General Soft Skill Questions

Question 1

Tell me about yourself.

Answer 1

Origin Story:

Have you ever had a not-so-positive experience with your lead or manager? Unfortunately, it’s a universal experience. We’ve all had that time in our career where we look to our manager for guidance, direction, and growth but yet not all managers are equipped with this skillset.

I once had a manager that excelled due to his technical prowess and told me how much he hated our weekly 1:1s and only focused on the status updates and answering questions important to him. No conversations about career growth, company direction, or any relationship building. As the most senior member of the team, I ended up becoming the unofficial mentor for a lot of the team. Within a year, 75% of the team including myself left to another team or to a different company.

I’ve seen the importance of people management and how it directly impacts morale, retention, and performance. Thus my desire to help others to achieve their potential, grow their career and finally succeed together as a team.

My background in electrical engineering and breadth of experience as a software developer, product manager, and technical program manager gave me different perspectives, toolsets, and most importantly the people skill that are suited for this role. My MBA helps me round out my business acumen with the ability to effectively communicate with non-technical stakeholders.

That’s why I’m excited about the engineering manager position because I believe I can contribute in multiple different ways other than technical.

Question 2

Tell me about your experience?

Answer 2

I am a software professional with 14 years of experience across different roles such as engineer, PM, TPM and EM. I worked in smaller organization from 50 people to large F100 corporations with a global footprint. I have been part of business transformation to launch v1 products with other individual contributors, senior leadership team, and external stakeholders from a project size of $10s of millions to hundreds of millions.

At my last role, I was handpicked to join the engineering management team as a leader for my previous leadership accomplishments.

Question 3

What is your greatest strength?

Answer 3

1. My greatest strength is the ability to provide support and expertise to challenging problems and assignments. This has helpedme to solidify my career as a facilitator that’s approachable and collaborate without ego. I am a firm believer of getting things done as a team, succeed as a team, and not leave a trail of frustrated stakeholders.
2. My greatest strength is the ability to bring a fact-based grounding to a team combined with the ability to work individually or with others effectively. This has helped me in my career to make objective data-driven decisions and collaborate without ego.

Question 4

What is your greatest weakness?

Answer 4

My greatest weakness is that I sometime internalize stress and can be slow to let go of my mistakes. As a mitigation, I actively work with my manager and my team to receive regular check-in sessions for feedback in a safe space and make and adjusting my mindset to avoid scarce-thinking and catastrophize.

Question 5

What is your salary expectation?

Answer 5

Based on my research from the greater Seattle area.
My expectation is to be in range for engineering managers with a range of $190k to $210k base salary with RSUs or other forms of compensation. And I’m flexible with other variations of compensation.

How does that fit in your range?

Question 6

Why are you looking around?

Answer 6

I enjoyed my time at Compass and worked with some of the best engineers in building a scalable service.

I’m excited about the opportunity at hand because of the increased scope, more ownership, and blah.

Question 7

Give an example of a situation where you anticipated potential challenges and developed preventive solutions.

Question 8

What was a difficult decision you had to make in your past role?

Question 9

How do you break down large, complex projects for your team?

Question 10

Have you ever coached an engineer into a management role?

Question 11

How do you plan to integrate team-building into the workplace?

Question 12

How do you describe the technical aspects of a project to individuals who don’t have technical backgrounds?

Question 13

How did you end up in a management position, and what drives you to continue?

Question 14

Imagine you need to build a new web app interface, what will be your process to achieve it?

Answer 14

Tip: Engineering managers should have the ability to prioritize and schedule the tasks in a way that allows them to build the final product, which in this case, is the web app interface. But for this, they can’t just start delivering random tasks to the team, hoping everything turns out well.

They need a system. And they also need to know in a team who’s good at what. After making a plan on how to achieve this, they can delegate tasks and get to work.

Question 15

If you had to manage a team of 10 developers how would you control how the project is going and the tasks among the developers?

Answer 15

Tip: A successful engineering manager knows the strengths and weaknesses of the team. They also know what each person is good at and what they are bad at, so instead of making everyone handle 10 tasks, they rather have each developer take one task but do it perfectly.

Also, in this question, you might learn if candidates work under a specific methodology. For example, some engineering managers love working with Agile. Others prefer Kanban or any other SDLC model.

Question 16

What do you think about micromanaging?

Answer 16

Tip: This question will help you know whether the candidate understands micromanaging and its disadvantages. Micromanagement can hamper motivation and creativity and often indicates a lack of trust in people. It can lead to a stressful work environment and also lead to a high employee turnover in the long-term. That’s why your goal is to get an engineer manager who is not a micromanager because it is not an effective management strategy. You may also ask them a follow-up question regarding their strategies to avoid becoming micromanagers.

Question 17

When and how do you promote an engineer?

Answer 17

Tip: This question will help you understand if the candidate is competent enough to manage this role. A good engineer manager promotes based on one’s previous performance at their current role and their potential to take on the next role.

Question 18

How do you help your team members to improve?

Answer 18

Tip: An engineer manager is a leader. They need to help everyone on their team to improve their productivity and efficiency. With this question, the goal is to assess if the candidate has practical strategies that they can use to help your engineers to get better at their day-to-day tasks. You should also determine if their suggestions can be applied in your company’s current setup.

Question 19

How do you handle team members that are more talented than you?

Answer 19

Tip: Some of the most challenging people to manage are those that are more talented than you in some technical aspects. Your engineer manager needs to have the charisma to command respect from everyone on the team, including those who are better than them in some aspects. Your goal is to determine if the candidate has experience handling such people and how they were able to do it.

Question 20

How best can you manage remote engineers?

Question 21

How do you choose the best technology to handle a given problem?

Question 22

How do you manage multiple high-priority projects?

Question 23

What is your approach when hiring software engineers?

Question 24

What is the role of an engineering manager?

Answer 24

Tip: The primary role of an engineer manager is to finish all key projects and engineering tasks in an efficient way that meets business goals. This involves planning and allocating tasks to the different engineers and any other people on his team. An engineer manager also has to ensure that all engineers on his team have the tools they need to do the work assigned to them.