How to Answer Behavioral Interview Questions Using the STAR Formula
STAR stands for:
Situation – Task – Action - Result
1.First, describe a work related Situation or Task that you needed to accomplish, and be concise.
2.Then describe the Action you took. Don’t tell them what you might do or would do, you need to tell them what you did.
3.Finally, describe what happened -- the result. What did you accomplish? What did you learn? How much time or money did you save? And most importantly does your result solve the problem you described in step 1.
Tell me a little bit about yourself.
I'm a second-year graduate student studying Computer Science at University of Southern California. I'm experienced with Java. I had a Big Data internship at Chinese Academy and Sciences. I have some project experiences including web development and mobile development.
I also have many project experiences including Frontend (React, Angular), Backend (PHP, Node.js, Express), Android, React Native and Unity 3D. I'm familiar with many front-end web technologies such as JavaScript, AJAX, HTML, CSS. Besides, I'm experienced with relational databases such as MySQL and non-relational databases such as MongoDB.对公司技术栈的了解: I know that the official website of Roblox is using the popular Front-end framework AngularJS, which is also used in one of my Full Stack project. In addition, my friend who is having an internship at Roblox told me that the backend of Roblox is mainly implemented by .Net. So I’m excited to learn more about your company and the chance to contribute to your web development team with my skills.
I love Open Source. I shared my code of 4 projects on GitHub to get feedback from other developers in order to improve code quality and help other developers learn new technologies. My 4 open source projects have gotten many stars and forks, all of which have been starred by over 100 people. I also submitted some issues to the famous Open Source projects such as ESLint which is a fully pluggable tool for identifying and reporting on patterns in JavaScript.
What do you know about us Expedia is the world's largest online travel company.
WePay is one of the fastest growing private US companies.My skills match well with your job description including Java, JavaScript, AngularJS, Redis and MySQL. So I want to join WePay to make contributions to your product.
Roblox is the largest social platform for play that allows people to imagine, create, and play together in immersive 3D worlds. Over 29 million user-generated online games have been produced on the Roblox platform with over 64 million monthly active players. It's awesome. Last year, Roblox was named to the Incorporated. 5000 list of Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America for the second consecutive year which is a great honor and a good proof that Roblox is an innovative company and has huge potential. I think your product is very creative and interesting.
Why you are interested Roblox?
Roblox: I very agree with the the engineer culture of Roblox that every engineer is a product manager since our final goal is to make a good product.
I'm Passionate about games, social networking and community driven content generation.
I'm also very Interested in working on large scale distributed web application development
So I want to join your team as a Web Intern in Summer and help you build the world's best user generated gaming platform, supporting integrated desktop and mobile gameplay.
Expedia: First, I like your product. My friends and I often use Expedia App for flights, hotels and cars. The service of Expedia is convenient and efficient. So I'm excited about the opportunity to join Expedia to make contributions to the great product.The culture of Expedia also attracts me. Expedia is a great company with good work/life balance. Engineers at Expedia know how to have fun. They love solving problems and creating ideas. My friends working at Expedia told me that the team atmosphere is very nice.
What's more, Expedia is a big company so I can have the opportunity to touch different projects to broaden my vision.
Describe your favorite/most proud/most challenging project My XXX project is a React web application. It's the second project on my resume.
I implemented a Material UI version of cnodejs.org website, which is the biggest Node.js Chinese community. I applied ReactJS for the Frontend development, which is the most popular Frontend framework. I used Node.js and Express for Backend services development. The difficult/interesting part is that when I wanted to deploy the website on AWS, I found that the generated website JS file was very big up to 900 kilobytes. But I had optimized the generated file according to React official document. To conquer it, I read a lot of source code on GitHub and talk with my friends in the industry and tried for many times（这里透露了三个点：自主学习能力，向合适的的人寻求帮助还有实验精神）. Finally I found the problem which is that I used a third-party react component called "react-simplemde-editor" and its code quality was not good enough. The author of this component used React as the production dependency instead of the development dependency which leads to the big generated JS file. Then I solved the problem by rewriting the component by myself. After this optimization, the generated JS file was reduced by 200 kilobytes. When I seen the website used by thousands of web developers, I was very proud of it.The Angular Web App I developed is a collaborative online judge system which allows multiple users to edit simultaneously. The Frontend frameworks I mainly used are Angular2, Bootstrap and Socket.io. The Backend frameworks are Node.js, Express, Redis and Flask. The Redis is a an open source, in-memory data structure store, used as database, cache and message broker. I used Redis to store the editing session in memory temporarily. I used Docker container to execute user-submitted code on server. In order not to slow down the frontend server (Node.js server), I deployed Docker container on backend server and make it accept execution requests coming from frontend server. In order to make the system scalable and easy to maintain, for each language, I set up an individual Docker image. In this structure, I also used a dispatcher to dispatch execution tasks based on language type. Task Dispatcher can be implemented using Node.js as it is perfect for I/O heavy scenario (which is our case).
Describe a teamwork experience, your role, team result During my Big Data internship at Chinese Academy of Sciences, my role was to implemented a parallel Louvain community detection algorithm by using Spark and GraphX with other 2 team members. We need to read many papers about this algorithm. To complete the task with high quality, I had extensive communication with team members and got a lot of useful advice from the mentors. Then we made a lot of optimization on the draft algorithm. For example, we improved time performance by simplifying the Modularity formula. And we enhanced the space performance by replacing the Java native Serializable with the Kryo serialization framework. Finally we successfully improved the algorithm performance by 30%. The improved algorithm could detect 40,000 communities from data of 30 million users in 2 hours.
In the original algorithm each vertex examines the communities of its neighbors and makes a chooses a new community based on a function to maximize the calculated change in modularity. In the distributed version all vertices make this choice simultaneously rather than in serial order, updating the graph state after each change. Because choices are made in parallel some choice will be incorrect and will not maximize modularity values, however after repeated iterations community choices become more stable and we get results that closely mirror the serial algorithm.
Do you have any questions for me? 1.Do you see any room for improvement in my code?
2.I have seen your LinkedIn profile before the interview and I know that your current work is to develop tools for enterprise cloud security. So my question is that what are you most proud about in your career so far?
3.What are the engineering challenges that your team is facing? 4.What qualities do you look out for when hiring for this role?
Based on my knowledge about React, I developed a React Native App for browsing GitHub trending and popular projects from scratch in only 2 weeks. I have released the App on Google Play to help other GitHub users.
I’m also a team player. During my internship at Chinese Academy of Sciences, I had extensive communication with and learning from other team members and mentors. Finally we successfully improved the algorithm performance by 30%.
Can you share more about the day-to-day responsibilities of this position? What's a typical day like?
BTW, How many web interns do you plan to hire?
Do you played their games or editor
What kind of knowledge do you have.
What role did you take in your previous internship?
What was the best aspect you've learned from this experience?
What is Your Greatest Weakness?
When I first started college, I was a pretty horrible public speaker. I knew this was something I wanted to overcome, so I promised myself to speak up more in small groups. Later, I took it a step further and took a public speaking class. Now, even though it doesn’t come naturally to me, I think I’ve made some big improvements. In fact, I recently presented at a student conference to an audience of over 100.Tell Me About a Time You Failed
At my last position, there was a three-month period of time when my supervisor had a very intense travel schedule, which meant most of my communication with her was via email. At some point, there was some miscommunication over who would be the point person for a new client, resulting in some confusing interactions and repeat memos to him. Ultimately, it wasn’t the best customer experience. From then on, I personally made it a point to clarify what information I was sharing with each of our clients on a weekly basis to my supervisor if not in person, then over the phone. I definitely learned the importance of frequent and clear communication.Where Do You See Yourself in 5 Years?
Well, I’m definitely really excited about the associate consultant position at Midnight Consulting, and I can see myself growing professionally in this role. I think, generally speaking, within the next five years I would seek to make a significant impact at Midnight Consulting, particularly in the energy sector. I’m also looking forward to eventually taking on additional managerial responsibilities and possibly taking the lead on some projects. Another big part of my life is mentoring, so I would hope to incorporate more of that as my knowledge of this industry develops.我们project开始以后遇到了一些team dynamic的问题，整体上对新的技术的不熟悉让我们遇到了很多困难，队伍也因此失去了动力（先整体交代前提）。于是我开始带动大家重新规划project（leadership），根据我们的时间以及能力重新定义core feature（project managment），我“自己”开始快速学习以及尝试不同的东西（move fast）， 同时跟队友分享并且帮助他们上手（team work）。再次过程中，失败了很多，错误的library，api，框架的选择，强调fix fast，以及对主次的舍取。 同时强调自己在team dynamics上的贡献，带领队友，list problems，规划时间，设定milestone。。。之后学到了很多，下次做的时候就会有更多经验，做的更好。
Why do you feel qualified for this job?
Why do you want to switch jobs?" or "Why are you interested in this position?