Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Questions to ask a company during a job interview

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 467 posts

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#321

Post by Tronno »

war1025 wrote: post #316
drongoking wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I came here to say basically this. I've worked at enough companies to know that their ideas of what their values are may not be accurate. Instead of asking about values, ask about behavior. No one is going to say no to "Do you value code quality?" Aking what they've done (and sacrificed) to support code quality will give you a better idea of what their relative values are. Asking about their tech ladder will get you…

I listened to a podcast recently [1] that talked about "embodied knowledge", which is basically the idea that what we know is often very different from what we think we know. The idea being that you will learn much more about someone / something if you ask questions that are anchored to a time and place rather than generic "unembodied" questions. So the first question you list "Do you value code quality?" is an "unem…

Without having listened to the podcast, another way to frame this is using the concept of yes/no questions, who/when/what/why/how questions, and open-ended questions.

Y/N questions are not very revealing and are likely to lead to dead-ends in the conversation.

WWWWH questions reveal a specific bit of information, but can also lead to dead-ends.

Open-ended questions ("Tell me about...", "What do you think of...", etc) will foster good conversations and uncover new threads to pull. In my experience, this is by far the best way to interact with other people, whether they are interviewing you or not.

Coming up with good/relevant questions on the spot is a skill that can be difficult to master, but is extremely valuable.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#322

Post by scarface74 »

jrjarrett wrote: post #311
scarface74 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you make 140400 a year and are getting 2 weeks of vacation. You are making $2700 a week. If you took another week off of unpaid time off. You will lose $2700 for that year. If they gave you an extra week of vacation. Your taxes wouldn’t change. If instead they gave you an extra $2700 in salary and you took a week off of unpaid time off, you have to pay 24% in Federal taxes on that income + 1.45% in Medicare (you a…

Assuming you CAN take unpaid time off, and not have that penalize you.

From my original post...

....and they will let you take unpaid time off....

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#323

Post by kempbellt »

jupiter90000 wrote: post #273

Ask a question like "Given a non-negative integer numRows, generate the first numRows of Pascal's triangle." If they can't answer without using Google I end the interview as they didn't pass the round. :-)

I'm not sure if this is satire. Sounds like it may be, considering your emoji.

Getting asked questions like this, in most cases, is enough for me to end the interview. I don't want people who can cite off memorized answers to random questions. I want driven people who are excited to learn what needs to be learned in order to push the company forward and make work a fun place to be. Confident people can learn to solve difficult problems on the fly, with ease. This is more valuable than being able to recite a textbook answer during an interview.

One of my favorite interviews of all times:

Interviewer: "Hello. I have your resumé in front of me. I am going to ask you a bunch of questions in rapid succession, and I just want yes and no answers. Are you ready?"

Me: "No."

Interviewer: "Excuse me?"

Me: click

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#324

Post by hinkley »

duxup wrote: post #289
harimau777 wrote: post #63

A problem that I've had is that every company says that they value code quality, emphasize developer growth, value developer's technical feedback, etc. even if they don't in practice. I've debated taking a page from old school behavioral interviewing and asking questions like: Tell me about a time that you made a decision to improve code quality or architecture at the expense of a deadline. Tell me about a time that…

I joined a team that does agile software development. Apparently that meant that occasionally a slack bot asks me what I did recently.

I did work with one team that managed to make a compromise around status reports.

If the team could commit to updating their stories at the end of the day, then we could cut 15 minutes out of standup by leaving out what we did and just talking about blockers and what we learned.

There's supposed to be some osmosis around hearing what everyone else is working on. But practically if you split into separate scrums, you're only hearing about what people you're already collaborating with are working on and odds are you already know what they're going to say.

If the team is big enough you can't have a combined standup than most of the value of these conversations is already lost. You have to use the tools to telegraph your actions anyway, so why chat about it every morning? Discuss time savers and time wasters instead.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#325

Post by proverbialbunny »

svckr wrote: post #235
acollins1331 wrote: post #7

Interviewing the interviewer has been THE best way to get the job. It just oozes a confidence that you already know you're good enough to get the job, and you're trying to figure out if they are good enough for YOU. Figure out questions before hand that describe the type of good working environments or fixes for bad ones that you've had in the past. The interviewer will quickly shift and try to sell the position to y…

I totally agree and, anecdotally, the last time I was interviewing for a position, the thing I was terrified of the most was running out of questions to ask (which happened eventually, after 5 rounds of interviews with ample time in between). I'm happy to be adding a few more questions to my list now :)

>the thing I was terrified of the most was running out of questions to ask (which happened eventually, after 5 rounds of interviews with ample time in between).

Why? Usually by the last interview if I have questions they're personal getting to know the person type questions, because I've got everything figured out by then.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#326

Post by war1025 »

Tronno wrote: post #321
war1025 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I listened to a podcast recently [1] that talked about "embodied knowledge", which is basically the idea that what we know is often very different from what we think we know. The idea being that you will learn much more about someone / something if you ask questions that are anchored to a time and place rather than generic "unembodied" questions. So the first question you list "Do you value code quality?" is an "unem…

Without having listened to the podcast, another way to frame this is using the concept of yes/no questions, who/when/what/why/how questions, and open-ended questions. Y/N questions are not very revealing and are likely to lead to dead-ends in the conversation. WWWWH questions reveal a specific bit of information, but can also lead to dead-ends. Open-ended questions ("Tell me about...", "What do you think of...", etc)…

To expand on this, people will commonly give you unintentional "hooks" for where you can go to increase the depth of the conversation.

For example, people use common words as short hand for many things ("Work was stressful", "The kids are being a pain", "We had a really nice weekend"), and a mistake people run into when talking with others is that they assume the person they are talking with meant they same thing they themselves would have if they had used that phrase. This leads to lots of people "listening but not understanding".

So basically, offhand comments and common phrases are a great place to get a person to dig in deeper into their feelings on a topic. Usually they indicate something that is on the person's mind but that they probably haven't worked through enough to put into words. That means you will get a much more raw and unfiltered response from them.

Also it's always good to remember that people love to talk about themselves, even if they say they don't.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#328

Post by kempbellt »

Beldur wrote: post #149

In my experience it's important to not ask "easy" questions that can be answered by a simple yes/no. Instead of: Are you friendly to remote work? Ask: Will I be working with anyone who is remote, or who works from home on a regular basis? Instead of: Is the work life balance good? Ask: How responsive are people to emails/Slack over the weekends and after 6pm? Instead of: Can I have a good career path? Ask: Did any of…

I like this method of inquiry. You would probably make a good investigator.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#329

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

wikibob wrote: post #193
snegu wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you working on my project? I'm trying to get out, but not having much luck. I wonder if recruiters are turned off by the fact that I'm looking for another job again after just a few months.

What city are you in? Across the major markets in the USA and Europe I’ve never seen a hotter market. If you aren’t getting responses I would ask someone for help with how you are marketing yourself. Post your LinkedIn profile if you’d like

What would you consider a hot market in Europe?

I mean, one could say my city is also hot by the number of search results from the keyword software in the job portals but after closer inspection, if you've been around the block a few times, you can easily tell that over 90% of those jobs are shitty micromanaged fake scrum-driven burnout meat grinders.

Therefore, the remaining 10% are spammed to death with resumes so they can afford to be incredibly picky and wouldn't even look at you without seniority in other prestigious places that do exactly what they're looking for. And they don't care for leetcode either so the barrier of entry remains prestige.

IMHO that's not really hot.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#330

Post by busterarm »

packetlost wrote: post #302
busterarm wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been at companies that were "engineering-driven" that were total disorganized messes and totally immature workplaces. I've also worked somewhere at a "lesser" company where I was firmly on the cost-center side of things, but my work was seen as absolutely business-critical, I was treated well, I survived all reorgs and department layoffs and had my salary tripled from the time I started. Working in unsexy compan…

This. I've worked for an ISP as a software engineer for almost 3 years and even though the company doesn't directly make money from what we do, we are quite respected for the value that we provide. Also that last statement hits way too close to home.

I had the same experience working as a developer doing marketing and data analytics for a (very large) personal injury lawfirm.

Also I used to work at an ISP too! :D

Post reply on HN