Now, this is a broad question as difficulty can be of any type. This question is asked to assess what are the things that you consider as difficult and how you go about solving that difficulty. While answering this:

• Focus on describing a problem that was related to your work using the STAR approach.
• Do not answer negatively or bad mouth any supervisor or any company.
• The interviewer should be made to understand the cause of the problem.
• Avoid bringing up personal problems in your life.
• Focus on the learnings of the problem rather than dwelling too much on the damage.

Sample answer:

There was a time in my current company when I received a bug report from our client which stated that the databases were performing below the mark when a complex query was called excessively from the interface.

The first thing I did was checking the logs to perform the root cause analysis. Doing this gave me a rough idea REGARDING where the bug started APPEARING. I reproduced the bug only on the production server and I tried replicating the same on my local system. While debugging, I found out that there was a bug in the Java code where some lines were commented out by the developers who had already left this company.

I fixed this code quickly and did a round of performance TESTING on the application to ensure that this doesn’t occur again. The issue was fixed at the end of the day and we were able to get the server up and running with enhanced performance. We learnt an IMPORTANT lesson to perform regression testing after every phase of releases to ensure the old functionalities were working fine along with the newly developed ones.