Interview questions to ask your interviewer

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 opposite- any criticism that you agreed with?"

> "Does your company have any policy that enforces a specific minimum number of people let go per time period? IE: Stack ranking, 'Unregretted rate of attrition (URA)', etc"

> "What are the company's non-compete rules? If I wanted to make and sell an app in my spare time, is that allowed? What isn't allowed?"

> "How does promotion and career growth work? If hired, what steps would I need to take to get my next promotion? What holds people back in those situations?"

I got great answers though. I learned a lot about the companies because I asked these to a number of people at each company. Those answers lead me to pick a company that was offering less money, but was a better place for me to be.

The contract that the interviewer has may not look anything like the one you are going to get. The only contract that matters is the one you sign.

Every company will negotiate the contract with you and they will frequently be happy to negotiate other things than just your bare salary. There might be things that you care more than others and the company will be happy to provide you with.

A lot of people treat the contract as a formality. Don't. The contract is there for you to feel safe and for the company to get what they need, too. This is the actual agreement between you, everything you had before should lead to writing down what you figured out in form of a contract.

As to asking for reasons of previous person leaving, I think turnover rate is definitely better question. One that can be followed with an actual discussion about the reasons for this or the actions that are being implemented, etc.

I was hired to create a software department in a well-funded , but "old" hardware-oriented company with ~100 employees. In retrospect it's "funny" how much time I spent trying to get the company to accept that developers should be able to use e.g. Linux/Mac, rather than Windows. It tooks several weeks of actual time spent. Insane.

I got there eventually. It's one of those things you don't expect, having worked with smart and flexible software people your entire previous work life. These hardware people were smart, but also incredibly "square", for the lack of a better term. Everything was so insanely rigid.

So much more to tell, but in general: be aware that hardware company culture is very, very different. I don't think it's possible to change the culture unless you change the CEO.

As an interviewer, I've been on the receiving end of most of those questions (or some variation of them). It's a pretty reasonable list.

One thing though is that most interviewers don't leave a whole lot of room for a barrage of questions so you really need to pick the two or three that you really want the answers to. For example, you probably don't want to waste time asking explicitly about version control at a company that you know does open source on github. Open ended questions about engineering culture will give you a much better picture (e.g. what's the story w/ tests or deployments or design autonomy or whatever).

Or, what you can do in addition is ask the recruiter (or whoever the first point of contact is) if you could spend 30 mins to talk to someone on the team, outside of the interview window, just to have a casual chat. Some companies have this arrangement setup as an official transparency program, others are more than happy to arrange it informally.

I won't take a job with Apple for this reason.