Disagreement Question for E4 Behavioral Story Vetting: XFN Disagreement

Yeah I drove the meeting and got managers to support my viewpoints and this was supported by my leads and peers. Ultimately this was supported by my manager and he gave the sign off at the end of the day.

And then the document that was created was more of a basic run book for what URLs to go to how to restart pods and deploy how to update the configs etc. what level of support we should give etc. Entire point is to give our partners config driven solutions so they can make the changes independently without our involvement. But still make sure it’s adding value.

For more context the concern is that there was a approving voice in the room to go in this direction instead of a mutual consensus

Like I got the folks in the room, and we all contributed to the discussion helped guide the team to why our support model is like this and then the manager stepped in to help as well and gave the voice to get our needs met.

Like my specific actions were creating the document and bringing folks together in the same room but the actual back and forths was a team effort in that call.

Team effort is good. That's what is supposed to happen as you grow from L4 -> L5 -> L6 -> etc. You switch from individual scope/impact/perspective to being that "connector" uplifting the team, bringing folks together.

I just thought for it to count my actual negotiation skills had to come solely by me and I had to be the one that carried the discussion. Not like others helping by using the overall context of how our platform is typically supported.

Because my involvement was bringing a new framework to life that fit in with the existing operating principles of our teams existence. So senior engineers were good leaders in being the guardians of those principles.

It's hard to tell without being in the room, but you can both drive a discussion and have the dialogue be a team effort.

At the companies you want to work at (i.e. the good ones), I imagine you would get more credit for being a connector and placing more emphasis on bringing folks together as opposed to telling a story that feels more like "I solo-carried this".

Wait I thought this question is supposed to test how good your negotiation skills are?

But you’re suggesting it’s fine to just focus my story on this signal for being proactive and getting everyone together? Cuz a lot of my stories are like this. I did something similar to get partner teams unblocked in our platform when it came to outages.

In this company I used to work on the technical complexity was pretty low except for those core times of building the core fwk and then it just devolved into these xfn support and project delivery which was config change support

Negotiation sounds confrontational and has more of a combative connotation. It's called negotiation when you are working on an offer as you and the company literally are on different sides.

But within a team, it's about collaboration and synergy. If a team is vetting for "negotiation" for this question, seems like a toxic team to me.

Ohh ok so yeah my xfn collaboration at my last role had tons disagreements due to the nature of our platform and the consumers who depend on it. I’m just very shocked that this actually is what can work for the mid level track.

Usually I get a bug from the sister team I push back cuz we don’t wanna disrupt smthn else and I go find a solution by aligning their team and my senior engineers and the fix is usually a config change or a pod restart.

I’ve struggled with wanting to talk about this due to the low technical complexity that the disagreements were revolving around.

Is this a valid mindset shift maybe I need to do where I should just be comfortable talking about this and if it’s not technically complex I go ahead and share different experiences where the tech depth is higher?

Also another follow up for me is that I’m confused how driving alignment by setting up calls and focusing on teamwork is gonna make me stand out in these rounds.

The thing is that it seems like these behaviors become trivial once you have good grasp on the system and the execution and who’s around you so I’m just worried I’ll just sound like every other candidate with stories like this.

Also another follow up for me is that I’m confused how driving alignment by setting up calls and focusing on teamwork is gonna make me stand out in these rounds.

You'll be surprised at how many L4s are actually incapable of this. This is a big part of going from mid-level to senior.

For this question in particular, the key term of "disagreement" is very much looking for team collaboration signal (remember the 3 keys of behavioral interviews). Evaluating technical strength comes more from DSA, practical coding, and system design rounds, not behavioral. It doesn't make that much sense to get deep technical reads in round where the candidate can't code or draw anything.

Okay after looking at this: the teamwork key I feel like after this convo it’s clear that those xfn experiences are gonna really help here.

But for the passion for software engineering key: my main way I’m gonna show that passion in the surface is to prevent outages by working with partner teams on solutions again this xfn.

When it comes to the behaviors that I show in this key should I mention how I don’t give up when scoping is unclear or smthn like that?

I have examples where I proactively have asked leads to descale certain aspects of projects or I have scoped out how data mappings work.

However, when it comes to going deep into understanding the internals and all I always go as far as I need to solve it and maybe a little further to check if there’s any other issue. If there’s some hidden gem, that’s great learning but I always err on the side of practicality vs premature optimization of going deep. Would people be concerned if this is my approach?