Can you give an example where you changed your mind because of someone else's pushback, rather than the other way around?

This question specifically screens for intellectual honesty and updateability — it's easy to prepare a "I disagreed and I was right" story, and interviewers know it; asking for the reverse checks whether a candidate can genuinely recognize being wrong in the moment and change course, which is a stronger signal of good engineering judgment than always being right, since nobody actually always is. A strong answer names specifically what changed your mind (the actual argument or evidence, not just "they made a good point") and shows genuine attitude change, not a grudging technical concession while still believing you were right.

Interviewers ask this specifically because the more common "tell me about a disagreement" question invites a prepared, self-flattering narrative where the candidate was right all along — which is a weak signal on its own, since it's easy to cherry-pick a story where that happened to be true. Asking explicitly for the opposite — a time you were wrong and someone else changed your mind — is much harder to fake convincingly and reveals something more useful: can this person actually update their position based on new information, or do they just perform open-mindedness while quietly holding their ground.

What separates a strong answer from a weak one here is specificity and genuineness. A weak answer stays vague ("someone made a good point and I agreed") without naming the actual argument or evidence that shifted the thinking — which reads as either not remembering clearly or not having genuinely engaged with the counter-argument in the first place. A strong answer names the specific piece of evidence, data, or reasoning that did the actual work of changing the position — "I was convinced the extra abstraction layer was worth the complexity, until they showed me the actual latency numbers from a similar system, which made the trade-off obviously not worth it for our use case" is concrete and verifiable in a way "they had a good point" isn't.

The other signal worth demonstrating: genuine attitude change versus grudging technical concession. "I updated the code because they were technically right, but I still think my approach was better" is a subtly different (and weaker) answer than one that shows the candidate's actual understanding of the problem shifted, not just their willingness to comply with a technically-correct counter-argument while still believing their original instinct. The former reads as compliance under pressure; the latter reads as real learning — which is what the question is actually trying to surface.

• This question specifically counters the easy-to-fake "I disagreed and was right" narrative by asking for the harder, more honest reverse case.
• A strong answer names the specific argument, evidence, or data that actually changed the position — vague "they made a good point" answers are a weak signal.
• Genuine attitude change (understanding actually shifted) reads much stronger than grudging technical compliance (did what was asked while still believing the original instinct was right).
• The ability to update on new information is a stronger predictor of good engineering judgment than a track record of always being right.

• Google SRE Book: Postmortem Culture