Tell me about a time when your manager set reasonable demands. Follow up asked for a situation with unreasonable demands.

In my first year, my manager asked me to add a small reporting feature in three days before a customer demo. It felt like a stretch, but it was reasonable because the scope was narrow, a teammate was available for questions, and the demo date was fixed. I broke the work into pieces, checked my plan with my manager that morning, and flagged that one part would need to be simplified if we wanted enough testing time. We agreed on a smaller version for the demo and finished the rest the following week. That experience taught me that a tough ask can still be fair if the goal is clear and tradeoffs are explicit. In a different case, I was asked to make a risky change in an unfamiliar area the same day without review time, and I pushed for a safer phased approach instead.

At my last job as a junior front-end developer, my manager once asked me to fix three small visual bugs and add a short accessibility note to the release notes before the next morning’s deployment. It felt reasonable because each bug was isolated, the designer was available to confirm the fixes, and the company prioritized shipping stable, accessible releases — I planned the changes, verified them in the staging build, and updated the release notes before handoff. A few months later, that same manager asked me to implement a brand-new feature, fix a backlog of unrelated bugs, and handle all incoming support requests overnight; I explained that taking that on alone would risk quality and burnout, proposed splitting the work across the team and shifting noncritical bugs to the next sprint, and we agreed on a realistic handoff. That taught me to appreciate managers who balance clear priorities with respect for team capacity.