# Making the 'I' Clear and Results Honest — Behavioural Interview Prep

Source: https://www.skillbyai.com/en/behavioural-interviews/s-honest

> Credit others, own your part, quantify truthfully.

## Your contribution, accurately

Most engineering work is collaborative, so it is easy to slip into 'we did this, we did that'. Interviewers are hiring **you**, so make your contribution explicit: 'The team owned the migration; I designed the rollback plan and ran the cut-over.' Give fair credit to others; claiming work you did not do is dishonest and tends to unravel under follow-up questions. For results, use numbers only when you know them or can estimate them honestly ('roughly', 'about half', 'from minutes to seconds'). When there is no metric, describe qualitative outcomes: a decision unblocked, a process adopted by others, feedback received, a risk avoided.

## Rewriting 'we' into clear ownership

Before and after.

```text
BEFORE
  "We noticed the API was slow, so we added caching and it got faster."

AFTER
  "Our team noticed p95 latency on the search API had grown.
   I traced most of it to repeated lookups of the same product data,
   proposed a short-lived cache, and implemented it with my teammate
   reviewing the invalidation logic. Latency dropped noticeably on
   our dashboard, and I wrote up the invalidation rules for the team."

Honest quantifying phrases
  - "roughly halved"            - "from minutes to seconds"
  - "about a dozen customers"   - "I do not remember the exact
                                   figure, but it was ..."
```

## If you do not remember a number, say so

'I do not have the exact figure, but it was in the order of...' is far better than a precise-sounding number you cannot defend.

**Quiz:** You led one part of a team project. How should you describe it?

- [ ] Claim the whole project as yours
- [x] Credit the team and state clearly which part you did
- [ ] Say only 'we' throughout
- [ ] Avoid mentioning the team at all

*Answer:* Credit the team and state clearly which part you did. Accurate ownership is credible ownership.