[BurningFrog]

When i started out, a lot of things were hard.

Now, I can usually think of three decent ways to do anything. Nothing really feels "hard", it's just a different amount of work.

Another angle is that the way to solve "hard" problems is finding a way to think about it that makes it easy. Once I've done that, I no longer think of the problem as "hard".

I think the real issue here, that I don't fully understand, is what interviewers are really asking with that question? What do they want to hear?

[cookiecaper]

I've had the same problem. I used to have what I thought were OK answers to those questions, but now it's hard to choose. It's especially hard if they scope it down, e.g., what's something you're proud of that you've done in the past 3 months. What would be worth being proud of after 3 months? It'd have to be an exceptional project to warrant that. Otherwise, little bugfixes are routine, and even if they're clever, they're hard to talk about both because the details get discarded and because it's hard to provide the necessary context.

Interviewers are being lazy with that question, essentially. They're saying "Wow me so that I can know you're the most impressive."

This is a problem if you don't think of interviews as a competition over who's the most sparkly (also, who's the best storyteller and/or who had the best script).

My experience is that people are shockingly bad at interviewing. They throw all the work onto the candidate and expect to get good hires that way, which is rarely successful.