14 ms·

Questions to Ask a Potential Tech Employer

252 points by dr_jay 10y ago

vinceguidry 10y ago
YAML's a weird choice for this kind of application. I once explored different markup languages for maintaining my resume, ultimately just went back to using LibreOffice. There's a temptation to use a structured, machine-readable formatting language for anything that has structure, because you might one day want to use machines to work on it. But for an application like this, those times are the exceptions, most of the time, it's humans that are going to read and modify the text. It makes way more sense to use a human-oriented format and simply use a convention so that it's easy to use a tool to convert it when you need to. I see no reason why Markdown can't be used.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  I use LibreOffice for my resume too. However, I'm the only person who maintains my resume, so it works for me. For something that's going to be touched by a lot of different people, a text-based language is far better because you can diff the changes easily. Such tools exist for office documents within those programs, but they're clumsy and don't integrate with source control systems. But otherwise, Markdown does seem like it'd be a better choice. Everyone's using it these days, it's simple, whereas YAML is obscure.
overcast 10y ago
I was expecting a neat list of questions on the web, and instead was presented with setting up a programming environment just to output them. You will need Python 3 with the PyYAML, jsonschema, and jinja2 packages installed. Seriously?
- HaloZero 10y ago
  https://doctorj.gitlab.io/interview-questions/ https://doctorj.gitlab.io/interview-questions/
- quasse 10y ago
  I mean or just view them as html. https://doctorj.gitlab.io/interview-questions/ https://doctorj.gitlab.io/interview-questions/ I agree that the system he is set up is almost absurdly complex for what should just be a markdown file.
  - dsmithn 10y ago
    That misses the answer, followup, and reference. Unless I'm missing something... - q: Would you say your colleagues are good at reading your emotional state, or still learning? # TODO: Better wording so the answer is not so obvious a: Research shows the most important factor in team effectiveness is psychological safety, a "shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking." One component of this is high "average social sensitivity," or that everyone is good at reading the emotional state of others. followup: Do you feel like your opinion is heard, respected, and valued? ref: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learn... pri: 1 tags: [culture]
- ben_jones 10y ago
  Haven't we all been there? We want to setup some great polymorphic abstraction that allows us to adapt it deeply and effortlessly in the future. Then half way in we're like "fuck I actually just needed x, not the whole alphabet". I actually give props that he finished it rather then revert it to something simpler bug uglier (as I would've done).
- imdsm 10y ago
  Was it too stimulating for you to have to set it up? /s
- exabrial 10y ago
  "How do you avoid over-engineering in this company?" might be a good one to throw in then
CameronBanga 10y ago
+1 for Gitlab! But one question. What was thinking behind setting up the extensive YML structure instead of just using simple markdown? I see some reasoning with printing through a script, but will that be a significant use case? This structure just seems complex for doing a quick PR with a question that I'd like to see added, and would keep me from contributing.
- dr_jay 10y ago
  Yeah, probably a bit over-engineered; just having a little fun. The idea is that you can filter and sort based on metadata, merge multiple lists, make mashups, and render/style it how you like. Feel free to just open an issue with a question, or post it here! In the YAML, you can get away with just: -q: Your question here.
  - sanderjd 10y ago
    My thought was that it would be useful to have it in machine consumable form if you want to collect data and report on things. You could turn it into a "debriefing" program that makes it quick to go through after an interview and note which questions you asked and rate your satisfaction on their answers.
    - dr_jay 10y ago
      That is a great idea. Want to help out? :)
    - machinshin_ 10y ago
      And sink it up with glassdoor
HaloZero 10y ago
The formatted HTML version of the questions, not sure why you'd need this in JSON... https://doctorj.gitlab.io/interview-questions/ https://doctorj.gitlab.io/interview-questions/
athenot 10y ago
I've done a decent amount of hiring over the years. When I ask the candidates if they have any questions, I expect them to interview me as a potential manager. Everyone has their own set of criteria so there is not universal "good question to ask". Instead, you should figure out if you'd like to work with/for me? Do you feel you'd grow personally? Perhaps you're in a phase of life where you just need the money to recover from an unfortunate situation. Still, you must figure out what are the criteria you won't compromise on, and make sure you're getting that. For some, it's work schedule; for others, it's communication styles. Maybe you'll be driven insane by my cheesy puns and so you'd probably want to figure that out ahead of time. Ask me what I'll do to ensure you'll be respected as an individual on the team. When I'm a candidate, I like to ask how my failures will be dealt with. I will goof up at some point, the question is how is that managed. The larger point is there must be some discussion about potentially unpleasant situations.
- overcast 10y ago
  Can your company offer a challenging environment where I learn daily, and look forward to walking into your building? That's the biggest issue I find with most employment opportunities. 90% of the jobs aren't stimulating me enough, and I'm thinking about being somewhere else. Cheesy puns I can handle, are you adept at talking in movie references only?
  - p4wnc6 10y ago
    I always liked Michael O. Church's way of phrasing this from his post on "the Haskell tax" (I think it's been taken down). Paraphrasing, he said something like, "most jobs require you to have work experience that is exponentially better than the work experience they will give out." That is a huge red flag for me. If a place is straining itself to "hire the best" and put candidates through the paces of a very difficult interview process, but then the actual job is some full-stack bullshit where your specialty or past experience is completely disregarded and you just do whatever random work happens to someone's misguided priority this week (which is almost every start-up job) it's just a bad, bad deal.
    - 10y ago
graham1776 10y ago
I realize this is geared towards the end of an actual job interview, but many of the questions that really hit home for an employer are: Questions that demonstrate 1)technical ability and 2)culture fit. If you can ask questions that show an employer that you can do your job well and that you will fit in with the team, you are that much further ahead of the competition. Questions serve as an opportunity to "fill in" the employer on areas they may have forgotten to ask you. If they are not 100% that you can do your job (or are teachable) and that you will fit in with the company, it is your job to ask the questions that eventually give them certainty. Shameless plug: Just released a book on informational interviews with a huge list of questions and walkthroughs on how to do them. Best way to get a job! http://www.amazon.com/Informational-Interviews-Coffee-Supercharge-Career-ebook/dp/B01DG19MIK http://www.amazon.com/Informational-Interviews-Coffee-Superc...
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  The primary use of questions during an interview is to actually determine if the employer is a good fit for you. Your advice seems to take a different approach -- that you shouldn't use questions as a means to ensure you will be happy in the job, but rather as yet another opportunity for status signalling. Even the first sentence depicts a totally alien attitude to me: "questions that really hit home with the employer are..." ... What? I have no obligation to ask questions that "hit home" with the employer. If the employer doesn't like the questions I do ask, well that right there is a good indication that I would be miserable working for them and should just work elsewhere. By approaching even the part of the interview where you get to steer the topics of discussion (your questions) with an attitude of infinite pliability and fealty, it makes the process even more about subjugation and hoop-jumping than it already is.
  - graham1776 10y ago
    I agree you are also trying to determine if the employer is a good fit for you. I think this is implicit in the interview process. You absolutely should ask questions that tick your own boxes! What I have found in my own career, though, is that you can't turn down a job or company if you are not offered. If you get an offer, and the company isn't a fit, it is your own prerogative to turn it down. Until that point, though, you are selling yourself and trying to get the job.
pklausler 10y ago
I conduct a lot of technical interviews, and I always make "Do you have any questions for me?" the first and last question that I ask every candidate. Mostly this is to provide an opportunity to just answer a question, of course. But it's also true that a candidate's questions, or lack thereof, can affect my evaluation of them. So, my advice: have a couple of good questions on tap. If you don't, you run the risk of seeming unprepared or lacking confidence.
- tgb 10y ago
  How many questions is too many? I'd want to ask something like half the questions listed here but that seems burdensome to the interviewer.
  - pklausler 10y ago
    The interviewer controls the use of time, so don't worry about imposing a burden. In my case, anyway, I'd rather have a fascinating technical conversation than ask my usual programming challenge and algorithm design questions, so your great question might seem more like a gift than a burden. I'm serious! With me, anyway, ask big questions like "what should/will HPC hardware and programming languages look like in 10 years?" and then tell me why you think my answer is crazy.
  - beachstartup 10y ago
    i do hiring. limit it to 15 minutes.
    - jsmthrowaway 10y ago
      Because that 16th minute shows too much eagerness, right?
      - vonmoltke 10y ago
        16 minutes is desperation. 14 minutes is just looking for a paycheck.
andrewfromx 10y ago
I would politely submit this whole interview system is wrong. Why not slowly get to know tech workers and interview them over the corse of many days to understand what they are capable of? This idea comes from http://officecrashe.rs http://officecrashe.rs
- gnopgnip 10y ago
  Job seekers who currently have a job are not available for multiple days. Many of the best job seekers are currently employed.
  - andrewfromx 10y ago
    yeah it won't work for everyone right away. We start with SCTWs who can do this.
    - esmi 10y ago
      I wouldn't work on someone else's project for "many days" for free. I strongly suspect most other candidates wouldn't either. If you start paying them for their work, then it seems the decision to employ has been made and the interview is in actuality over.
      - andrewfromx 10y ago
        this is a complete mind shift for the process. Step 1, people currently employeed and happy with their job get permission to work from anywhere. i.e. a Self Contained Tech Worker. I work from any coffee shop I want to, my employeer is happy with my work. Step 2. I start crashing offices and working else where, still working for my current employeer. They don't care where I work, coffee shop, or some other office. Step 3. Over time as I work at new places I'll get to know new people. Leads to my next job when I'm looking for a switch.
      - danielweber 10y ago
        If you keep someone at work for this long, you should pay them at contract rates. I would really like this as an option. If I wake up tomorrow and have no job, it would be neat if there were companies out there willing to pay me contracting rates for a few days, because it would let me pay my bills.
graham1776 10y ago
A great post with non-technical related questions and discussion on questions to ask an employer: http://www.theladders.com/career-newsletters/it-s-not-about-me--it-s-about-you----the-20-questions-you-need-to-ask-in-a-job-interview-June-2013 http://www.theladders.com/career-newsletters/it-s-not-about-...
adaml_623 10y ago
If you ask the question: "Where do you fall on the spectrum of "Do it right" to "Get-R-Done"?" then do be aware that might be flipped back to you. Certainly I wouldn't describe both ends of the spectrum with those words. Maybe "Hack it together" vs "Precisely assemble" is less judgemental
- emodendroket 10y ago
  The balance between expediency and careful design? "Hack it together" sounds kind of negative too.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  The thing is, a lot of people think they "do it right", even if they are coding without source control and releasing 1 time a year. So worried this won't tease out enough unless you drill down into what they are view as right.
- RBerenguel 10y ago
  This has also a lot of wiggle room. I'm not sure where I'd put myself, since it depends a lot on the situation. Do I have time to do the proper thing? Then I try to do it right and nice. Is it incredibly urgent to finish A, B, C and Z just exploded? I'd hack a solution for Z, get to (properly, hopefully...) solving A, B, C and hopefully next sprint we can properly fix Z for real.
drhayes9 10y ago
One of my faves to ask my interviewers is, "Given a month of time to work on it, what would you work on in your current product?" The question is worded such that it's not offensive and doesn't sound like a "trying to find out the bad stuff" kind of question, so it puts people at ease. But it still gives people a chance to talk about the "bad stuff", to air out the things that frustrate them about the job. Those aren't necessarily red flags that prevent people from working at the company, but it's given me a pretty good picture over the years of what the day-to-day is like working on that product.
- arsenerei 10y ago
  I really like this question and I'll be reserving it for future use.
exabrial 10y ago
"How do you avoid micromanagement and promote autonomy in your organization?" "I'd like a copy of the employee handbook to take with me"
- mooreds 10y ago
  So important. Employee handbooks will rule or ruin your job.
a_imho 10y ago
If you have anything you are curious about, ask away. If no, asking questions for the sake of it does not improve your situation one bit, it won't come across as clever or thoughtful.
gryphonshafer 10y ago
Just for the giggles, I love hearing wars stories of epic fails to questions like these. Paraphrased, here are some I've personally experienced: q: If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about the company, what would it be? a: Get rid of all our customers. q: How many hours did you work last week? a: All of them. q: How many meetings were you in in the last few days, and how long did they last? a: Most of what I do is meetings. q: What do you use for source control? a: We use $NAME but we forbid branching because merging is too hard. q: Describe your build / deploy process. a: I don't think we have time for that right now. q: What do you use for a bug / task tracker? a: Email. q: How would you gague your technical debt? a: What's "technical debt"?
- hackaflocka 10y ago
  Sadly, not surprising. This is the state of most of the industry. Mostly, only companies with cushy government contracts with unlimited time and expense accounts on their hands (think defense) don't want to fire their customers.
  - vonmoltke 10y ago
    Unlimited time-and-materials (T&M) contracts are a rare beast. There is almost always a cap that cannot be exceeded without a renegotiation As for not wanting to fire the customers, upper management may not want to fire them, but those of us actually doing the work sure did. We hoped they would take their so-called "experts" with them.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  > q: What do you use for source control? a: We use $NAME but we forbid branching because merging is too hard. Where I used to work, and the first place I wrote software full-time, we were not allowed to commit code to our system (Synergy) until after our code review. I ended up creating a parallel SVN repository so I could do incremental check-ins. Don't get me started in merging...
  - cableshaft 10y ago
kevindeasis 10y ago
How about the contrary? What questions should future tech employees know beforehand before going into an interview? Does anyone have a playbook?
OddMerlin 10y ago
This is everything thats wrong with (web)developers today. Why is this available in more than one format? Why on earth is there a filter.sh and render.py?!? This is just awful. If you can't read through a simple text list and select the appropriate questions then you're already doomed.
- dr_jay 10y ago
  https://gitlab.com/doctorj/interview-questions/raw/master/interview-questions.yml https://gitlab.com/doctorj/interview-questions/raw/master/in...
CuriouslyC 10y ago
for managers: - What do you believe is the role of a good manager? - What do you do to support the people you work with? - How do you handle technical disputes between employees? - How do you decide who to allocate a task to? for engineers: - Describe some interesting problems you've encountered, and tell me how you solved them - Tell me some of the interesting things you've learned as a result of your work - How do you make important technical decisions
mpdehaan2 10y ago
Hmm, this is always hard. The interviewer is trying to recruit you and also filter you out, but usually will not honestly respond to questions about what they don't like, or will hold some of those against you. Ergo, you really have to ask "what is it like to work here" (and also culture questions, etc) and leave open ended questions, and then learn to read between the lines. Asking multiple people the same question can also be good. Attempting to gauge enthusiam is good. I find places that really want to invest in new hires and make them feel part of the team are the best (i.e. people that want to take you out to lunch and help go over code with you), but those are in my experience also a bit too rare. You also need to figure out if the folks are smart, not burned out too much, and whether there's a lot of politics -- but it's really hard to filter that out from an interview, just in the same way it's hard for people to tell how a candidate is really going to be too.
seige 10y ago
Thank you so much for putting the work in listing out exact questions. I have been maintaining my own list and I am glad to find some really good additions from this list.
- dr_jay 10y ago
  You're welcome!
leeny 10y ago
I gave a talk at MIT last year, and part of it was going over good questions to ask your interviewers. Here is the resulting list: http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-to-interview-your-interviewers/ http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-to-interview-your-interviewe...
- dr_jay 10y ago
  Those are good. May I steal some?
alexandrerond 10y ago
You know, sometimes you have to join a company and get the s*it done yourself. The failure to answer some of this questions also shows the areas where you can be most valuable. Overall, I find fitting well in a team is of way more value than anything else. Good teams succeed even in bad companies.
alanwatts 10y ago
"What is your favorite thing about working at company x?" This is a simple but great one to end with. If they smile genuinely in their answer then that's good information for you and its good to leave them on a high note to tilt things in your favor.
chris_wot 10y ago
At this point in my life, if I work in a tech firm that pays me a reasonable amount (when I say reasonable I don't mean top dollar, average or slightly below is fine for me as I have relatively low levels of debt and my wife works also) and treats me fairly I'm not that worried about other issues like aging tech stack or legacy code base. Reasonable management allows you to work towards fixing this, although might not always make what you consider optimal technical decisions. If you can get along with your colleagues, get paid on time and not have the boss breathing down your neck I think that's a pretty good job!
batguano 10y ago
This is the question that I always want to ask, but am afraid to: > q: How many hours did you work last week? > a: Working more than 40-hour weeks regularly decreases productivity. > followup: Is that typical? I have kids, and I don't want to miss their growing up. But as an older-than-median dev, I fear coming off as less-than-committed.
- kod 10y ago
  Don't be afraid to ask it. You can phrase it in a more wishy-washy way, e.g. "what's the work-life balance like", but this is a common question. If someone DQs you for it, you didn't want to work there anyway.
infodroid 10y ago
A discussion from last week that touches on a related issue: Ask HN: How to detect a crappy boss / toxic environment when interviewing? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11449133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11449133
garfieldnate 10y ago
This is a great resource. As a junior developer I didn't have much experience or confidence in this area when interviewing for my current job. The big red flag for me should have been the way they answered my questions. "what is your development process?" "Oh, hmm, I dunno, I guess agile." asking about technical debt would have been a good one, too. Hint: there's lots.

252 points by dr_jay 10y ago

YAML's a weird choice for this kind of application. I once explored different markup languages for maintaining my resume, ultimately just went back to using LibreOffice. There's a temptation to use a structured, machine-readable formatting language for anything that has structure, because you might one day want to use machines to work on it. But for an application like this, those times are the exceptions, most of the time, it's humans that are going to read and modify the text. It makes way more sense to use a human-oriented format and simply use a convention so that it's easy to use a tool to convert it when you need to. I see no reason why Markdown can't be used.

Grishnakh 10y ago
I use LibreOffice for my resume too. However, I'm the only person who maintains my resume, so it works for me. For something that's going to be touched by a lot of different people, a text-based language is far better because you can diff the changes easily. Such tools exist for office documents within those programs, but they're clumsy and don't integrate with source control systems. But otherwise, Markdown does seem like it'd be a better choice. Everyone's using it these days, it's simple, whereas YAML is obscure.

overcast 10y ago

I was expecting a neat list of questions on the web, and instead was presented with setting up a programming environment just to output them. You will need Python 3 with the PyYAML, jsonschema, and jinja2 packages installed. Seriously?

HaloZero 10y ago
https://doctorj.gitlab.io/interview-questions/ https://doctorj.gitlab.io/interview-questions/
quasse 10y ago
I mean or just view them as html. https://doctorj.gitlab.io/interview-questions/ https://doctorj.gitlab.io/interview-questions/ I agree that the system he is set up is almost absurdly complex for what should just be a markdown file.
- dsmithn 10y ago
  That misses the answer, followup, and reference. Unless I'm missing something... - q: Would you say your colleagues are good at reading your emotional state, or still learning? # TODO: Better wording so the answer is not so obvious a: Research shows the most important factor in team effectiveness is psychological safety, a "shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking." One component of this is high "average social sensitivity," or that everyone is good at reading the emotional state of others. followup: Do you feel like your opinion is heard, respected, and valued? ref: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learn... pri: 1 tags: [culture]
ben_jones 10y ago
Haven't we all been there? We want to setup some great polymorphic abstraction that allows us to adapt it deeply and effortlessly in the future. Then half way in we're like "fuck I actually just needed x, not the whole alphabet". I actually give props that he finished it rather then revert it to something simpler bug uglier (as I would've done).
imdsm 10y ago
Was it too stimulating for you to have to set it up? /s
exabrial 10y ago
"How do you avoid over-engineering in this company?" might be a good one to throw in then

CameronBanga 10y ago

+1 for Gitlab! But one question. What was thinking behind setting up the extensive YML structure instead of just using simple markdown? I see some reasoning with printing through a script, but will that be a significant use case? This structure just seems complex for doing a quick PR with a question that I'd like to see added, and would keep me from contributing.

dr_jay 10y ago
Yeah, probably a bit over-engineered; just having a little fun. The idea is that you can filter and sort based on metadata, merge multiple lists, make mashups, and render/style it how you like. Feel free to just open an issue with a question, or post it here! In the YAML, you can get away with just: -q: Your question here.
- sanderjd 10y ago
  My thought was that it would be useful to have it in machine consumable form if you want to collect data and report on things. You could turn it into a "debriefing" program that makes it quick to go through after an interview and note which questions you asked and rate your satisfaction on their answers.
  - dr_jay 10y ago
    That is a great idea. Want to help out? :)
  - machinshin_ 10y ago
    And sink it up with glassdoor

HaloZero 10y ago

The formatted HTML version of the questions, not sure why you'd need this in JSON... https://doctorj.gitlab.io/interview-questions/ https://doctorj.gitlab.io/interview-questions/

athenot 10y ago

I've done a decent amount of hiring over the years. When I ask the candidates if they have any questions, I expect them to interview me as a potential manager. Everyone has their own set of criteria so there is not universal "good question to ask". Instead, you should figure out if you'd like to work with/for me? Do you feel you'd grow personally? Perhaps you're in a phase of life where you just need the money to recover from an unfortunate situation. Still, you must figure out what are the criteria you won't compromise on, and make sure you're getting that. For some, it's work schedule; for others, it's communication styles. Maybe you'll be driven insane by my cheesy puns and so you'd probably want to figure that out ahead of time. Ask me what I'll do to ensure you'll be respected as an individual on the team. When I'm a candidate, I like to ask how my failures will be dealt with. I will goof up at some point, the question is how is that managed. The larger point is there must be some discussion about potentially unpleasant situations.

overcast 10y ago
Can your company offer a challenging environment where I learn daily, and look forward to walking into your building? That's the biggest issue I find with most employment opportunities. 90% of the jobs aren't stimulating me enough, and I'm thinking about being somewhere else. Cheesy puns I can handle, are you adept at talking in movie references only?
- p4wnc6 10y ago
  I always liked Michael O. Church's way of phrasing this from his post on "the Haskell tax" (I think it's been taken down). Paraphrasing, he said something like, "most jobs require you to have work experience that is exponentially better than the work experience they will give out." That is a huge red flag for me. If a place is straining itself to "hire the best" and put candidates through the paces of a very difficult interview process, but then the actual job is some full-stack bullshit where your specialty or past experience is completely disregarded and you just do whatever random work happens to someone's misguided priority this week (which is almost every start-up job) it's just a bad, bad deal.
  - 10y ago

graham1776 10y ago

I realize this is geared towards the end of an actual job interview, but many of the questions that really hit home for an employer are: Questions that demonstrate 1)technical ability and 2)culture fit. If you can ask questions that show an employer that you can do your job well and that you will fit in with the team, you are that much further ahead of the competition. Questions serve as an opportunity to "fill in" the employer on areas they may have forgotten to ask you. If they are not 100% that you can do your job (or are teachable) and that you will fit in with the company, it is your job to ask the questions that eventually give them certainty. Shameless plug: Just released a book on informational interviews with a huge list of questions and walkthroughs on how to do them. Best way to get a job! http://www.amazon.com/Informational-Interviews-Coffee-Supercharge-Career-ebook/dp/B01DG19MIK http://www.amazon.com/Informational-Interviews-Coffee-Superc...

p4wnc6 10y ago
The primary use of questions during an interview is to actually determine if the employer is a good fit for you. Your advice seems to take a different approach -- that you shouldn't use questions as a means to ensure you will be happy in the job, but rather as yet another opportunity for status signalling. Even the first sentence depicts a totally alien attitude to me: "questions that really hit home with the employer are..." ... What? I have no obligation to ask questions that "hit home" with the employer. If the employer doesn't like the questions I do ask, well that right there is a good indication that I would be miserable working for them and should just work elsewhere. By approaching even the part of the interview where you get to steer the topics of discussion (your questions) with an attitude of infinite pliability and fealty, it makes the process even more about subjugation and hoop-jumping than it already is.
- graham1776 10y ago
  I agree you are also trying to determine if the employer is a good fit for you. I think this is implicit in the interview process. You absolutely should ask questions that tick your own boxes! What I have found in my own career, though, is that you can't turn down a job or company if you are not offered. If you get an offer, and the company isn't a fit, it is your own prerogative to turn it down. Until that point, though, you are selling yourself and trying to get the job.

pklausler 10y ago

I conduct a lot of technical interviews, and I always make "Do you have any questions for me?" the first and last question that I ask every candidate. Mostly this is to provide an opportunity to just answer a question, of course. But it's also true that a candidate's questions, or lack thereof, can affect my evaluation of them. So, my advice: have a couple of good questions on tap. If you don't, you run the risk of seeming unprepared or lacking confidence.

tgb 10y ago
How many questions is too many? I'd want to ask something like half the questions listed here but that seems burdensome to the interviewer.
- pklausler 10y ago
  The interviewer controls the use of time, so don't worry about imposing a burden. In my case, anyway, I'd rather have a fascinating technical conversation than ask my usual programming challenge and algorithm design questions, so your great question might seem more like a gift than a burden. I'm serious! With me, anyway, ask big questions like "what should/will HPC hardware and programming languages look like in 10 years?" and then tell me why you think my answer is crazy.
- beachstartup 10y ago
  i do hiring. limit it to 15 minutes.
  - jsmthrowaway 10y ago
    Because that 16th minute shows too much eagerness, right?
    - vonmoltke 10y ago
      16 minutes is desperation. 14 minutes is just looking for a paycheck.

andrewfromx 10y ago

I would politely submit this whole interview system is wrong. Why not slowly get to know tech workers and interview them over the corse of many days to understand what they are capable of? This idea comes from http://officecrashe.rs http://officecrashe.rs

gnopgnip 10y ago
Job seekers who currently have a job are not available for multiple days. Many of the best job seekers are currently employed.
- andrewfromx 10y ago
  yeah it won't work for everyone right away. We start with SCTWs who can do this.
  - esmi 10y ago
    I wouldn't work on someone else's project for "many days" for free. I strongly suspect most other candidates wouldn't either. If you start paying them for their work, then it seems the decision to employ has been made and the interview is in actuality over.
    - andrewfromx 10y ago
      this is a complete mind shift for the process. Step 1, people currently employeed and happy with their job get permission to work from anywhere. i.e. a Self Contained Tech Worker. I work from any coffee shop I want to, my employeer is happy with my work. Step 2. I start crashing offices and working else where, still working for my current employeer. They don't care where I work, coffee shop, or some other office. Step 3. Over time as I work at new places I'll get to know new people. Leads to my next job when I'm looking for a switch.
    - danielweber 10y ago
      If you keep someone at work for this long, you should pay them at contract rates. I would really like this as an option. If I wake up tomorrow and have no job, it would be neat if there were companies out there willing to pay me contracting rates for a few days, because it would let me pay my bills.

graham1776 10y ago

A great post with non-technical related questions and discussion on questions to ask an employer: http://www.theladders.com/career-newsletters/it-s-not-about-me--it-s-about-you----the-20-questions-you-need-to-ask-in-a-job-interview-June-2013 http://www.theladders.com/career-newsletters/it-s-not-about-...

adaml_623 10y ago

If you ask the question: "Where do you fall on the spectrum of "Do it right" to "Get-R-Done"?" then do be aware that might be flipped back to you. Certainly I wouldn't describe both ends of the spectrum with those words. Maybe "Hack it together" vs "Precisely assemble" is less judgemental

emodendroket 10y ago
The balance between expediency and careful design? "Hack it together" sounds kind of negative too.
brianwawok 10y ago
The thing is, a lot of people think they "do it right", even if they are coding without source control and releasing 1 time a year. So worried this won't tease out enough unless you drill down into what they are view as right.
RBerenguel 10y ago
This has also a lot of wiggle room. I'm not sure where I'd put myself, since it depends a lot on the situation. Do I have time to do the proper thing? Then I try to do it right and nice. Is it incredibly urgent to finish A, B, C and Z just exploded? I'd hack a solution for Z, get to (properly, hopefully...) solving A, B, C and hopefully next sprint we can properly fix Z for real.

drhayes9 10y ago

One of my faves to ask my interviewers is, "Given a month of time to work on it, what would you work on in your current product?" The question is worded such that it's not offensive and doesn't sound like a "trying to find out the bad stuff" kind of question, so it puts people at ease. But it still gives people a chance to talk about the "bad stuff", to air out the things that frustrate them about the job. Those aren't necessarily red flags that prevent people from working at the company, but it's given me a pretty good picture over the years of what the day-to-day is like working on that product.

arsenerei 10y ago
I really like this question and I'll be reserving it for future use.

exabrial 10y ago

"How do you avoid micromanagement and promote autonomy in your organization?" "I'd like a copy of the employee handbook to take with me"

mooreds 10y ago
So important. Employee handbooks will rule or ruin your job.

a_imho 10y ago

If you have anything you are curious about, ask away. If no, asking questions for the sake of it does not improve your situation one bit, it won't come across as clever or thoughtful.

gryphonshafer 10y ago

Just for the giggles, I love hearing wars stories of epic fails to questions like these. Paraphrased, here are some I've personally experienced: q: If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about the company, what would it be? a: Get rid of all our customers. q: How many hours did you work last week? a: All of them. q: How many meetings were you in in the last few days, and how long did they last? a: Most of what I do is meetings. q: What do you use for source control? a: We use $NAME but we forbid branching because merging is too hard. q: Describe your build / deploy process. a: I don't think we have time for that right now. q: What do you use for a bug / task tracker? a: Email. q: How would you gague your technical debt? a: What's "technical debt"?

hackaflocka 10y ago
Sadly, not surprising. This is the state of most of the industry. Mostly, only companies with cushy government contracts with unlimited time and expense accounts on their hands (think defense) don't want to fire their customers.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  Unlimited time-and-materials (T&M) contracts are a rare beast. There is almost always a cap that cannot be exceeded without a renegotiation As for not wanting to fire the customers, upper management may not want to fire them, but those of us actually doing the work sure did. We hoped they would take their so-called "experts" with them.
vonmoltke 10y ago
> q: What do you use for source control? a: We use $NAME but we forbid branching because merging is too hard. Where I used to work, and the first place I wrote software full-time, we were not allowed to commit code to our system (Synergy) until after our code review. I ended up creating a parallel SVN repository so I could do incremental check-ins. Don't get me started in merging...
- cableshaft 10y ago

kevindeasis 10y ago

How about the contrary? What questions should future tech employees know beforehand before going into an interview? Does anyone have a playbook?

OddMerlin 10y ago

This is everything thats wrong with (web)developers today. Why is this available in more than one format? Why on earth is there a filter.sh and render.py?!? This is just awful. If you can't read through a simple text list and select the appropriate questions then you're already doomed.

dr_jay 10y ago
https://gitlab.com/doctorj/interview-questions/raw/master/interview-questions.yml https://gitlab.com/doctorj/interview-questions/raw/master/in...

CuriouslyC 10y ago

for managers: - What do you believe is the role of a good manager? - What do you do to support the people you work with? - How do you handle technical disputes between employees? - How do you decide who to allocate a task to? for engineers: - Describe some interesting problems you've encountered, and tell me how you solved them - Tell me some of the interesting things you've learned as a result of your work - How do you make important technical decisions

mpdehaan2 10y ago

Hmm, this is always hard. The interviewer is trying to recruit you and also filter you out, but usually will not honestly respond to questions about what they don't like, or will hold some of those against you. Ergo, you really have to ask "what is it like to work here" (and also culture questions, etc) and leave open ended questions, and then learn to read between the lines. Asking multiple people the same question can also be good. Attempting to gauge enthusiam is good. I find places that really want to invest in new hires and make them feel part of the team are the best (i.e. people that want to take you out to lunch and help go over code with you), but those are in my experience also a bit too rare. You also need to figure out if the folks are smart, not burned out too much, and whether there's a lot of politics -- but it's really hard to filter that out from an interview, just in the same way it's hard for people to tell how a candidate is really going to be too.

seige 10y ago

Thank you so much for putting the work in listing out exact questions. I have been maintaining my own list and I am glad to find some really good additions from this list.

dr_jay 10y ago
You're welcome!

leeny 10y ago

I gave a talk at MIT last year, and part of it was going over good questions to ask your interviewers. Here is the resulting list: http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-to-interview-your-interviewers/ http://blog.alinelerner.com/how-to-interview-your-interviewe...

dr_jay 10y ago
Those are good. May I steal some?

alexandrerond 10y ago

You know, sometimes you have to join a company and get the s*it done yourself. The failure to answer some of this questions also shows the areas where you can be most valuable. Overall, I find fitting well in a team is of way more value than anything else. Good teams succeed even in bad companies.

alanwatts 10y ago

"What is your favorite thing about working at company x?" This is a simple but great one to end with. If they smile genuinely in their answer then that's good information for you and its good to leave them on a high note to tilt things in your favor.

chris_wot 10y ago

At this point in my life, if I work in a tech firm that pays me a reasonable amount (when I say reasonable I don't mean top dollar, average or slightly below is fine for me as I have relatively low levels of debt and my wife works also) and treats me fairly I'm not that worried about other issues like aging tech stack or legacy code base. Reasonable management allows you to work towards fixing this, although might not always make what you consider optimal technical decisions. If you can get along with your colleagues, get paid on time and not have the boss breathing down your neck I think that's a pretty good job!

batguano 10y ago

This is the question that I always want to ask, but am afraid to: > q: How many hours did you work last week? > a: Working more than 40-hour weeks regularly decreases productivity. > followup: Is that typical? I have kids, and I don't want to miss their growing up. But as an older-than-median dev, I fear coming off as less-than-committed.

kod 10y ago
Don't be afraid to ask it. You can phrase it in a more wishy-washy way, e.g. "what's the work-life balance like", but this is a common question. If someone DQs you for it, you didn't want to work there anyway.

infodroid 10y ago

A discussion from last week that touches on a related issue: Ask HN: How to detect a crappy boss / toxic environment when interviewing? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11449133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11449133

garfieldnate 10y ago

This is a great resource. As a junior developer I didn't have much experience or confidence in this area when interviewing for my current job. The big red flag for me should have been the way they answered my questions. "what is your development process?" "Oh, hmm, I dunno, I guess agile." asking about technical debt would have been a good one, too. Hint: there's lots.