Questions to ask a company during a job interview • Hacker News Board

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#441

Post by dustinmoris » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 1:05 PM UTC

I hate these typical questions which hiring managers or candidates ask each other with no real meaning behind.

E.g. "how do you use source control"?

What is the intention of this question. What value do I gain from this question? It implies that I have a specific way of interacting with source control in mind and if they don't follow the say way then I'm unhappy or what?

Interviews take such a long time, I am of the opinion that I only want to ask questions which genuinly help me later to make a decision.

e.g. instead of "what tech do you usually use?" I'd ask "I've been recently playing with X and think it's a brilliant use case for doing Y. If I were on your team and I'd want to do Y with X, would that be an option, or what's the protocol in tech decisions in your team?"

With a concrete question like this the interviewer has to explain to me how they actually decide on tech and give me a more or less yes/no answer to whether what I want would be possible. I find this a lot better than a generic tech question and then get bombarded with a ton of buzz words which don't really say much about how open the tech teams are to picking their own tools for the job, etc.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#442

Post by lkschubert8 » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 1:07 PM UTC

eb0la wrote: post #387

lkschubert8 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a place that has "unlimited PTO" and must say I'm not a fan. You have employees like me who fear taking off too much getting yelled at by HR to take more time off (but how much more??). And on the flipside the higher ups make snide remarks about people who take 20+ days off. From my understanding unlimited is code for in the high teens.

I wonder if you have operations in Europe. Standard here in Spain is 30 days off (including weekends and bank holidays). Most companies just offer 22 working days. I worked for one that offered 24.

No we are just a local office in the US.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#443

Post by christinaupton » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 1:18 PM UTC

not enough in here about explicit mentorship. will there be someone better than me who is incentivized to level me up?

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#444

Post by Diederich » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:01 PM UTC

arikr wrote: post #367

Diederich wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In one of the better examples, someone at a very large tech company told me that one of their major data pipelines had effectively no monitoring in it while it ran, and it took many hours to complete. The monitoring before and after the pipeline was excellent, but they had no visibility while it was running.

He said there were cases where the pipeline had effectively failed early, but continued to run throughout most of the normal run period. If they had some in-pipeline monitoring, they could have intervened earlier and helped it succeed.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#445

Post by reubeniv » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:21 PM UTC

I normally ask what opportunities for growth exist, eg training/certs/online courses etc, and what they like about the company, can normally tell if they like the job/you by how enthusiastic they answer or whether it comes across as scripted

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#446

Post by java-man » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:26 PM UTC

relax88 wrote: post #43

protonfish wrote: post #24

One I am going to start to ask is "Are all developers allowed to have local admin access of their computers?" I've struggled against this in my last 3 positions. This is a dealbreaker for me, and should be for all developers.

From an infosec professional perspective, this one is always a challenge for security sensitive places. I agree with you that developers need admin rights on their development machines, but I have witnessed first hand why many companies attempt to take away local admin rights. When I'm responding to security alerts where developers have downloaded random .dll files from the internet, or some "troubleshooting utility"…

I've never seen a clear separation between production environment (machines, network) and the dev. Air gap the two and a lot of problems might go away (not all, of course, but the most common ones).

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#447

Post by burntoutfire » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:31 PM UTC

oarabbus_ wrote: post #335

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG, for Netflix. Microsoft does not matter.

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

Perhaps because Microsoft pays less? (at least according to levels.fyi).

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#448

Post by sohodlers » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 2:40 PM UTC

Do you pay for this job?

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#449

Post by aintnoprophet » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 3:12 PM UTC

korethr wrote: post #280

SamBam wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the nice thing about the "tell me about a time when..."-style questions is that it makes it harder to lie, or at least harder top lie believably. None of the interviewers will bat an eyelid answering "do you value developer growth" with a one-word lie "yes," but I think most interviewers would feel uncomfortable making up a story whole-cloth, and that would show. The risk, of course, is that you'll seem rude…

It seems to me that offense at such questions being asked back is itself an indication of a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word "interview". The "inter-" part of the word denotes mutuality or reciprocity[1], that the questions and answers go both ways, so both parties may learn more about each other. An interview is not supposed to be solely an inquisition wherein the potential employer evaluates the applican…

I agree. It took me a long time to learn that I'm interviewing them as much as the other way around. I learned a lot watching football (soccer) and the behavior of players with respect to their contracts. They are paid up front for services they are expected to provide. Sometimes their salary is low but they agree to high performance bonus. In the past my attitude was that I just want a job that pays the most money. I was taught in school how to interview. But, I learned that there is more to it.

Re: Questions to ask a company during a job interview

#450

Post by vadikkiev » Tue, Sep 10, 2019, 4:01 PM UTC

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