Behavioral Interview Prep - "What's your greatest weakness?"

IMO when people ask this question you should answer it as - "Here is something I have struggled with in the past, but here's the strategy I've used to overcome this". This allows you to be a little vulnerable / self aware, but also allows you to show in an authentic manner why that isn't a reason not to hire you

Eg - "at times I've struggled with public speaking, which I think earlier in my career hurt me because of X. However, I've taken classes and now make sure to present at every available opportunity. I'm continuing to work on this by doing Y and Z"

In your multitasking example, you could potentially say "I struggle with context switching at times, but what I do is i) maintain a daily task list which I use to prioritize the most important task at any given time ii) make use of focus blocks early in the morning. This has reduced the overhead needed for me to context switch as well as allow me to make uninterrupted progress on my key tasks"

For inspiration, I recommend checking out Philip Su's (ChatGPT engineer, ex-Meta/Microsoft engineering leader) incredible response about being self-aware here: "What's the core insight behind quick growth?"

As I talked about in the course, simply being honest will get you 90% of the way there. Nobody is perfect, and your goal with this question is to truly and genuinely realize why you aren't perfect (instead of falling into the failure mode of giving a fake weakness like "I work too hard"). From there, you can just to vocalize that and explain what you do to combat that weakness - Every good person is always striving for self-improvement, so this should feel natural.

The remaining 10% is narrative structure. For this question, it's:

1. Go through the weakness
2. Give examples of that weakness manifesting and coming back to bite you in the butt
3. What you're doing to correct that weakness

There are many "evergreen" weaknesses which are perfect for this question. As an example for me, I rabbit-hole unnecessarily a lot, missing the forest for the trees. It's always tempting as an engineer to dive deeper into issues, but the problem is that 95% of issues don't actually matter in the long-term. It's important to regularly "come up for air" as an engineer, view all your tasks holistically, and do a reprioritization exercise to ensure that you're working on the right problems. This is a critical concept, which is why I dedicated a large portion of my productivity course to it: https://www.jointaro.com/course/maximize-your-productivity-as-a-software-engineer/the-productivity-giant-you-are-missing/

Frankly, I feel like everyone on the Taro team struggles with the weakness I just mentioned, haha.

In the past, I've gone with "I don't multitask" because I mostly try to focus on one task before moving on to another.

Side note: This doesn't feel like a real weakness, just a working style preference. I imagine it wouldn't land well with a startup either as startup engineers are constantly context switching.

There are 2 failure modes with weakness:

1. Fake weakness - This is something that is actually good (at least has a positive connotation), but you are desperately trying to spin it as a negative. This fails as it's effectively dishonesty.
2. Bad weakness - In other words, this is a "weakness weakness", haha. An example would be "I write messy code". Okay, that's probably a honest response but it makes you look terrible.

The tricky part of this question is that you need to find a more nuanced and grounded weakness where it's true but it's not a low-hanging fruit weakness that is emblematic of a bad engineer who nobody wants to hire (e.g. poor code quality). The good news is that every human on Earth has those more nuanced weaknesses. You just need to introspect.