Some things are obvious it's a negative situation though. If you're looking for a new job after a year what can you say?
My approach would be along the lines of "if you have nothing nice to say don't say anything" which would probably lead to some vague statement like "it wasn't a good fit"
Software jobs are generally pretty nice jobs. If your leaving one it's not for some positive reason. I feel like people know that.
In an interview setting you should frame negatives as growth. You are doing marketing, not a retrospective or post mortem so put on the LinkedIn-style, vacuously-half-a-person mask. The interviewers know their job isn't perfect so a valuable thing to evaluate is "can this person keep a positive and effective attitude through both good and bad". Obviously different roles have different knobs to turn here for the right message (like a generic ic vs a "wartime manager").
Some basic examples of describing negative situations:
I ended up learning a lot there and I'm a better engineer now because of it.
We had a lot of challenges to overcome and you can never nail all of them but we really managed to produce a lot of great work there within some pretty serious constraints.
I accomplished a major thing and was learning X on the side so it was a perfect time and opportunity to find an opportunity to learn that more in a real world setting and/with experts.
I joined that team with the intent to learn X first hand and, while there is always more to learn, I got enough hands-on, production experience with it that I feel like it's firmly in my toolbox.
We had some unexpected changes/setbacks early on that changed our goals but it ended up being kind of a blessing in disguise since it pushed me out of my comfort zone and gave me an unexpected opportunity to level up my leadership/management/architecture/in-the-weeds skills.
Using your example, tell a selective truth.
If you join a team as an IC and it’s a dumpster fire and clearly never going to ship, then “I joined expecting the project to be in a different stage of development. I gave it a shot but I’m looking for something <more mature/earlier in development>”. If your director is a raging ass, then “leadership want to take the product one way and Id rather go another “
Why are people at their jobs so fatally allergic to honesty?
There’s two reasons to do this - as an interviewer, the way you present yourself to me is the way I expect you’ll present yourself as a representative of the team or company. It’s not good to air dirty laundry publicly, and if you can’t keep it under control when it’s almost an explicit “don’t trash talk your old job” the. There’s basically no hope of it when things are more relaxed.
Secondly, there’s three sides to every story. Yours, theirs and the truth. If I say “my manager is an asshole so I’m leaving his team”, it’s probable that my manager has a different take on it, maybe “maccard said they wanted to be kept in the loop so I am telling them what happening but they accuse me of changing my mind”.
Neither of those answers seem at all dishonest. They just skip past the diagnosed cause to focus on the impact.
Maybe the boss being a raging ass is the root cause of the team moving in the wrong direction. But that may be debatable, and knowing that doesn't answer the interviewer's question. The more relevant piece is that you and the director disagree and that you don't want to waste your time working on something you aren't inspired by.
Why are you leaving your current job questions are typically inartful checks whether there's "something wrong with you." Refusing to meaningfully answer can come across as, "I'd prefer not to discuss whether there's something wrong with me." Not explicitly damaging, but certainly not confidence building.
The most useful answers I've heard in the wild were dispassionate, one sentence expressions of why <objective fact> made the existing job irreconcilable with your <valid need>. Done well, that shows the hiring manager you're able to approach conflict constructively, and gives reason to believe the bad fit is unlikely to recur in this role.
AskAManager[0] also suggests "I’m not actively looking, but I saw this job and was really interested because of X," as a reasonably broad spectrum solution to this problem. (Though after just a year, I as a hiring manager might still worry you are flighty).
[0] https://www.askamanager.org/2023/02/how-do-i-tell-interviewe...