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Questions to ask a company during a job interview

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Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PTO is a non taxed benefit. I'm not sure what you mean by that, but income from PTO/vacation/sick leave is taxed the same as any other income.

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…

What you're saying is that your net income after taxes is less than your gross income. Of course that is true, and the exact numbers will vary for every individual. Naturally you should always take the difference between gross and net into account in any financial decisions.

That wasn't what I was addressing, I was only commenting on this: "PTO is a non taxed benefit."

Someone could misinterpret that and think "I pay taxes on my salary, but PTO is not taxed."

But the money you're paid for PTO is salary. If you have accrued PTO and leave a company, when you get your final check you will find that the PTO payout is taxed as ordinary income, just like all of your other paychecks. And while you are at a company, the income you receive from any PTO days is also taxed as ordinary income, no different from a day that you actually work.

That was the only issue I wanted to clarify.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure you can leave in the first weeks easily in most countries.

Sure, but then you've lost out on other offers that you may have declined, and you're back to unemployed.

Indeed. The labor market is quite illiquid from the point of the laborer, with a lot of ugly sunk costs and worse opportunity costs. There's not enough safety nets if you buy the wine-and-dine sales pitch but find the reality is a lot more of a lemon than you were sold. (There are no lemon laws for the labor market, sigh.)

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#363
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Simple. For nice round numbers. Say you’re making $140K (above the social security maximum to make the calculations slightly simpler). A 5% match is $7000. But since it is an untaxed employee benefit and if I think I can already max out my 401K plan, I would have to take into account the 24% Federal 6% state (GA), and 1.4% Medicare tax - 31.4% That means I would need to negotiate at least 7000/.686 = $10,204 extra.

Employer contributions are tax deferred, not untaxed. Assuming you don't trigger penalties, you'll pay ordinary income on that down the line. I wouldn't expect to retire into a 0% tax bracket, especially if you're maxing the employee contribution.

While true, one doesn't normally have a tax rate that high when they withdraw from their 401ks, so their taxes will probably be less.

Capital gains are untaxed in a 401k.

Depends on the person and how they handle their finances.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#364
post #363
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Employer contributions are tax deferred, not untaxed. Assuming you don't trigger penalties, you'll pay ordinary income on that down the line. I wouldn't expect to retire into a 0% tax bracket, especially if you're maxing the employee contribution.

While true, one doesn't normally have a tax rate that high when they withdraw from their 401ks, so their taxes will probably be less. Capital gains are untaxed in a 401k. Depends on the person and how they handle their finances.

> Capital gains are untaxed in a 401k.

Capital gains are taxed as ordinary income when withdrawn from the 401k. The timing is better (since you're not taxed on sale, you can rebalance at will), but the rates are worse than a taxable account.

I'm just saying, if you count employer 401k match in your all-in comp figure, it doesn't make sense to treat it as untaxed; it will be taxed, the rate might be less, but it might not be that much less.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#365
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They all solved it But did they all solve in under the interview conditions? ( time pressure, coding infront of strangers, possiblity of not getting the job that you need etc). I can pretty much solve all leetcodes on my own computer with noone staring at me like hungry wolf eyeing its next meal.

I usually allocate up to 20 minutes for that problem during the interview, maybe extending this to 30 minutes if they are not doing too well. My goal was that the co-workers solve it under 10 minutes -- that 3x length factor is trying to compensate for harsher interview conditions. As for leetcodes -- I just looked at the site, and my interview question would be rated 'easy'. In fact, I'd say that most of the 'easy'…

> My goal was that the co-workers solve it under 10 minutes

do you have an example of this? I have hard time imagining solving algortihm qs under 10 mins.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in europe?

Google in the US does this. I was on call for my team about once a month and at the end of the year, the bonus for merely being available was quite large. (I think it was something like $1600 a week, but I could be misremembering.)

My understanding is at Google it's counted as 33.3% time for every hour you are on-call with a 30 minute response time.

And 66.6% time for every hour you are on-call with a 5 minute response time.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were the responses by Google to those three questions?

Of course, Google didn't answer my questions, people who were working at Google at the time did. (: As to the specific responses, I'd have to check my old notes, which I don't have handy at the moment. For "tier 1" companies, such as Google, common responses to "What brought you here" and "Why do you stay" are excellent comp, being able to work with many very talented people, and the ability to move around in the org…

> I've found the "what keeps you up at night" question has the most diverse responses.

> In general, I've been pretty surprised at the amount of apparent honesty I get. It's hard to verify the responses, of course, but any time I get a response that's not completely positive or 'canned' in some way, it seems pretty legit.

Could you please give a few high-level examples?

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#368
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiters will possibly say anything to get a sale. But when talking to your future peers/team mates, I think you can expect a lot of honesty if you ask the right questions about how things really are. I know I'm always 100% honest, because if they get hired, we'll be coworkers, and they'll know if I lied!! PS It's weird that you didn't get the title in the contract

Sometimes they’ll tell lies that their boss tells everyone willing to listen. Everybody knows these are lies, but they won’t always give you that “read between the line” interpretation during an interview. The most obvious one is usually “we’re on an agile process”, but there’s so many other ones more subtle and hard to get a grip on, short of reading interviewer’s clues when they answer the canned answer. Sometimes…

Reality shocks I've seen personally:

1. Workspace/office not the one you were shown/told. This is the most common one, in my few data points. I think people know it's a factor in appeal of the job, so it's mentioned, but the followthrough doesn't always happen.

2. Person you interviewed with is leaving. (One of the people I hit it off really well with in interviews was a tech co-founder of the established company. When I arrive as a new Architect, he apologizes and says he had been looking forward to working with me (which is not something I normally hear), but he just got an offer for a supercomputer startup that he couldn't resist. Fortunately, some other great people remained, and I ended up working directly with one of the other tech founders. I supposed I might've been hired due to the company knowing that some people were looking to transition out.)

3. Job not as described. (I've mostly avoided this common pitfall, but once got bit by it. I was recruited as the Research Scientist who'd execute on an idea that was sorta outside the scope of two professors who'd come up with it, but that they wanted to see it done, and it was up my alley. But, subsequent to discussion, when I'd been told I'd be the sole person leading&doing, one of the professors' grad students decided to do the idea for their dissertation, and I didn't find out until the first day on the job. It got worse from there, but the saving grace was that an all-around great 3rd person was also an "assistant" on the team, so, morale-wise, I was able to complete the entire year-long appointment I'd agreed to. I declined when the PI renewed the appointment for another year, and both us assistants asked not to have our names on the papers. It was unfortunate, because we did some good work, and the PI was willing to help me get my own ideas funded, but I couldn't commit to another year of the accidentally-bait&switch project.)

4. Famous culture broken. (My anecdote wasn't a first-day reality shock for me, but first-year. A successful with-revenue early Web tech company in a university town had a locally well-known policy slogan about how you advance, which seemed much more widely quoted than the "don't be evil" of another company, and was repeated to me when I interviewed. Long story short, while I was working there as a Senior Engineer, someone in company leadership was willing to spoil culture and morale, to let someone's nephew (or similar) break the slogan. I went and talked with the head of engineering, who normally had amazing poise and charisma, but he had no good explanation for that one. This was when other dotcoms were hiring the then-rare experienced developers like crazy... but companies sometimes do things that employees don't understand, creating new reality shocks.)

5. Representative from new parent company, walking around with representative from offshoring company, talking to employees about what they do, for multiple days. A bit like in "Office Space", but at an advanced Web tech company. (Also, I was concerned when they started asking me about an elaborate 3D puzzle that someone had assembled near my workspace before I was hired, they seemed skeptical when I said I didn't know anything about it, and then one of them asked where they might buy such a 3D puzzle, which I happened to know, and I couldn't resist being knowledgeable/helpful, even as I suspected it was just a trick.)

Reality shocks like these are another reason I'd rather talk with prospective employers, and get as much sense of the team and company as I can, rather than get distracted with one-way leetcode whiteboarding.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#369
post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

Scrum has a limit on team size, for this very reason and a few others. I tried running a scrum of 12 and indeed it was clear from the first standup that it wouldn't fly.

I covered that. If I'm not hearing what everyone is working on what's the point of trying to use that meeting as the source of that information?

It's especially jarring when systems that claim to be self-aware are so unaware.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG, for Netflix. Microsoft does not matter.

Care to elaborate? Why does Microsoft not matter, but Amazon/Apple does?

I'm not entirely sure why, but here on HN especially I've seen a lot of the use of FANG with one A [Apple] used to mean Bay Area super-powers, as opposed to GAFAM for general tech majors, because some believe the Bay Area to matter more than the rest of the industry and Seattle-focused Amazon and Microsoft somehow "outsiders"/"foreigners" to the Bay Area.

It's also fascinating to me from an anthropological/sociological view point because Microsoft has had some sort of Bay Area campus (almost continuously) for longer than several other members of GAFAM have even existed (with PowerPoint headquartered there from its acquihire in the 1980s until a reorg shuffle in the mid-90s and HoTMaiL/Hotmail/Live Mail/Outlook.com and other "web properties" carrying the torch up until a lot of recent acquihires expanded that campus again to more Office-relevant tools beyond just "web stuff").

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