When did you solve a scaling challenge?" -- I get questions like this in interviews. It seems like they are biased toward cowboy coders.

Whenever I've been on a project that had to solve a scaling challenge the solution was something we discussed as a team. Yet these questions come up and it feels like my answers for them are insuffici

Whenever I've been on a project that had to solve a scaling challenge the solution was something we discussed as a team. Yet these questions come up and it feels like my answers for them are insufficient because I usually say something like "well I talked with the team and the solution we came up with was ...". For instance we've change our Aurora instance to have a separate write and read node. But I wouldn't do that without talking to the team first. Do people solve scaling challenges on their own without discussing the right solution with the team? What's that look like? If it comes down to "I made X function 50% faster" that doesn't seem like a scaling problem at all. Just to be clear: I'm not complaining about these questions. I'm wondering what a good answer for these looks like in a team environment.