Tell a story you're a part of.

A friend was preparing for a job interview at a pretty high-profile startup when he reached out for advice in an online community we both frequent. The recruiters had laid out some expectations for the interview that seemed pretty bog-standard, but one particular item prompted my friend to seek some guidance. Paraphrasing a bit, the prompt stated interviewees were expected to talk about a few things including:

What’s a complex project you’ve worked on, relevant to this position? Who did you collaborate with? How did you contribute to the project? What were some challenges you overcame? How did your work affect the project in the end?

That first part can hit the panic button pretty hard.

What’s a complex project you’ve worked on…?

It’s a fairly common question to get asked in interviews, especially for tech-related jobs, and yet, it always seems daunting to answer.

Imagine someone walking up and asking this right when you’re about to order some food. I’d wager your first thought may be, “Wait, what? I trying to get a sandwich.”

Give it a second, let it sink in, and your next thought may be, “Oh, goodness. What’s a complex project I worked on? What work did I complete that was genuinely complex, let alone relevant to the next job I want?”

For most people, this is likely when they scroll through their job history in their minds and find the most complex project they led and delivered, start to finish, top to bottom, soup to nuts. I’m hardly innocent of this myself. I can count on my fingers how many times I answered similar questions with a vote of confidence, and that would be a good guess at best.

For my friend, the nuance of answering this question wasn’t about what complex project he solved, but that he hadn’t solved any complex problems yet, in his mind. He hadn’t worked in software development that long. How was he to honestly answer this with only so much work experience under his belt?

Main character syndrome

In this day and age of AI-driven web scrappers, I presume you who are reading this are like me and are human. We humans naturally tend to center ourselves when asked questions about what we’ve done. Speaking for myself, talking about and upselling my work is probably one of the most uncomfortable positions to be in, and I bet I’m not alone in that sentiment. Let’s take a second to re-interpret the prompt, though.

Instead of thinking about it as:

What’s a complex task you yourself organized, led, championed, and delivered?

Let’s try interpreting it as:

What work have you contributed to a complex project?

Suddenly, answering this just got a lot easier, didn’t it? Talking about your role in something complex can be a lot easier than talking about a complex role you had to fill.

Part of the sum

Anyone working on software, let alone anything in general, is rarely asked to deliver deeply technical and complex solutions all by themselves. Any given project is usually broken down into tasks. Those tasks are delegated to people, often based on their specialties or bandwidth. The sum results of these individual tasks being completed, in addition to solutions to challenges the team collaborates on, are what generate outcomes. At that point, it’s usually fairly clear how someone’s completed work can influence those outcomes. That throughline, starting from the tasks a contributor was delegated and ending at those outcomes, is what recruiters asking that question want to hear about.

Sure, sometimes there are highly passionate, high-output contributors whose work supports the outcomes of the project to an outsized degree, but they’re outliers. Even their work doesn’t usually meet the project’s goals in and of itself. Heck, Superman could thwart the best-laid plans of many villains, but even he was part of the Justice League.

What if you’re the only one on the team solving those problems? What if you’ve built something for yourself to solve your own complex problems? The same rubric applies, and you’re still not in a silo. You’re likely still collaborating with stakeholders, one of which can definitely be you in the mirror, to identify deliverables and timelines. You may own more of the project, but you’re still handling tasks and challenges in threads instead of drawing the rest of the owl in one step.

Complexity by any other name

When my friend asked about how to respond, he also served up another interesting question: What counts as “complex?” Other friends in the community chipped in on this one.

One pointed out, “Complexity doesn’t necessarily have to be strictly technical.” The complications of any given project could refer to resource constraints, prioritization, or regulatory and standards compliance of one kind or another. It’s common to even have conflicting milestones on the same project that make it difficult to navigate towards a single outcome.

Someone else added, and I’m paraphrasing a little, that the important bit of talking about one’s role in a complex project is “your ability to recognize that there was a system, that it was complex, that you recognized it as complex instead of diving head-first only to regret it a week later, and how your actions treated it as the complex project that it was.” This is a sharp edge I’ve cut myself on numerous times. Learning how to identify a system or project as complex takes time and experience, but that learning can be done through experimentation and study.

Taking a look at the prompt as a whole one more time:

What’s a complex project you’ve worked on, relevant to this position? Who did you collaborate with? How did you contribute to the project? What were some challenges you overcame? How did your work affect the project in the end?

it’s easy to see now how redefining the mental image of a “complex project,” changing it from a one-person show to a collaborative effort, can help answers for the rest of the prompt fall into place. Being asked what you’ve worked on is a chance for us to talk about our smaller part in a larger whole. It’s not a question about how you found and climbed the mountain. It’s more about how you, and maybe your team, worked to make climbing that mountain easier, even if your part in that seemed small at the time.