31. Tell me about a disagreement that you had where you insisted on your position, and you turned out to be wrong.
Describe the disagreement, how you responded, and what changed after you were proven wrong.
Use STAR to structure your answer: briefly explain the Situation and Task, make Action the most detailed part, and finish with the Result. For example, describe a disagreement where you strongly supported one technical approach, explain why you believed it was correct, show how you listened when evidence proved otherwise, took responsibility, changed your position, and helped the team move forward.
In my last role, my team was changing a Java service that called another internal service. We disagreed about whether we should add a local cache for some frequently requested data. I strongly supported adding the cache because I believed it would reduce repeated calls and make the service more responsive. Another developer argued that the extra cache would add unnecessary complexity because the existing service was already fast enough for our use case.
My responsibility was to help choose an approach that kept the service reliable and simple. I also needed to make sure my technical opinion did not slow down the team. At first, I was convinced that the cache was the safer long term design, so I pushed for it more strongly than I should have.
I explained my reasoning to the team and described the situations where I thought repeated remote calls could become a problem. The other developer suggested that we measure the real behavior before adding more code. I initially resisted because I thought the future risk was obvious. However, I agreed that we should test the assumption instead of continuing the disagreement based only on opinions. I worked with the developer to review request patterns and run load tests against the existing implementation. The results showed that the remote call was fast, the request volume was manageable, and adding a cache would create more work around expiration, stale data, and failure handling without solving a current problem. At that point, I told the team that my original position was wrong. I supported keeping the simpler design and helped remove the cache related work from our plan. I also documented the conditions that would justify reconsidering caching later, so we had a clear way to revisit the decision if traffic or latency changed.
We moved forward with the simpler implementation and avoided adding complexity that we did not need. More importantly, I learned to separate a reasonable technical concern from evidence that the concern actually matters now. Since then, when I feel strongly about a design choice, I try to define what evidence would prove or disprove my assumption before insisting on the solution.
Interviewers ask this question to see whether a candidate can handle being wrong without becoming defensive. A strong answer shows self awareness, respect for evidence, willingness to listen, ownership of mistakes, and the ability to change direction while maintaining a productive working relationship.