| > That is a carefully rehearsed answer making the weakness look fixable instead of being serious weakness. First, there's absolutely nothing wrong with rehearsing your answers to common questions like this. If anything it allows you to present yourself in the best light, which every interviewer wants. Nothing is worse than turning down a good candidate who performed poorly because they didn't take the interview seriously. Second, I literally thought of that answer off the top of my head in a few seconds. It wasn't actually rehearsed. I don't mean this to sound arrogant. There are many millions of others who can do the same -- think on their feet, take the interviewer's desires into account, and come up with a great answer. Some of these people will be interviewing at the same places as you. It's important to know that there is a wide range of communication abilities, just like there is a wide range of programming abilities. > No, the question was "what's your biggest weakness", the "I haven't practiced doing this kind of work" is not a big weakness, everyone have bigger weaknesses than that due to their personality… such answers are so easy to come up with, and are guaranteed not to be their biggest weakness, so you are basically checking whether they are fine with lying or lack self awareness This is splitting hairs. A reasonable person won't expect you riff through all your weaknesses to literally find the biggest one. They just want to hear something that's not too trivial. I can confident assert that the best communicators would instantly be aware of this when posed the question in an interview. I know a lot of engineers (myself included) who have a higher-than-normal-or-useful tendency to take things as literally as possible, as if every sentence is a spec, which makes us (relatively) poor or at least awkward communicators. > An honest answer would be "I am much slower learning technical things than my peers" or "I am competitive so I often come in conflict with my peers" or "I am afraid of conflict so I have a hard time making decisions" or "I get bored easily so I have a hard time finishing things" or "I constantly wear a mask so people never learn to know the real me" or "I don't like being proven wrong" or "I judge peoples competence by how much I like them rather than what they actually do" etc. Sure, and you could totally go that route if you want to. And ideally you'd go a step further, demonstrate that whatever trait you list is actually innate in humans, and that it's taken you work to be aware of it and work on it. |