How Have You Utilized Your Problem-Solving Skills to Overcome a Technical Challenge in Your Previous Role?

This question is asking you to demonstrate your problem-solving skills by giving an example of a situation where you overcame a technical challenge in your previous role. The interviewer wants to understand your thought process and systematic deconstruction of complex problems to workable solutions. Your answer must show your ability to:

• Identify a technical problem and analyze it.
• Generate and implement a solution.
• Monitor the solution's effectiveness.
• Learn from the experience and use that knowledge moving forward.

Your answer should demonstrate clear logical thinking, the ability to work under pressure and perhaps even team-working skills if others were involved in solving the problem.

In my previous role as a Software Engineer, we ran into a serious performance issue with our application which led to very slow load times for the end-users. We had just moved to a different cloud-based technology and we were unfamiliar with the detailed workings of this new environment.

To address the issue, I first did an analysis of the network traffic using the network logs, which allowed me to isolate and reproduce the problem. From my research, I realized there were some network configurations that were not optimally set for our application's requirements.

I proposed a solution and discussed it with the team. Once we agreed on the solution, we implemented the changes and saw a significant speed improvement in load times. We learned to be more careful with network configurations in cloud-based technologies and I led a knowledge sharing session so all team members could benefit from the experience.

At my previous job as a Database Administrator, we faced an issue where one of our critical databases was frequently becoming locked due to a racing condition and deadlock issue, which was locking users out of the system and causing downtime.

I initiated an analysis of the transaction requests to pinpoint the parts of the code causing the locking, and identified that multiple sections were trying to access a common resource simultaneously. To solve this issue, I redesigned the database transaction process to make it occur sequentially rather than simultaneously, thereby eliminating the deadlock issue.

Post implementation, we observed the system for a period of time and noted a significant drop in the number of lockouts, proving the solution's effectiveness. From this experience, I learned how crucial it is to incorporate efficient transaction handling to avoid such issues in the future. I shared my findings and the lessons learned with my team to prevent such issues from reoccurring.