Tell me about a time you pushed back on leadership.

Question

Accepted Answer

This tests **constructive courage** — disagreeing with senior leaders respectfully, with evidence, while staying aligned to the company's goals. Not defiance, not silence.

## How to approach it

```text
1. Anchor your pushback to a shared goal
2. Bring data and a clear alternative, not just objection
3. Choose the right venue — usually private first
4. Disagree, then commit if overruled
```

## Worked example

```text
S: Leadership wanted to cut all QA to hit a quarter-end date.
T: I believed it would cause a costly outage but didn't want to seem obstructive.
A: I met the VP privately, showed defect-escape data from the last rushed
   release, and proposed risk-based testing on the critical paths only as a
   middle path.
R: He accepted the targeted-testing plan. We hit the date and avoided the
   outage pattern from before.
```

## Good vs weak

```text
✓ Shared goal + data + alternative + then commits
✗ "I refused and that was that"
✗ Saying yes despite knowing it's wrong
```

## Why it matters

Leaders don't have full context; well-reasoned pushback protects them from blind spots.

Offering an alternative turns "no" into a better path, which is far more persuasive than objection alone.

The courage to disagree respectfully — and commit afterward — is exactly what senior leaders want from senior engineers.