Hi,
Recently, I am giving many interviews as Software Engineer, am pretty much comfortable with the technology side when it comes to answering questions like What are your Strength and What are your weakness, I have kind of hard time giving them answers.
So my question is how can we handle questions like :
What are your Strengths ?
What are your Weakness ?
Thanks.
My primary strength is my attainment of absolute perfection. My primary weakness is my attainment of absolute perfection, since I have nothing left to shoot for.
Thank you, folks, I'll be here all week.
Tailor your answer to the job at hand and whatever you do don't give lame answers like "I work too hard" or "I'm a perfectionist". Also it should be reasonably close to the truth.
for example:
Strengths should be easier.
The trick is to "read" the interviewer, that is to figure out what kind of answers s/he's looking for. Then you just say exactly what s/he wants to hear.
Primary strength: I'm brilliant. Primary weakness: I'm not modest.
When I ask this question, the main thing I'm looking for is if you can critically evaluate yourself, if you understand what your weaknesses are, and how you plan to compensate for them or improve on them.
My advice is to answer truthfully, but be sure to emphasize how you plan to fully leverage your strengths, and what your plan is for improving your weaknesses.
For example, I would say that big weakness is I'm not very outgoing, which can make it difficult to work with other teams. Because of this, I have to make a very conscious effort when collaborating with other teams.
And never, ever, say your weakness is "you work too hard". That is incredibly cliche.
Programmers can sometimes actually pull off the "perfectionist" flaw in interviews if done right. Most interview advice says not to use this because it sounds like you're just bragging. This can work for you if you phrase it that your perfectionism means that you sometimes spend too long making every detail perfect instead of prioritizing. Just don't go to far with it. In an interview, this should always come across in the end as a positive.
Perfectionism is definitely part of what makes a good programmer. For myself, it is also legitimately often my enemy for the very same reasons.
Primary strength: +5 Agility
Primary weakness: weak against ice and water spells.
+1 to anyone who guesses which company I'm interviewing for and for which position (no cheating by looking at the URL :).
Biggest weakness:
My singing voice is terrible! There won't be any singing required on this job will there?
Here is a good programmer answer for the weakness question.
Laziness
The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer.
Impatience
The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least that pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer.
Hubris
Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about.
I think the whole thing is a bunch of bs.
I suggest being real with the interviewer. Tell them who you are, what you are about, what you want out of the job (or life), how you aim to get it, etc etc...
If you honestly don't know what you are good at, or what you or not so good at, then you should find out! (and then you can tell them at your next interview =D)
Be honest about your weaknesses... but let them know how you will improve or how it can be a positive.
Here are my honest weaknesses as an example:
I'm very shy at first and don't ask questions or reach out for help right away. possible positive: I like to solve problems myself because I learn better that way, however I need to know when to ask for help to keep productivity high.
I sometimes spend too much time sweating the small stuff when designing. I like to prove to myself that every aspect of the project (to the low level details) is possible. how to turn it to a positive: I like to prototype a lot and would volunteer to prototype and experiment with new technologies when needed. However I need someone to help me stay focused on the high level design and not sweat the small stuff.
I don't unit test as often as I should. how to mitigate: I've been focusing more on testing my code in depth before submission. I've been using XYZ platform for unit testing. However I need to make sure I don't over-do it also
Also, be honest about your strengths. Don't be cocky or cliche. A few for example:
Hope this helps.
In an interview, I asked a guy what his biggest weakness was, and he said:
I sometimes give smartass answers to stupid questions.
touché.
I always thought this was a stupid question. As an interviewer, you have no way to tell the difference between an honest answer and a carefully prepared one. As a candidate, it is in your best interest to prepare a false answer to this question.
If you're feeling really confident, you could tell the interviewer this. If I was the interviewer, and a candidate told me my question was stupid, and gave me a good reason why, I'd be inclined to hire them. That sort of behavior is something I really need in an employee: someone who will tell me when I'm making a mistake. It also shows that you've thought (at least a little) about how to conduct a good interview, and all employers need good interviewers.
That said, it's a good question for you to ask yourself. The problem, of course, is that most of the time we have a hard time seeing our weaknesses clearly. If you aren't seeing your weaknesses, then you need to look a little harder.
Knowing your strengths, and how to play to them, and your weaknesses, and how to stop them from being a problem, makes you much better at the job.
At times I like to twist these questions a little. Marcus Buckingham has a slightly different definition of strength that I rather enjoy in that to him a strength is something that makes you feel better at the end. So for me this is where I'd say that I solve problems and think abstractly well and enjoy that too. For weaknesses, I'd just be honest in that sometimes I take things too literally which can be difficult for some people. If they want other weaknesses, I'd list a few other things that tend to annoy me or can cause great challenges for me.
A point on the weaknesses is whether or not some place will have a lot of those and thus not be a good place to work.
regarding Wakness try to answer your weakness in such a way that it should be looked upon your strength. e.g.
You struck in an issue and you consult your senior who in turn could not help you out. In that scenario your weakness is that even you are appraching your senior you are doing constant R&D and will calm down once you solve this issue. In other words unless and until you solve this issue you tries on and on. for this sometimes your senior gets irritated for your restlessness.
I had a friend answer this question by saying, "my biggest weakness is I can't take questions like this seriously."
This is an awful question, for all the reasons noted here. You can say exactly what the interviewer wants to hear without the interviewer being able to tell that that's what you're doing.
(btw, my friend got the job)
Primary strength: Can solve complex problems easily. Primary weakness: Cannot describe well how I do that in plain english.
One of my weaknesses which came to light recently is that I don't question bad instructions. Specifically I was told to automatically convert c++ to C# and write tests in C# to test this c++ code base. It seemed like a bad idea, but I figured hey they are paying the bills so whatever. But really I should have hollered about how bad the idea was. It turned out to be a big waste of time.