Filling in a decisions table on your own is easier than explaining those decisions to someone who keeps asking “Why?” In this session, you’ll talk through one of your projects with an interviewer who wants to understand how you think.
Mentor AI plays an engineer on the team you’re applying to join. The session takes about 20 minutes. Here’s how it goes:
- You open with the one-sentence version of your project and a menu of directions for the discussion. Your interviewer picks one.
- Your interviewer then picks a decision and asks “Why?” a few times, going a level deeper each time.
- Expect questions about what went wrong, such as the hardest bug you encountered and what you’d do differently.
- At some point, you’ll get a question beyond your project that you can’t fully answer. That’s on purpose, so you can practice answering honestly.
As in the behavioral round, say each answer out loud first (or record it), and then type what you said. Have your profile.md card ready, along with your project’s write-up or README and the decisions table from interview_prep.md. If you don’t have a project write-up yet, you can practice with a sample candidate’s capstone project instead.
Your interviewer stays in character until the wrap-up. Type hint for a nudge, pause to step out and ask a coaching question, or wrap up to get your feedback. This feedback identifies where your answers became vague, so you know exactly what to prepare.
