Interview questions to ask your interviewer

On the contrary, you can have a job without a contract.

Corollary: continuing employment may depend on adherence to policies you don't control, regardless of prior agreement.

Not all law is contract law, and this remains true of employment law.

For questions like this

> Who supports the product once it's released? Pager duty? Monitoring email?

and this

> Typical working hours? Flexibility? Crunch times?

In my experience it’s a huge mistake to leave such questions in its vague form as the author has shown in his post, especially if you’re living in a third world country like India where the managers and centre heads often project “getting engineers to work at any hour” as one of their USPs to their bosses, who are - very often - CEO and CTOs in USA and Europe where engineers cost more and often refuse to work absurd hours (rightly so).

Rather ask specific questions like:

- clearly state your intended normal working hours and ask whether there’ll be a problem with that.

- what is the on-call frequency (if there’s one)?

- what is the on-call hours going to be for you whenever that happens?

- Is there a follow the sun policy or not? (It’s a red flag if the product is used around one timezone and engineers mostly live in another, far from it)

- ask whether there’s any requirement to have an app like PagerDuty active for your phone number or needed to installed on your phone and would you be expected to be reachable also during other than your “normal working hours” and your “scheduled on call rotation” whenever that happens?

- The point above is very important - my last manager tried to soft bully/pressurise me into activating pager-duty for my personal number 24x7 saying “anyway the call will be at most 2-3 times a quarter” (and I knew he was probably right) and “others are doing it”. Luckily he was my hiring manager also and I had already discussed all this with him - I confronted him right then!

- ask clear questions about how often you’d be asked to attend “scheduled/recurring” calls out of your normal working hours.

You don’t have to be available 24x7. You must not - under any pretext! You are made to do that only because you end up saying “yes”.

If you can, ask this questions on email preferably to your hiring manager keeping recruiter in CC - at least I do that.

Out of 7 verbal offers I had said yes to (around a year ago) 1 company demurred from issuing the final offer letter after these questions, others were very open and candid about it and didn’t mind at all (at least in the mail).

Goldman Sachs clearly mentioned I’ll be required to be ready whenever needed, others were reasonable, Cisco was semi reasonable but seemed skittish to me, Uber flat out lied which I later found out (and hence I left within a month).

I recommend against one question in particular:

> Do you have a favorite part of the job? Least favorite?

When I asked the "least favorite" question in my interviews a few months ago, the answers all fell into 2 buckets:

1) it's a big company, harder to get things done (I have only worked at big co's, I already know it's hard... so this is not an insightful answer)

2) COVID makes life/work harder (I understand it's hard, but some of these people just use this excuse to avoid talking about their job/team)

During my last batch of interviews, I was salty when one of the companies I interviewed with asked me the "Super Egg Drop" question, I actually don't mind LeetCode type questions in interviews but that super egg drop question is so ridiculous that as soon as I heard the question I knew they didn't wanna hire me. So at the end of the interview I asked my interviewer to solve a LeetCode hard (Alien Dictionary) as a laugh. The interviewer did not see the humor in the situation.

X servers suck though.

Vscode renders sharply without having to do extra work.

Both wsls are reasonably enjoyable. Much better than ssh-ing to a Linux host