I'm a Good Engineer but Terrible at Interviews. What I Did About It.

I know my stuff. I've been doing backend development for nine years, mostly Go and Python, some Rust lately. I can architect distributed systems. I can debug things at 2am. I've shipped products that handle millions of requests. But put me in a behavioural interview and I fall apart. "Tell me about a time you handled conflict with a stakeholder." My brain goes blank. Not because I haven't done it. I have. But I can't package it into a neat story on the spot. I start rambling. I give too much technical context. The interviewer's eyes glaze over.

The Melbourne market specifically

I'm based in Melbourne and the tech scene here has this weird thing where even deeply technical roles want you to pass behavioural rounds. I get it in theory — culture fit matters. But when I'm applying for a principal engineer role and the third interview is "tell me about your leadership philosophy," it feels disconnected from the actual work. I lost two offers last year because of this. Technical rounds, fine. System design, fine. Behavioural round? Thanks but we've decided to go in a different direction.

What I tried

I'm not great at winging things so I prepared like it was a technical problem. I wrote down twelve stories from my career. Real ones. Conflict. Failure. Leading without authority. Tight deadlines. Each one in a basic structure — what happened, what I did, what the result was. Then I practiced saying them out loud. This felt incredibly stupid. I was sitting in my apartment talking to myself about a disagreement I had with a product manager in 2022. But it worked. When the question came up in my next interview, my brain had something to reach for instead of just panic.

The outcome

Got an offer from a company in Cremorne. Principal engineer. The behavioural round still wasn't my strongest — the interviewer could probably tell I was reciting prepared answers. But prepared answers are better than no answers. My advice to other engineers who hate this stuff: treat it like a system you need to learn. It's not natural talent. It's preparation. Write the stories down. Practice them. It feels dumb but it works.

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