After interviewing with my department head I went in to a second interview with the VP of HR before they offered me the job.
He asked what my biggest failure was and that was very jarring initially.
Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
31–40 of 43 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#32Starting from high-school, describe the professional path and motivation that got you here. Feel free to go earlier, if it helps.
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#33[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#34This: "There's a feature you and several other co-workers are building. The deadline is 3 days from now. You and 'Co-worker A' are tasked in building a module of that feature. You've already written several classes and tried abstracting some repetitive parts that would allow you to hit the target deadline for the team. However 'Co-worker A' has also worked on those same classes and wrote more methods that are too tig…
A deadline 3 days from now and we're still discussing how we're going to approach it? Does it need to be in production? Does it need to be tested and deployed? I think I'd first inform our stakeholders that we've got a delay and are not going to make the deadline unless we drop this feature.
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#35Call me weird but I like IQ questions. They're fun to do albeit not a fair judge of candidacy.
And also illegal.
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
??? so grab some peeps from the street and make them senior engineers?
What? The implication of interviews are worthless for finding the best senior engineers is not to hire random people off the street. It's to hire people based on their previous work, reputation and recommendations.
Aaaah no, no no no. Hiring based on reputation and recommendations is also terrible, and not just because it's tautological; it also doesn't work. The industry is full of people with sterling reputations gradually failing upwards.
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#37As an interviewee:
“What’s one thing you wish you knew before you started here?”
Makes the interviewer think and its hard to BS, so you’ll usually get an memorable answer.
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#38So, this is from the other side of the table. Every place I interview, with every person who interviews me (phone and in-person), I always ask:
"If there was one problem here that you could snap your fingers and magically 'fix', what would it be?"
Then I usually follow-up asking what they consider the "fix" to be.
If there's a systemic problem at the company, usually the answers among the different employees will be quite similar. If I notice that, along with possibly similar solutions proposed, as I interview up the food chain I'll ask specifically about it. If I get a dismissive response, then I know to turn down any offer.
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#39“Is there anything I didn’t ask that you wish I had?” I recognize that I’m not perfect at interviewing and want to give people the opportunity to brag about themselves and express something I might have missed.
I like this one. I'll have to add it to my list.
Re: Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question?
#40"What's something that you f*'d up on where you thought you might be fired for it?" Most any engineer or developer above a junior level position should have at least one of these stories. It also gives you the chance to ask what they learned, how they fixed it, what resources they used, what they did to prevent it in the future, etc, etc, etc. It's also a really humbling moment to have to explain one of your failures…
I’ve never been worried about being fired for something. Not everyone makes huge fireable mistakes.
Well aren't you lucky! And in my experience with this question, there's a big difference between "felt fireable" and "is fireable", which also gives insight.
I have my own go-to example that I'll use if they give back your type of answer (which has happened). I messed up packaging a demo version of our software that almost sank a 300k sale (~5% of revenue on the P&L for that year).
Was I going to get fired? no Did 23 year old me think I might get fired? yes
Essentially it boils down to what's a large mistake you've made while employed (or otherwise) and how did you resolve it.