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“There’s an IC sitting out there who just had an amazing idea for a new feature/product. What happens?”
“Tell me about your last major migration. How long did it take and how long did you say it was going to take before you started?”
“Let’s say I’m the person you hire. 6 months have gone by, what’s different?”
I usually try to ask these What are the bad things about this job? What's the average tenure on the team, how many people have left the team recently and why? How does this team & company compare with other places you've worked? (second or third round) How many other people are being interviewed and how do I compare?
A softer way to word this:
"What are some of the biggest challenges for this role?"
It won't get into all the dirt, but should give you some insight into things that aren't great.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't have any interest why do you want to work at that organization? You just want a check? That's not a good way to spend half your waking hours during the work week.
If you aren't already wealthy, you're probably working because "you just want a check". Even if the job you want is to own your own company, you still have to work until you have enough savings. This is how the world has always worked for most of the population in every human society that has ever existed.
On the interviewer side, I usually left 5-10 mins for such questions for them to ask me. (I always think it'd be funny if more time was scheduled for candidates to hit interviewers with their favorite "can you actually code" style questions, like is the team they're expecting to join even any good...) It's a bit disappointing when the candidate has nothing to ask, asking something is better than nothing... A type of useful question I got and used to ask as well was simply why I myself had joined the company/how long I'd been there. Sometimes you get a sort of cookie-cutter HR style answer, but sometimes you get something more revealing (in a good or bad way). Engineers tend to be (often too) honest.
> “There’s an IC sitting out there who just had an amazing idea for a new feature/product. What happens?” Man, I bet my answer and my VP's answer to that are gonna be rather different.
When I was more junior, one of my favourite questions to ask a company was "Can you give me a day in the life, or a week in the life of this job/role?". The reason being, job descriptions are very often a fantasy. An aspiration. What the company wishes its people did, not what they are actually doing. Often the reality is much less attractive than the job description you think you are interviewing for. Faced with thi…
I work in a small business where we do hardware, software, help the marketing folks, and do a little IT work where needed. I want someone who is curious, energetic, and enjoys taking on whatever challenge presents itself. They'll start in a pretty well-defined role in a well-defined domain, and I'll give them support in that role. But they will have every opportunity to branch out from there, and I believe the kind of employee I seek—as well as the company—will benefit if the employee fits this technical culture. I want to scare off people who want to be pigeon-holed and fed repetitive tasks.
To that end, I also like to discuss with candidates projects they've worked on in the past, rather than offer up new challenges I present to them. Our normal work week doesn't involve isolated puzzles or single activities that one finishes in an hour. Finishing a project takes a long time & requires acquiring new knowledge, skills, and understanding, so I want to explore in depth something the candidate had a long time to work on where this process did (or did not) transpire.
My POV is that I want to find a postdoc (or someone who could grow into this paradigm), not a clever parrot.
The interview process is just plain nonsense. Multiple rounds, you have to start from scratch every time. They don't even have a common platform where they can evaluate your language and other basic skills. You have to prove every time that you are able to speak in whatever language, can code, although you have 20+ years of experience. Some even want to see what you code and how you do it. And they make you do tricky things, that you will never fucking ever do in the role.
And they ask you if you have any experience of tightening screws. Well, you're not a trained monkey, you're an engineer who has to fasten all kinds of screws, but they ask if you've worked with stainless steel screws and if you haven't, then sorry, they can't employ you.
The HR process is laden with layers and layers of bullshit. Most of the HR people and their process is all about control, to make the expert go down on all fours (yeah, humiliate the person) and do circus stunts, so they can insert you into their braindead process and evaluate your stunts based on their totally braindead metrics. All of this, so that HR can exist as a "profession".
For example you are someone who is an expert in a specific field and yet you have to learn this completely useless, filler bullshit, because who knows what the HR might think. Well, fuck them peasants. They are nothing more than gatekeepers. Very dangerous ones, because they are who decide in the first place who gets in who gets rejected. So if the HR is compromised they send the company the saboteurs and reject the proper people. Abolish HR monkeys and their idiotic hiring process.
Treating the interview as two-way is good, and how it should be. A couple points: > When people struggle to answer it you still reap the rewards of letting them know that you’re not just looking for a job, you care about being successful at their company. If you publicize that in a Medium post targeting HN-like audience, aren't you just increasing the number of people will ask that question just to "reap the rewards"…
Or get denied an offer for using “in this space” during a technical interview.
1. The offer is good. I was aiming at 12% more, though. Can we work it out? 2. Is on call mandatory? 3. Are there any plans to move away from 100% remote work?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Isn't this exactly the kind of answer that the question is meant to tease out, so that the candidate can know ahead of time that the company is more interested in executives' status than in innovating? This is like asking if sharks like the taste of blood. Any answer other than the obvious is a shark looking for a meal. Executives only exist because they are obsessed with status/power, the share price, the market c…
This makes me sad for the companies you worked for. I'm at the director level at my company, and I make sure to both give credit to whomever does good work, and to enable them to do it. I do enough good work of my own that I don't need to steal credit to be successful.