Lessons · Python · the STAR story
The two-minute story: Situation, Task, Action, Result
A behavioural answer has four beats: the situation, the task you had, the action you took, the result that followed. Most of the words go on the action, and the result carries a number.
Hone is a place to practise programming. This is one of its lessons, written out in full and free to read without an account.
What it is for
'Tell me about a time you...' opens most interviews and decides more of them than people admit. A real story told in two minutes, with what you learned at the end, is what separates a candidate from a résumé.
How to think about it
Pick one real problem you solved. Write the four beats as single sentences. Say the action in the most detail, give the result as a measurement, and end with one thing you learned. Practise it aloud until it is two minutes.
Worked example
story = {One real problem, four beats.'situation': 'The nightly report took 40 minutes and blocked the morning.',Where you were.
'task': 'I was asked to get it under ten.',What you had to do.
'action': 'I profiled it, found a query inside a loop, built one dict of the lookups before the loop, and re-ran the report against the old output.',What you did: the longest beat.
'result': 'Six minutes, same output, and the fix shipped that week.',What changed, with a number.
}
for beat in ('situation', 'task', 'action', 'result'):print(beat, len(story[beat].split()))The action carries the most words.
Your turn
Give the result beat a measurement.
result = 'The page loaded in instead of four seconds.'
Solve one with the tests running
The trap
Telling a story where nothing went wrong. Something went wrong in every real one; how you handled it is the answer they came for.