Behavior Questions
Tell me about yourself
- Company name and title
- Number of years in that role
- Your major responsibility
- One major achievement
I'm currently working as an iOS developer at MyDoc, a start-up company that is trying to simplify healthcare in Singapore. I have been working here for almost two years now. My main responsibility in this position is to develop and maintain two iOS apps. One pro app for healthcare professionals to manage their consultations and connect with other professionals, and one app for patient to access the healthcare network.
Before MyDoc, I worked at Hong Wei Global as a software engineer. I've been working there for one and half years. In this position, my responsibility is to build AI systems using game engine, like Unreal Engine. I design and implement multiple AI using behavior tree, steering behaviors and path finding algorithms.
In my spare time, I worked on a few games with my friends. The biggest game we build is called Scrap Convoy. It is a four player co-op game. We spent roughly about half year on this project. We were trying to recreate the experience where friends can sit and play together. In this project, I'm responsible for building all of the AI systems, some gameplay mechanisms and puzzles.
Why this company?
- Talk about what do you love about the product
- How do you align with the company's culture and mission.
- What would you like to work on?
Why do you want to leave your current/last company?
During my two years at MyDoc, I had the opportunity to really develop a strong skill in problem solving, mobile development. While it's great learning experience and I enjoyed contributing to the team, I’m ready to move on to the next challenge in my career.
I loved the people I worked with and the projects I worked on, but at some point I realized I wasn’t being challenged the way I used to be. I don't want to let myself get too comfortable, I decided to pursue a position where I can continue to grow.
What are you looking for in your next role?
Start with your skills I've been developing mobile apps for years now, and I'm looking for a position where I could continue to improve my skills.
Explain your motivation Another thing that's really important to me is the chance to impact people's lives and make a big difference through my work. I’m always motivated by being able to see the impact of my work on other people.
Connect With Your Long-Term Goals And, I’m definitely looking for a position where not everything has been figured out, but have lots of challenging problems to to be solved. I don't want to let myself get too comfortable, I want to keep growing. Being at a company where I can grow and work toward something I care about also matters.
What is your motivation?
Learning new things has always been a great motivator for me. In every job I've had, I believe I've always been able to learn something new, or discover a new way to look at a problem.
I love learning new things which is why I love being on a team. For every project we had at my last job, we had a half dozen different ideas and ways to tackle it. We would all work together to refine those into one final plan. Being open to what others have to say and seeing new and exciting ways others would think outside the box not only kept me interested in the work I was doing, but drove me to further my own education outside of work so I could continue to contribute to the group overall.
I’m directly motivated by seeing the results of my efforts translate into a product. I enjoy every aspect of development but nothing makes me happier than seeing my work is making a difference. That’s why I’m driven to be hands on every step of the way.
The STAR format.
Situation - The interviewer wants you to present a recent challenge and situation in which you found yourself.
Task - What were you required to achieve? The interviewer will be looking to see what you were trying to achieve from the situation.
Action - What did you do? The interviewer will be looking for information on what you did, why you did it and what the alternatives were.
Results - What was the outcome of your actions? What did you achieve through your actions and did you meet your objectives? What did you learn from this experience and have you used this learning since?
Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a co-worker.
Tell me about a time in which you had a conflict and needed to influence somebody else.
Why are you interested in this job?
What makes you excited about this particular role
- Express Enthusiasm for the Company
- Align Your Skills and Experiences With the Role
- Express your career goals and how this position fits into your plan
Generic
Transferwise
This role excites me because I love the idea of helping other people
send and receive any currency effortlessly.
Booking
To be able to work on a product that improves travel experience. I really love traveling myself, and booking app is what I personally use every time I'm traveling. So having the opportunity to be able to improve the product that I really like is a huge motivation for me.
The opportunity to keep learning and improving myself. As far as I know, booking.com is a start-up like company, there's a huge potential to contribute to the product and possibility to learn and improve during that process. Also I read that there's monthly hackathons in the company. I really like hackathons cause it allows me to extend my knowledge and skills outside of my daily job.
Last but not least, I also believe that diversity is important. Because I did my internship in Disney World Florida back in college, where I got the chance to work with people from all over the world. So I think working with great people in a multicultural environment will help me learn new skills and develop my career better.
How can you improve the product?
From a traveller's perspective, there's one feature that I really like but is currently missing. I first saw this feature on Skyscanner, instead of any specific date, you can choose to see the price for the whole month, and from there you can even choose the cheapest month. As a regular traveller myself, it would be nice to avoid the peak season and keep my budget low. And this is especially useful for weekend getaways.
And I think it's better to show customized recommendations on the first page after user searched something, right now it will show me popular destinations. So the next time I open the app I can see hotel recommendations for my destination without searching again.
What application you feel is most complicated and why?
I think it's probably the game I developed, called Scrap Convoy. It's a local multiplayer co-op game. I've been working on for half year, we have a team of 6 people, 2 designers, 2 artists and 2 programers. I think it's complex in both the technical part and non-technical part.
For the technical part, we are using a game engine called Unreal, and at that time it's not open sourced and we have to use their own script to do everything. Every time I was stuck with any issue, there are not too many resources and documentations out there. And I also get to implement the AI behaviors in our game, which is a bit hard to debug sometimes, and I have to keep trying and testing to make the AI feel more natural. I think my problem solving skills improved a lot.
For the non-technical part, we're a team of different personality, so we kind of having some arguments here and there when we first start. But we manage to figure out a way to solve this, and that is honest communication. And that helps a lot with our decisions and execution. I learned a lot about team collaboration and communication from this project.
Questions to ask
- What is the culture like at the company?
- What are the engineering challenges that the company/team is facing?
- What are you most proud about in your career so far?
- What is unique about working at this company that you have not experienced elsewhere?