1. What are your strategic priorities over the next 12 months?
2. What is your leadership style like?
Ask HN: Best questions for an engineer to ask a CEO during a job interview?
61–70 of 132 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best questions for an engineer to ask a CEO during a job interview?
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which examples bother you?
To name some: - "You have enough money you live the rest of your life in idle luxury. You could just go to the beach and never come back. If I had your money, that's what I would do. Why the heck are you still working?" (this is incredibly assuming) - "Will you share slides from the last board meeting?" (I think if you need this information you'd probably be on the board) - "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" (th…
Every company I've worked at has shared board slides (usually slimmed down for time and to remove any personnel info, but with all the key financial info there). Transparency is a huge deal for me and tells me a lot about the value of the founders. Also, "if you need this information you'd probably be on the board" is just wrong - if you're compensating someone in equity, they need to understand the financials of the business to value your offer.
"What keeps you up at night" is also a very common question... obviously within the context of an interview, the candidate isn't asking about problems with your marriage or your health or whatever other personal issue you might be thinking of. Typical answers I've heard are figuring out how to scale, hiring fast while maintaining a high quality bar and moving up market. Knowing what the CEO is concerned about is a totally reasonable and relevant piece of knowledge for picking a company.
Re: Ask HN: Best questions for an engineer to ask a CEO during a job interview?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
To name some: - "You have enough money you live the rest of your life in idle luxury. You could just go to the beach and never come back. If I had your money, that's what I would do. Why the heck are you still working?" (this is incredibly assuming) - "Will you share slides from the last board meeting?" (I think if you need this information you'd probably be on the board) - "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" (th…
They’re not bad. They’re similar to questions asked by employers to candidates. The fact that you find them arrogant, to me, says that you hold yourself in higher regard than you hold your employees; that you feel superior in some way. If someone asked you to share some board slides, you could simply explain they’re company confidential then try to tease out what information they’re after with follow up questions. Or…
Arrogance is about overreaching your station. What that means to people depends on how much and why they value those boundaries and violations.
What should be the emotional response to that? Does arrogance arouse anger?
Re: Ask HN: Best questions for an engineer to ask a CEO during a job interview?
#64Have you made any ship date commitments to the board, or to stakeholders, or customers?
Re: Ask HN: Best questions for an engineer to ask a CEO during a job interview?
#65Revenue rate - Does the company take any money in, or is it simply running off funding Runway length - Similar to above, trying to gauge if the company is self propelled or not If received funding, how much and when was it received, also ask for burn rate here. Very quick estimate of company health = Revenue per month - (burn rate per month + (head count * average monthly salary)).
These are investor questions, not employee questions. In my experience, you're either going to get a vague dodge or a flat-out "we're not going to share that / it's confidential" response unless you're applying for a C-level position.
A better approach is to dive into the product and make a judgement... "What does the company need to do to secure its next round of funding?" VC-scale rule-of-thumb is you need a new funding round every 18 months... 12 months to improve the metrics, then 6 to close the next round. Figure out when the last one was, when the next one comes due, and how honest the company goals are from now until then.
Re: Ask HN: Best questions for an engineer to ask a CEO during a job interview?
#66What is the biggest existential threat to this company today?
Re: Ask HN: Best questions for an engineer to ask a CEO during a job interview?
#67Will you share slides from the last board meeting?
Or at least "do you share board meeting slides at the following employee all-hands"
Re: Ask HN: Best questions for an engineer to ask a CEO during a job interview?
#68As a data scientist: What do you want to know about the thing you're building and how it works?
"We don't know what we want to know, but we have a vague sense that if we knew we would benefit from knowing it."
Re: Ask HN: Best questions for an engineer to ask a CEO during a job interview?
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of us have enough money that we just don't care. If you want people to tiptoe around your feelings I suggest messaging some broke new grads.
Why are you even applying to work for someone else's company then if you're so super rich? If you're gonna be arrogant you can expect many companies to shut the door for you.
Not OP:
Good software engineers have options, if they're not working somewhere that offers FAANG money it's probably because they value things other than money such as a good mission, small team work environment, good management, etc.
As a rule, your company can't pay FAANG salaries, so if you want good engineers you need to sell them on the other aspects of working with/for you. There's simply no reason for them to take a bigger risk than they feel comfortable with on your company given the current market for strong engineers.
You may not like that, that's fair, but other CEOs will answer these questions and they're competing with you for that talent.
Re: Ask HN: Best questions for an engineer to ask a CEO during a job interview?
#701. Would you prefer a large number of small customers or a small number of large customers, and why?
2. What is your current pricing model for your product(s), and how will your pricing models change over time?
3. What tangible efforts have you made to make high-level business decisions transparent across all levels of the company?
4. (optional) Why have you chosen your particular financing model (bootstrapping / VCs / other), and what are the pros and cons you have considered?
You should be looking for a high to very high degree of alignment between sales/marketing and engineering, high price points and premium markets, and a good amount of transparency. The insurmountable problems that will make your life miserable are the problems you cannot solve and cannot solve with technical means (working for low pay / benefits cut / company is VC playground and has no future / etc).