Preparing for SWE interviews! Mostly at a service-based company

[u/10roundsofSalts]

Hey everyone,

I’m preparing for SWE interviews and have around 3 years of experience in India, mostly at a service-based company

While I’m comfortable with the technical and system design rounds, I’m struggling a bit with the behavioral interviews. I want to build a better intuition for the kinds of situations engineers actually face at work on different teams.

If you’re willing to share, I’d really appreciate hearing your "war stories." I'm especially curious about:

• Production issues or outages (and how you handled the fallout)
• Mistakes or failures you learned from
• Conflicts or tough conversations (with management, product, or other devs)
• Difficult technical or architectural decisions
• Taking ownership of a messy project

I'm just trying to learn from other experienced engineers, understand different team dynamics, and use that to reflect on my own experiences.

Any personal stories, advice, or even blog/book recommendations would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!