Most engineers I talk to prepare for interviews the same way. They grind coding problems for weeks, skim a system design primer, and leave the behavioral round for the night before.

The data says that plan is upside down.

At Dataford we collect interview reports from candidates after they finish a loop. For Software Engineer roles alone we have 320k+ candidate reports, 245k+ reported questions and guides for 11k+ companies. When we group those questions by category, behavioral and leadership questions come out on top.

What the question counts show

Here is how reported Software Engineer questions break down by category:

Behavioral and leadership: about 88k questions, or about 36%

Coding: about 68k, or about 28%

Execution: about 25k, or about 10%

System design: about 23k, or about 9%

Technical fundamentals: about 13k, or about 5%

Behavioral questions outnumber coding questions by roughly 20k.…