Hermes Wiki
Works/Profile/PersonalBrand/interview_narrative_bank

Interview Narrative Bank

STAR-format stories (Situation, Task, Action, Result), one per common interview theme, so a real narrative is ready to adapt per question instead of improvising from scratch each time. Pull from proof_artifacts for candidates — a story only belongs here once it has a specific situation, specific actions, and a specific measurable result, not a generic summary.

Incident response / high-stakes failure

Strong candidate already written up: the P1 VLAN change outage war story — Works/ResumeProjects/p1-war-story-vlan-change-outage-elastiflow. Adapt it into STAR shape here.

[!todo] Pull the war story into STAR format here: Situation/Task/Action/Result, plus the 1-2 sentence "what I'd do differently" reflective close most interviewers are actually listening for.

Scale (system handled real load/complexity)

[!todo] Candidate: PIV or NetOps (per proof_artifacts) — "1000s of devices, 50+ commands each" and natural-language querying at production scale are both real scale stories. Pick one, write it in STAR format with actual numbers.

Leadership / influence without authority

[!todo] Fill in — a time you drove a technical decision or got buy-in without formal authority over the people involved.

Conflict / disagreement with a peer or manager

[!todo] Fill in — a real technical or prioritization disagreement, how it resolved, what you'd do the same or differently.

Ambiguity / unclear requirements

[!todo] Fill in — a project that started underspecified and how you found the real problem. TraceLens or the Citibank DQ project (per proof_artifacts) may fit if the requirements genuinely weren't clear at the start.

A hard technical tradeoff you made

[!todo] Fill in — a real architecture/design decision with a genuine tradeoff (not a no-brainer), and why you chose what you chose.

Hermes Wiki