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FAQ Intermediate Level ~2 min read

Tell me about a situation when your work was criticized

Quick Revision Summary

This is a tough question because it’s a more clever and subtle way to get you to admit to a weakness. You can’t dodge it by pretending you’ve never been criticized. Everybody ha...

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Model Answer & Deep-Dive Explanation

This is a tough question because it’s a more clever and subtle way to get you to admit to a weakness. You can’t dodge it by pretending you’ve never been criticized. Everybody has been.Yet it can be quite damaging to start admitting potential faults and failures that you’d just as soon leave buried. This question is also intended to probe how well you accept criticism and direction.

Approach: begin by emphasizing the extremely positive feedback you’ve gotten throughout your career and (if it’s true) that your performance reviews have been uniformly excellent.Of course, no one is perfect and you always welcome suggestions on how to improve your performance. Then, give an example of a not-too-damaging lea ing experience from early in your career and relate the ways this lesson has since helped you. This demonstrates that you lea ed from the experience and the lesson is now one of the strongest breastplates in your suit of armor. If you are pressed for a criticism from a recent position, choose something fairly trivial that in no way is essential to your successful performance. Add that you’ve lea ed from this, too, and over the past several years/months, it’s no longer an area of conce because you now make it a regular practice to…etc. Another way to answer this question would be to describe your intention to broaden your master of an area of growing importance in your field. For example, this might be a computer program you’ve been meaning to sit down and lea … a new management technique you’ve read about or perhaps attending a seminar on some cutting-edge branch of your profession. Again, the key is to focus on something not essential to your brilliant performance but which adds yet another dimension to your already impressive knowledge base.

Interviewer Evaluation Points & Scoring Rubric

  • 1 Structure answer clearly: Core concept, Practical example, and Pitfalls to avoid.
  • 2 Demonstrate clear communication without unnecessary buzzwords.
  • 3 Relate concept to real-world software development scenarios.