As mentioned in our behavioral interview preparation overview, growth mindset is one of the 8 main categories of questions to prepare for.
In this guide, you will learn how to tackle them:
When rating candidates under this category, interviewers are often looking at the following criteria:
As mentioned in our behavioral interview preparation overview, it is impractical to prepare answers specifically for every behavioral question out there. However, by batching specific questions into similar themes and preparing stories that cover a large number of question requirements, we can reduce the number of stories to prepare to around 3-5 stories.
These are the themes which seem to recur:
As always, the STAR format is the simplest and most effective framework that we recommend to structure your story.
Here are our recommended approaches for each identified theme, with which you can structure your story around:
A good answer combines a consistent schedule and effort placed into learning, as well as how the learning was proactively applied to work. e.g. "I learned about X because I was doing Y. This impacted the way that I was tackling Z at work because it made me realize W and V".
The points below are key ideas you can structure your answer around technical learning; however, you should still add on concrete examples of events, newsletters or communities you have actually participated in, to showcase your willingness to keep up with trends.
I have been working at a big tech company for the past two years now and the company uses a mix of external and internal technologies for our front end stack. Because we have a huge code base and established practice of doing things, we tend to not upgrade libraries that often and change our technology choices. It was only after a year into the job that I realized that I have been too comfortable in my role since I have fully ramped up on the code base and haven't learnt anything new for the past year. It was then that I decided that I have to be proactive in my learning in order to keep my skills sharp and relevant.
The Front End ecosystem moves really fast and there's a joke that there's a new JavaScript library emerging every day. Thankfully the ecosystem is more stable compared to 2015/2016 when a new wave of front end tooling first emerged. To keep myself updated without suffering from JavaScript fatigue, I spend a weekend every month going through front end newsletters like "This Week in React" and "JavaScript Weekly" and reading engineering blogs. If I see something interesting or is relevant to my job, I will dive deeper into them by trying out small examples and building small prototypes in my company's code base. For example, I recently discovered React Query, which is a data fetching library for React that uses a declarative paradigm for fetching data and am trying to incorporate it into my work. I also recently discovered tRPC, a library that enforces type safety between client and server boundaries, which is an issue that has caused some bugs for us.
To make this learning process more fun and collaborative, I started a front end social club within my company by creating a new Slack channel and inviting a few like-minded coworkers to join. Anyone can share front end news they find interesting there and discuss front end technologies. It has been pretty well-received, with over 30 people currently in the channel and activity nearly everyday. A side effect of this initiative is that people also start asking questions about front end issues they are facing at work, and we created another Slack channel for people to get help on front end issues. Feedback has been really positive so far!
This answer uses the STAR technique in a subtle fashion and demonstrates many qualities interviewers would like to see in candidates:
When I joined my current company back in 2019, I was fresh out of college and had no experience with the front end stack that the company was using, which used React, Apollo, Styled Components, TypeScript for their front end stack and a Django + GraphQL back end. Back in college, I was mainly using Vue.js for front end development as it was the JavaScript framework of choice taught in the web development class and haven't used GraphQL before.
It was definitely a huge learning curve for me at the start and I was really afraid of underperforming due to my unfamiliarity with the tech stack. Thankfully I had a mentor who gave me a lot of guidance on the tech stack and came up with a number of onboarding tasks which progressively got harder. I first spent a few days reading the documentation websites of the technologies and trying out the examples on their websites. I made it a point to understand the problems that these libraries were solving and how they were better than prior art because I think knowing that is important for fully appreciating the library and using the right tool for the right job. I also looked up some resources that compared Vue.js to React, as they were quite similar yet had some differences. That helped me to learn React faster (fully grasping React hooks still took me some time though). When I had time at nights or on weekends, I'd explore building small projects using these new technologies and also rebuild my personal blog using Gatsby (because it used both React and GraphQL).
Within two months, I felt like I had learnt so much and was comfortable with most of the code base. I could build end to end features without much guidance from my mentor. To help future new employees who might face the same onboarding challenge, I jotted down my learnings in our internal wiki along with links to the best resources for learning the topic. My manager was surprised by the initiative and commended me for that. Today, it is part of our official engineering onboarding resource and I update it every once in a while. A few new joiners have also thanked me for sharing my knowledge in the wiki and making their onboarding process smoother.
Analysis of the answer: