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Interview questions to ask your interviewer

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Re: Interview questions to ask your interviewer

#151

Post by anontrot »

hlbjhblbljib wrote: post #144
anontrot wrote: post #138

I got an interview scheduled with Meta/Facebook, for monday (14th Feb 2022). Their careers portal has a lot of sample leet codes, I'm not even able to do the level 1 puzzles. Sure going to bomb the interview with live codinng session! Sigh... this would have been a life changer for me

Share the portal? I suggest doing it anyway. I think I've learned more from failed interviews than I have from some jobs. Useful lessons anyway.

https://www.facebookrecruiting.com

Yes of course, I'm not going to stop trying. Though my hopes of clearing the interview just hit 0%. I'll keep doing all preparations I can nevertheless

Re: Interview questions to ask your interviewer

#152

Post by wink »

BeetleB wrote: post #99
denysvitali wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My go-to question is: Am I able to use Linux? This tells you a lot about the company. I avoided some Windows-only jobs in the past :)

I thought that way before my current job. I learned the error of my ways. In companies like mine, you'll get a Linux account on a server, and will not have root privileges. So you're quite limited on the SW you can easily install (try installing Emacs with all its dependencies from source). Since then, whenever I shifted teams, I'd pick ones where I don't have to use Linux. At least I can customize my Windows laptop…

That's a weird experience. 100% of companies I worked for (or where I worked with a customer's computer, so not just 3-4) it was:

Windows = managed, user account, pain (sometimes exceptions for developers, sometimes not)

Linux = you have root on your machine.

Re: Interview questions to ask your interviewer

#153

Post by wink »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #37
lapetitejort wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to ask what version of software they're running, and why. You might catch some change-adverse or bleeding-edge jockeys that way.

My favorite question as an interviewer is "What's your favorite OS of all time and why?"; the what is almost irrelevant and there are no right or wrong answers, but the whys are always useful/interesting (my favorite is probably a guy who raved about AIX's apparently amazing backup functionality).

I raise you a "I like SuSE Linux because it's free". To this day I don't know what to make of this answer. But that was only one of many answers that led to us not continuing with that candidate.

That day I changed my stance "there are no wrong answers", but I've also asked this in the past and it can yield some good conversation material.

Re: Interview questions to ask your interviewer

#154

Post by JonChesterfield »

Osiris wrote: post #133
tragictrash wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you misunderstood that remark intended to be humorous. Its too bad you took offense. Your right about it being a tool. A tool which has better alternatives. A virtual machine running in virtual box or some other vendor's VM has literally none of the limitations that wsl2 does. WSL 2 Doesn't fully support all userspace stuff, I bump into that all the time. You can ssh into other boxes using PowerShell. It is o…

"better"? Every tool has pros and cons and tradeoffs. I run Linux, Windows, and MacOS. Each one has it's pros and cons. Each is the "better" tool depending on the need. The same goes for programming languages and engineering problems. I train my team to identify multiple possible solutions to a problem then identify pros and cons and then pick the solution that optimizes for the most important goal. There is rarely a…

There is rarely a right solution but there are always wrong ones. Searching for pareto optimal contours is great but implies the existence of pareto pessimal contours where N poor solutions combine to make something maximally rubbish.

Software dev is not in a design space where all things are broadly equivalent with small pros and cons to choose between. It's more a discontinuous surface with orders of magnitude of cost/benefit changes as one meanders over a given cliff.

Re: Interview questions to ask your interviewer

#155

Post by Buttons840 »

rad_gruchalski wrote: post #124
Kranar wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true unfortunately and there are absolutely horror stories of this happening to people. For example at some FANG companies you sign what you think is your regular employment contract and then move on down to the Valley excited to start your new job on the agreed upon terms... then as soon as you introduce yourself at reception just before orientation, you're made to sign a secondary agreement with terms yo…

Serious question then: do you really believe that they are going to show you “the second contract”? It seems like the better question is: are there other documents than this contract on which this job depends to sign and can I see them. If yes, can you please put this in the contract.

Just ask yourself, "what are the odds a programmer and a recruiter would miss a contract I needed to sign?" Remember, there isn't a representative from the legal department in most interview processes. It's really easy for the people that are doing the interview to mess up stuff like this, because asking to see the contracts is an unusual request, and there's little consequence for them if they mess it up.

Re: Interview questions to ask your interviewer

#156

Post by mabbo »

skeaker wrote: post #126
mabbo wrote: post #52

I recently did a round of interviews with a few companies, and I came up with a list of fun questions for the interviewer, mostly based on my own gripes with my then-employer or things other companies were doing that I didn't like. I caught everyone I asked these to off-guard. > "Every company gets criticized. What's a piece of criticism your company has received that you felt wasn't really accurate? What about the o…

How do you go about bringing these up over the course of the interview?

Almost inevitably the interviewer saves a few minutes at the end for "do you have any questions about ?" And yes, yes I do.

Re: Interview questions to ask your interviewer

#157

Post by jollybean »

mabbo wrote: post #52

I recently did a round of interviews with a few companies, and I came up with a list of fun questions for the interviewer, mostly based on my own gripes with my then-employer or things other companies were doing that I didn't like. I caught everyone I asked these to off-guard. > "Every company gets criticized. What's a piece of criticism your company has received that you felt wasn't really accurate? What about the o…

The questions in the article are decent.

This one 'what steps would I need to take to get my next promotion?' - this is probably not the right way to ask the question.

The implication is that 'promotion' is kind of like progress you'd see in school, i.e. you get to stage 1, then 2 then 3 with increasing responsibility, experience and comp.

But reality is not like that, the company is interested in creating products, services, making money, and almost all organisations are pyramids in terms of operational structure.

This means that 'promotion' beyond just the lowest levels inherently competitive. Obviously it's political and nobody likes that part, but the reality is 'to get promoted to manager you need to be better than 80% of your peers and to director better than 98% of your peers' and what 'better' means is very subjective, and notably, not everyone gets promoted.

Also, instead of asking about the 'benefit to you' i.e. 'promotion' you might want to put it in terms of the value you can provide, and soften the question a bit by asking about 'career progress' etc. and avoiding the word 'promotion'.

It's a fair thing to ask about, but it's delicate.

Re: Interview questions to ask your interviewer

#158

Post by tragictrash »

Osiris wrote: post #134
tragictrash wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize your using an x server to do that, right? It's just one thats bundled in with windows, and you don't have to configure.

I thought vs code ran natively as a Windows app and just used a remote connection to wsl to do file management and run cli commands ? I don't think vs code is running inside the wsl environment directly.

There's a couple ways you can do this. The latest revision of WSL lets you run Linux gui apps that appear in a x server window, and you can pin them to the taskbar/start menu. That is definitely using a built in x server.

Opening vscode in windows and opening the Linux vm's file through the "filesystem"(it's a network share) is unstable. You really have to open vscode in Linux, or run it in windows and ssh into the virtual machine for it to work well.

Re: Interview questions to ask your interviewer

#159

Post by tragictrash »

Osiris wrote: post #135
tragictrash wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

File system performance sucks. No fuse support. No direct hardware access. I've experienced stability issues with it. Don't get me started on the networking or custom init put in by Microsoft. Systemctl calls don't work. It is most definitely not just like regular Linux. I actually used it pretty extensively for years before I figured out it was causing more friction than it was worth. It's convenient, I'll give you…

What's the big deal if he likes it? It works for him. It's fine.

Just because someone likes and uses something doesn't mean there aren't better alternatives that they could benefit from using and learning about.
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