The Team Interview
One or more interviews will be with your future co-workers.
These interviews have a lot of impact on whether or not you’ll be hired. They aren’t always make-or-break, but the hiring manager will take their feedback very seriously.
The questions are usually technical in nature: “describe what a load balancer does”, “what does it mean when you get this error?”, and so on.
You may even get a curveball, like “tell me about a time you had to give bad news to your boss”.
The problem with team interviews: Most people at the team level have little or no training or experience conducting interviews.
Team Interviews: Where Your Future Coworkers Get to Play Judge
You’ll probably sit through a few interviews for any decent job. Some with HR, some with managers, and - more often than not - one or more with the actual people you’d be working beside every day.
Here’s the thing about those team members: they’re often terrible at interviewing.
Why your future coworkers aren’t great interviewers
Most engineers, designers, or analysts you meet with have never been trained to conduct interviews. Not even a little bit. Their entire approach to interviewing boils down to three steps:
- Remember what their interviews felt like
- Try to recreate that (plus whatever they’ve heard from coworkers)
- Wing the rest
Think about it - they became engineers because they like solving technical problems, not because they dreamt of evaluating human performance. They might ask weird curveball questions because someone once asked them a weird curveball question. Or they’ll grill you on obscure syntax because that’s what happened to them. It’s not strategy - it’s imitation.
How to handle it
You can’t fix their lack of training. You can’t make them suddenly understand behavioral interviewing techniques. What you can do is work with the reality you’ve got.
First - be human. Not “perfect human,” just… normal. Smile. Make eye contact. Nod when they talk. Yeah, it sounds basic, but you’d be amazed how many technically brilliant people forget this part.
Second - have real stories ready. Not scripted monologues, but actual work moments you can share. Like:
“Back when I was debugging that payment gateway integration, I realized the third-party API was returning success codes even when transactions failed. So I built a reconciliation script that ran hourly - saved us twelve hours of manual checks every week.”
That’s not showing off. That’s saying “I’ve been in your trenches.”
What they’re really deciding
Your panel isn’t secretly scoring you on how well you reverse linked lists on a whiteboard. They’re deciding one thing: could they survive sitting near you for eight hours a day?
- Will you explain your ideas clearly when they’re stuck?
- If they ask for help debugging at 4:45 PM, will you sigh or lean in?
- When someone says something stupid in a meeting, will you mock it quietly or ask clarifying questions?
The best team interviews feel less like exams and more like casual conversations where you accidentally prove you wouldn’t drive everyone nuts. Show up as someone they’d grab coffee with - except you’re wearing slightly nicer clothes and talking about your last project instead of weekend plans.
At the end of the day, they just want to know you won’t be that person. The one who hoards knowledge. Who blames the framework when code breaks. Who makes every meeting longer than it needs to be.
Be competent. Be reasonable. Be someone they wouldn’t actively dread working with. That’s not selling yourself short - it’s matching the actual stakes of the situation.
