral questions and just have conversations like adults to the hiring manager (department head, IT director, CTO) where we talked about their real world problems and how I would solve them.
