I Versus We

Engineers who work on good teams default to "we". It's culturally correct and interview-fatal, because the write-up has to answer "what did this candidate do" and a story made of "we decided, we shipped, we found" doesn't answer it. The interviewer either has to interrogate you for the answer — burning your time — or guess low.

The fix is not to claim other people's work. It's a division of labour inside the sentence: "we" carries the setting, "I" carries the actions. "The team was three engineers on a two-month deadline. I owned the sync layer. I proposed we drop offline support for v1 because the conflict resolution was where all the risk was, and I wrote the doc that got that agreed."

Overcorrecting is a real failure too, and it shows up as a story where the candidate appears to have done everything, made every call, and had no dependencies. That reads as either exaggeration or as someone who steamrollers a team — and it's easily exposed by "what did the other two engineers do?"

The strongest version does both at once: precise about your own contribution, generous and specific about others'. "The migration plan was mine; the reason it worked was that our SRE insisted on a dry run against a prod snapshot, which caught a constraint violation I'd missed." That single sentence signals ownership, humility, and collaboration, and it's more believable than either extreme.

A pronoun audit is worth doing once, out loud, on your two or three main stories. Most people are surprised by how much of their own work disappears.

This is the single most common preventable weakness in strong candidates' answers, and it maps directly to the levelling decision — a story with no identifiable "I" gets recorded as ambiguous scope, which resolves downwards. It's also cheap to fix: same stories, different pronouns.

• The write-up must answer "what did they do"; "we" stories force the interviewer to guess, and they guess low.
• Set the scene in "we", state decisions and actions in "I".
• Name your specific surface — "I owned the sync layer" — rather than the project as a whole.
• Total "I" invites "so what did everyone else do?", which is a hard question to recover from.
• Credit others concretely, with what they contributed, not with a generic nod to the team.
• Combining precise self-attribution with specific credit is the most credible register.
• Audit your main stories for pronouns once; the drift is usually invisible from the inside.