Was it last month or the month before? The interviewer was young.
The main questions were:
- Talk about one of your projects
- Some hypothetical questions around team playing and leadership — for example, if you were the team lead, how would you handle someone on the team blowing past a deadline, or how would you assign roles when the team runs into a new problem that nobody on the team is familiar with
- Conflicts and feedback
Overall only #2 was somewhat difficult; #1 and #3 were pretty standard questions.
As for #2, in the moment it felt more like a PM question? Since I'd worked at a certain company before and had studied Scrum, I basically answered it based on the Scrum Guide. In Scrum there isn't just the developer role — there's also the Scrum Master, which covers part of the manager function, so even though I personally don't have leadership experience, I was able to fake it convincingly by drawing on that.
The Scrum Master serves the Scrum Team in several ways, including:
Coaching the team members in self-management and cross-functionality;
Helping the Scrum Team focus on creating high-value Increments that meet the Definition of Done;
Causing the removal of impediments to the Scrum Team's progress; and,
Ensuring that all Scrum events take place and are positive, productive, and kept within the timebox.
More importantly, when you're facing an impediment, it's not just about solving the problem — you also need to 1. proactively align with team members, and 2. think about how it happened in the first place. It's not just about resolving the current issue; you also need to understand what went wrong in the process, so that if the same kind of issue comes up in the next sprint, you can nip it in the bud and fix it at the root. Scrum has the retrospective meeting for exactly this kind of thing.
That company was honestly hard to sum up in a few words, but in some ways it also taught me a lot of framework-level, beyond-coding stuff lol. Grateful, I guess?!
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