Describe a situation where you had to push back against technical debt or shortcuts. How did you make the case?

What the interviewer is looking for:

The interviewer wants to understand how you balance delivering features quickly with maintaining high quality and sustainable code. They want to hear how you justify prioritizing code health even when it slows things down in the short-term.

Example response:

"As the lead engineer on my team, I inherited a codebase with years of messy, untested code written by different engineers. My product manager kept pushing me to deliver new features out quickly. However, I knew we needed to prioritize technical debt first or velocity would eventually grind to a halt.

To make my case, I put together a presentation for my PM with code profiling data. I demonstrated how our technical debt was directly slowing down our feature development due to fragility and bugs. I proposed that we spend one sprint focused just on refactoring, implementing test coverage, and documenting key flows.

While hesitant at first, my PM agreed to a trial refactoring sprint. After we delivered a more robust codebase, my team's feature velocity increased 30% while bugs decreased. I successfully advocated for making refactoring sprints a regular practice going forward. Having hard data to correlate debt to velocity was the key to getting buy-in."