"I did this, I did that" - But what did you learn?

 This is a bit of a pet peeve: very often I encounter situations where upon asking of experience around certain topics people answer "I was part of this project where they used tech X, did things in Y way".

...And that's it, they leave it at that.

There is nothing wrong with that formulation - as long as it's a premise for the more important part: why. Why did you do it like that? What did you learn? Was it great? What could be improved? Did it go awry? What considerations were made? What was the context? How does that context reflect to our current situation and why the topic is being discussed at the moment in the first place?

So very often this actually valuable part of analyzing and providing value based on the experience is missing entirely.

Someone who repeatedly utilizes the "I did that and this" without analysis gives the impression that they either haven't or cannot analyze the pros and cons - or don't even realize that doing that would be beneficial.

This is sadly prevalent in work interviews where upon trying to improve understanding of the prospective employee's capabilities by discussing their CV lines / projects they end up just listing the trite trivialities like above. This is also not just a technical matter - whether it's business leadership, product ownership, architect or coder - they should be able to analyze the scenarios at the level and perspectives relevant to the role in question. Not being able to do that (i.e. just listing CV factoids) is basically an automatic NO in work interview context. 

This of course works the other way as well - if you're being interviewed and the interviewers don't show analytical understanding of their own relevant context then that would be a yellow flag at the very least to avoid the company in question.

The more common scenario regarding the above is the everyday discussion on various problems that we face in our work and spare time. If you notice yourself saying "we did it like this in the previous place" then be sure to always follow that with some context-specific valuable analysis. After all - the aim usually is to solve the problem at the moment or at the very least create additional meaningful mutual understanding.