How did you overcome a situation where you have been given a negative feedback?
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Practice with feedback and follow-up questions
What is this question about
Interviewers use this question to assess how you respond when your self-image is challenged. They want to see whether you can receive criticism without getting defensive, understand the real issue beneath the feedback, and turn it into sustained behavior change. At more senior levels, they also look for whether your response improved outcomes beyond just your own performance.
Key Insights
- You do not need a dramatic failure story. A strong answer usually features legitimate, meaningful feedback and shows a real learning loop, not a disguised strength or a trivial comment.
- Don't stop at 'I accepted the feedback.' Strong candidates explain how they validated it, what they changed over time, and what evidence showed the change actually worked.
- If the feedback came from someone else, show curiosity rather than defensiveness. Honest ownership of your part in the problem is a fast signal of maturity.
What interviewers probe atlevel
Top Priority
Don't present feedback as a simple command to obey; show that you understood what behavior was causing the concern.
Good examples
🟢I asked my lead for examples and realized the real issue wasn't effort, it was that I waited too long to surface uncertainty when tasks got blocked.
🟢After the feedback, I reviewed a few recent pull requests with a teammate and saw the pattern: I was bundling unrelated changes, which made review slower and riskier.
Bad examples
🔴My manager said to communicate more, so I started sending more messages in chat.
🔴I was told to be more careful, so I slowed down and double-checked everything.
Weak answers apply a surface-level fix; strong answers identify the underlying behavior that needs to change.
Valuable
Example answers atlevel
Great answers
In my first few months on a backend team, my manager told me that I was waiting too long to ask for help when I got stuck. I was trying to be independent, but when we looked at a recent task together, I could see that I had spent almost a full day going in circles instead of surfacing the blocker early. After that, I started writing down my approach after about 30 minutes of being stuck and sending a quick update if I was still blocked after a few hours. I also asked a more experienced teammate to review my plan before I dove too deep into unfamiliar areas. Over the next couple of sprints, I was unblocked much faster, and my manager later called out that I was communicating risks earlier and moving work forward more predictably.
Early on in my front-end role I was told my pull requests were too large and bundled styling tweaks and small refactors with feature code, which made them hard to review and delayed merges. I’m someone who cares about polish and fixing things as I notice them, but that approach was slowing the team down. After the feedback I began breaking work into focused PRs (feature, styles, refactor), added short checklists and before/after screenshots to each PR, and used a feature flag for in-progress UI so the feature could be merged safely. I also asked a senior engineer and our designer to agree on a simple PR template for the team and followed it. Reviews became quicker, there were fewer follow-up changes, and I learned to balance wanting things to look right with keeping changes reviewable.
Poor answers
I got feedback once that I needed to communicate more while working on a task. I felt like I was already doing the work, so I didn't think a lot of extra updates were necessary, but after that I made sure to post more in chat. That seemed to address the issue and nobody really mentioned it again. I think sometimes managers just want more visibility.
Question Timeline
See when this question was last asked and where, including any notes left by other candidates.
Late July, 2026
Mid May, 2026
Late April, 2026
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