I'd love to ask, "Why do people quit?" during an interview, but can't think of a way to phrase it without sounding accusational or pretentious.
Questions to ask a company during a job interview
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Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#72> What's the on-call plan/schedule? (what's the pay for standby and call-out) I’ve never been in a position where we were paid for on-call (i.e. fix prod at 2am) work. Is that not typical?
I've never been in a position where I've not been paid for each call out. (And only one place which didn't pay for standby)
Whoa.
That gives me pause. It makes absolute sense, but it never occurred to me.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#73I'd love to ask, "Why do people quit?" during an interview, but can't think of a way to phrase it without sounding accusational or pretentious.
What’s wrong with the way you phrased it there?
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#74I'm slightly bothered by the "reverse-interview" concept. To me interviews should be bidirectional you are there to find out about the company as much as they are there to find out about you. It should be treated as the starting phases of a negotiation where you gain information about the value of the asset you are going to acquire. I'm certainly happy that viraptor shared this valuable resource, don't get me wrong,…
It's very much a tongue in the cheek name. I completely agree with the bidirectional conversation idea, but wanted to concentrate on the part I found lacking.
I'll improve the introduction to make it clearer.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#75I'd love to ask, "Why do people quit?" during an interview, but can't think of a way to phrase it without sounding accusational or pretentious.
I think asking something like “when people don’t work out and end up leaving the company what are some of the typical causes of that mismatch?” wouldn’t raise a red flag.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#76Why doesn't the interviewee ever ask the interviewer a whiteboard or puzzle question, "to see how you think?"
That's not very useful tbh. If you want to question their technical knowledge, ask for their road-map, what technologies they're looking into to adopt, what their tech-stack is, if and how they plan to migrate their legacy stuff, and their idea of an ideal dream setup.
I also ask 'company culture' related questions, my go-to question is ask what the team I would end up in did as a teambuilding event last year, and follow up with who decided the type of event. It tells you a lot on the freedom you'll get, the company's attitude towards people working there, and how healthy the company is.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#77I wrote this[1] a few years ago. Since then I changed these questions quite a lot (I need to write a new post) but the concept is still the same. Whenever I'm going to interviews I never go as I will be the interviewee.
For quick reference:
- What will my job be? At first and after few months?
- What is your work policy for employees?
- Software/hardware that I will get?
- Can I participate on/run side projects?
- Is there a budget for conferences, further education, bonus?
- What is the history of this company and how do you see the future?
- Will you measure my productivity and how?
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because unless you are some sort of celebrity engineer, "interview is a conversation between both parties" is nonsense. Company is interviewing the candidate not the other way around, no matter what we like to think. Edit: Sorry I should've clarified. I am specially referring to companies that don't really have to care about your feelings towards their interviews. FAANGs for example. They simply don't care and there…
Strong disagree; it is not always this way. I'm no celebrity, and I flail at adversarial technical whiteboard exercises, but I've been paid well to do software-related things for over 20 years. Maybe in part because I insist on treating every interview as bi-directional. It is not necessary to accept a "please may I have this job" attitude towards a potential employer. Software developers are radically more empowered…
if you don't think you're interviewing the company too, you're doing yourself a big disservice and selling yourself short.
Absolutely.
But outside of places like SV or NYC, there may not be a lot of jobs available. For someone with a similar length of career, I'm not as flexible about being able to move to where there are more jobs. Is one just SOL when trying to improve their career; take what you can get?
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#79I'm slightly bothered by the "reverse-interview" concept. To me interviews should be bidirectional you are there to find out about the company as much as they are there to find out about you. It should be treated as the starting phases of a negotiation where you gain information about the value of the asset you are going to acquire. I'm certainly happy that viraptor shared this valuable resource, don't get me wrong,…
Interviews already are bidirectional, even if the interviewer thinks they’re not. If you’re so keen for the job that you don’t ask any questions, then you look a) desperate and b) like you’re trying to bs your way through the interview, which isn’t great. My only objection to these questions is a some of them are essentially negotiating the terms of employment, which isn’t appropriate for most interviews.
Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do, and I have excluded companies for the wrong answers. Why would you not? You're taking the risk of wasting a few months until you find out that the fit is poor.
Can you give an example?
To be fair, I never ask "puzzles" as such.
But I do ask things that show if the technical recruiter actually knows what they are talking about.
"What strategy do you use to complete Pull Requests?" There are many ways to answer that question that will show you don't know.
In general, I ask things that make me see if the other person is reasonable, and I can talk to one-to-one, but also that they make conscious decisions and don't just carry around cruft.
This might involve asking "What ORM do you use?", then responding to their answer with "Oh, why didn't you use ?".