Your favourite question has some cultural gaps as in many countries in interview settings people downplay weaknesses and flaws. It’s why a lot of weakness questions are often ineffective. Unless you are acutely aware of when a person is doing this BECAUSE it’s an interview you’re going to get some answers that might lead you to reject good candidates.
I've made a lot of foul-ups in the course of my career. When people ask me about mistakes I've made and what I've learned from them during interviews it's generally an easy question to answer because I have this overstuffed mental file folder of examples.
I can't speak for the US but, in the UK, don't misrepresent your work in a job interview. I can't say you'll never miss out on an offer by being honest, though I don't believe I ever have, but would you really want to work for people who'd prefer you to lie or misrepresent mistakes you've made than be open and truthful about them?
To me that's something of a red flag: it's at least indicative of a culture where mistakes are likely to be covered up, leading to a lack of reflection, learning and improvement... and also quite possibly storing up bigger problems for later.
(FWIW, I started as a developer and am now the CTO of a mid-sized multinational market research and insight company. This is nowhere near as grand as it might sound, and isn't meant to be a boast, but hopefully illustrates that being honest doesn't appear to have done my career any long-term harm. Some things that have, if not derailed my career, caused me to take some fairly substantial detours: (i) taking things too personally, (ii) placing too much weight on others' assessments of me, (iii) and I say this as somebody who is wary of people who change jobs too often, but... staying in a job way past the point where there was anything else I could learn/give/progress. I am, of course, but a single data point.)
> Honesty is something that never goes down well in an interview when it comes to being critical. (At least in the US)
I wouldn't paint all tech companies in the U.S. with such broad strokes. In the interview loop for the job I have now in the U.S., every single interviewer asked me a question about "how things could have gone better." I talked about mistakes I made, lessons learned, and how I could do better next time.
I am told the feedback from that loop was across-the-board "outstanding."
Amazon thinks otherwise. This is their Earn Trust Leadership Principal:
"Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best." [1]
There is a difference between being self-critical once employed (where I agree it's a useful practice) and being self-critical during an interview (which is often viewed as the process of selling yourself in order to get a job).
Amazon's "principles" is also just that, corporate shpiel. 100% of Amazon employees, including Jeff Bezos, would fail if they were actually tested against their own dogma.
