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Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#81

Post by kkfx »

Some random points:

- not offering full-remote for all jobs actually doable from remote;

- trying to start selling itself as a super-duper-enterprise naming vague roles with unclear responsibility and so on;

- choosing external recruiters who have no clue about real opened position so they just run HR games and absurd questions;

- talking about proprietary software they use, requirements like "you will use this IDE", finding normal using a laptop for desk-fixed works;

- not possessing anything themselves living on someone else iron and even worse develop on someone else services.

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#82

Post by ghaff »

karaterobot wrote: post #77
qwerty456127 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1-2 hour long interview?

No, I meant one or two interviews of an hour each. I've since edited my comment to gaslight you. Err, I mean to clarify the language.

I honestly think 30 minutes is a pretty good length as an average. Get much longer than that and it's really easy to get into filling in conversation holes. I've even interviewed people where 10 minutes in it's pretty obviously not going to work out and now where are you?

Maybe it's modern attention spans but I generally push back on analyst briefings/presentations/etc. that get much beyond the 30 minute mark.

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#83

Post by mrj »

ghaff wrote: post #43
mrj wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Take home assignment with a time limit." What's your concern there? (Honest question!) I feel terrible about asking for home assignments but I feel like it's good for people like myself who are terrible about coding live. (I usually have a choice of live or homework.) I put a "limit" as a guideline about what kind of quality to expect, usually with language about things not to worry about. I don't expect/want folks…

The main issue is that you can give any guidelines you want but a ton of people will take "Don't spend more than 4 hours on this" with an implied nudge/nudge/wink/wink. That said, as I wrote elsewhere, if you can't pull a reasonable version of a work product out of a folder, I may be asking you to create one. I'm not necessarily talking code but I absolutely am looking for some proof that you can do the work if it's…

I have had this problem and my assignments really stress that it doesn't even have to be done, we can look at in the meeting and possibly finish small parts together or talk about work that'd be done. But still people do sometimes do far too much and it's not the positive signal they think it is.

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#84

Post by kelnos »

avgDev wrote: post #54

* Open office bonus points for adding "because we like collaboration" * No remote or hybrid * Unlimited PTO can potentially be a red flag depending on other aspects * Dinners at the office * Business model that is not generating any revenue * Needing 5 references for a junior position and they had to be people I worked with(my team was 3 devs). So, I listed other people I knew. One of them a VP of a tech company, who…

> Unlimited PTO can potentially be a red flag depending on other aspects

The key on this one is to then ask your interviewers how much PTO they usually take per year. If the answers are below what would make you happy, then that's a problem.

At my last company with unlimited PTO, at my height I was taking ~8 weeks per year. I was highly productive and my boss knew that even losing me for two months out of the year, I was getting much more useful work done than most people who were taking 2-3 weeks. (At least I hope that was his thought process, and not just that he wasn't paying attention.)

> Business model that is not generating any revenue

Do you mean profit? Not generating any revenue either means they're very young and don't have a product yet (fair to not want to work on something like that, but every company has to go through that phase), or that they have a product but are somehow not charging for it at all, and don't have any other monetization strategies like ads (gross) or selling user data (even grosser).

But if you limit yourself to only companies that are turning a profit, you're essentially saying that you'll mostly only work for older, established companies, and for the most part nothing that's VC-backed. (Which, again: fair, but also pretty limiting.)

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#85

Post by pcloadletter_ »

kelnos wrote: post #80
karaterobot wrote: post #30

The ones that come to mind: * If they are a small company who outsources any step of their interview process to another company. If you're only interviewing for a couple positions—people you will work with every single day—take the time to do it yourself. * If they are a startup that says they are looking for people who are interested in solving exciting problems . For some people, this is going to be an enticement,…

> If they are a small company who outsources any step of their interview process to another company. I'm torn on this. Having dedicated recruiting staff isn't cheap, and I'm not sure a small company could justify this unless they're constantly hiring. But I've gotten soooo much low-effort, generic recruiting spam from third-party recruiters that, were I running a company, I'd only resort to those sorts of recruiters…

While it's not fair, what I've settled on is this: if they can't spend for in-house recruiting, they probably can't afford me. This is based on ~20 years of this consistently happening. Again, not fair, but I have limited time to do job searching and empirically 3rd party recruiters have always hit a dead end.

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#86

Post by pcloadletter_ »

kelnos wrote: post #79
gumby wrote: post #74

I think a lot of companies forget that the interview is the applicant selling themselves to the interviewer and *the company selling itself to the applicant". That's a strong "reject" signal to me. But also some of these examples could be from companies who understand the bidirectional dynamic. E.g. if you consider wearing a suit to be a bad sign the company might just as well be glad you don't want to work at a plac…

> think a lot of companies forget that the interview is the applicant selling themselves to the interviewer and the company selling itself to the applicant . To be fair, I think that's a more recent phenomenon, at least when it comes to hiring low- to mid-career rank-and-file (in the past I think this was a consideration mainly only when trying to hire executives or people with specialized talents). And even then, th…

A bit of short-term thinking, though. Even if companies _right now_ can treat applicants like crap, they probably shouldn't. I'd rather have an applicant accept an offer because they want to, not because they have to. They'll care more about the work and are less likely to flee.

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#87

Post by ghaff »

treeface9000 wrote: post #2

If they answer yes to any of the following: - Have you ever had to work on the weekend or well beyond 5pm outside of your own personal interest/initiative? - Are we required to be on-call If there's any hint of "nah, we don't really write tests because we just need to ship stuff, y'know"

I'm not sure I would even know how to answer that first question. When I was working, I spent many weekends and late nights traveling. It was my "own initiative" I guess in the sense that it was sort of my job.

I realize that probably doesn't describe a lot of people in which case it's probably the right job for them.

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#88

Post by kelnos »

* Referring to the company as a "family", or cliches like "work hard, play hard" or similar.

* They don't leave time for you to interview them.

* They're stuck on looking for particular, specific answers to their questions, even if other answers are valid and workable.

* The questions/problems given are one-sided and don't invite discussion. I really enjoy interviews where the interviewer will kick off a design or architecture question, and then instead of just sitting there, waiting for me to respond, taking notes and moving on, they engage with me on the problem and we discuss it mutually, like peers, with a lot of back and forth. This might not be a strong "nope" signal (some people just aren't very good at interviewing, and often that doesn't reflect all that poorly on the company), but it's definitely concerning.

* Being inflexible on compensation mix. If I think the salary is too low, I might ask for more equity. If they can't budge on the financial part of compensation, and have fixed/accrued PTO rather than unlimited, I might accept starting out with more vacation days instead. Answers like "sorry, this is the standard that everyone gets and it can't be changed" are big red flags.

* If we get to the offer stage and they want me to sign things that I'm uncomfortable signing, and their response is "oh, it's just standard boilerplate, we'd never enforce something like that". Well, I'm not comfortable with selective enforcement, either. "Never" really means "as long as we don't end up having an axe to grind with you later on".

Re: Ask HN: What are your personal red flags when you're interviewing at a company?

#89

Post by fetus8 »

Recently interviewed with a startup, and during the process via email, I was constantly communicating with different people. After the 3rd interview with the CTO, I thought they ghosted me and emailed the last interviewer and got no response. Over a week later the director of engineering emailed me to schedule the 3rd interview with the CTO. I immediately knew that they had internal communication issues and decided I wasn't going to pursue the role further.

My current role has a somewhat misleading title, but to offset that I make sure I really highlight my experience and the projects I've worked on. If an interviewer starts asking me about my title and why I'm applying for something more 'generic' I immediately know they didn't read my resume or pay attention and I'm out.

Years ago I walked out of an all day interview, maybe 2 hours in, because one of the engineers was on his phone the entire time, seemingly just scrolling and not paying attention.

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