Red Flags and Decision Cheat Sheets

An interview answer rarely fails because one field name was imperfect.

It usually fails because the answer repeatedly withholds the evidence the interviewer needs:

• the caller never appears;
• the resource model copies storage;
• operations have names but no behavior;
• failures remain "an error";
• retries remain "we retry"; or
• choices appear without triggers and costs.

This lesson is a final repair guide.

The first section names eight patterns that lower a rating. The second section compresses recurring decisions into trigger-and-cost tables. These are not scripts to recite