11 ms·

What Startups Really Mean by “Why Should We Hire You?”

131 points by joeyespo 8y ago

bryanrasmussen 8y ago
Ok I read it nothing that interesting until this 'What?' moment: 'Plastiq—a startup that allows users to pay their bills with credit cards' Is that a thing in America or someplace you can't use credit cards to pay your bills? I followed the link thinking that it would be something else but it seems that really that's what it does.
- spiffytech 8y ago
  I've had some bills like car insurance and some apartments insist on bank drafts for automatic payments, cards not accepted.
- wlesieutre 8y ago
  My gas[1] and electric[2] companies are both subsidiaries of Avangrid, their websites and payment portals are practically identical, but one of them lets me use a credit card and the other doesn't. I always wondered if there was a regulatory reason for it, or maybe if it dates back to arbitrarily different company policies when they were independent of each other. [1] https://www.soconngas.com https://www.soconngas.com [2] https://www.uinet.com https://www.uinet.com
- polynomial 8y ago
  Did not read the article, but a wild guess would be they are just looking for a hook to get users to opt-in to Plaid (presumably before the inevitable media backlash once alarmists figure out what it is.)
wrs 8y ago
This is a surprisingly good article when it comes to describing the needs of a startup, but it makes me wonder why it’s taken for granted that these interview questions have to be asked in subtextual code...
skrebbel 8y ago
FWIW I run a startup and I think every single one of these questions is terrible. We can gauge your ambition and your resilience just fine in your first few weeks (in which we've signed you on as a contractor-under-evaluation - if your situation allows). And yes, we've had to learn how to do this the hard way (having kept people on for longer than was good for anyone). But I think it's nuts to think that you can test someone's ambition asking "where do you see yourself in 5 years?". I'm pretty convinced that that place deep down where people's natural drive comes from is, especially for engineers and other creative roles, very disconnected from conscious career planning. If you want to tap that natural drive, you need to create an environment where it can flourish. I don't think that asking "Why should we hire you?" when you mean "Do you understand what problem we're solving?" contributes to such an environment. You want to be open, clear, direct, and honest, not play guessing games.
- kenhwang 8y ago
  We ask the "where do you see yourself in 5 years" question as part of our standard interview. We don't put very much weight on it, but it adds color to the candidates ambitions. Most engineers say they would try to stay as engineers, some say maybe product/project/people management; these are all fine answers. Then we have the candidates that just blank or give a response like "I just want to make money". Not dealbreakers, but not great answers. But I've also gotten a surprising amount of really terrible answers, like "at Google" and "ideally I finally paid off all my student debt so I can finally be a comedian". These are the people we don't hire.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > But I've also gotten a surprising amount of really terrible answers, like "at Google" and "ideally I finally paid off all my student debt so I can finally be a comedian". These are the people we don't hire. I wonder why? Those are the most, if not the only, honest answers you got. In current state of software industry, unless the candidate happens to believe in your mission, anyone answering they'll want to still work for you is either lying or naïve.
    - 8y ago
im_down_w_otp 8y ago
There is an enormous amount of consideration and nuance being projected by this article onto these questions and the context they're often asked in. I've been in this industry a long time, I've been in startups and in big enterprises, and I've been a hiring manager in both cases and an executive in the former. Very, very rarely would I say that my hiring manager or executive peers (especially of the typically inexperienced startup variety) would be asking questions like these with the awareness of intent and interpretation being claimed here. Mostly these questions are being asked because, just like the fairly pointless "whiteboarding" questions, they're just the questions everybody thinks they're supposed to ask. That is of course until an alternative model is presented and nurtured. If you find a great hiring manager who is actually putting in a lot of forethought, intent, and consideration into their hiring and interviewing process, then do whatever you can to work with them. But, one of the ways you'll be able to detect such a person is they won't likely be asking cookie-cutter questions or giving you cookie-cutter quizes.
zwkrt 8y ago
As the interview was further and further analyzed by both The Company and the proletariat, an arms race developed. The Company asked esoteric questions and the proles studied. The proles learned to FizzBuzz and The Company developed FooBaz. Whiteboards gave way to take home interviews which gave way to probationary offers. Personal questions were supplanted by a form of subtextual sparring in which small facial movements, pauses, and hand movements spoke volumes. By 2034 the majority of proles were on illegal performance-evaluation enhancing drugs, necessitated by the fact that the average prole was also on The Company's indefinite performance improvement probation. They occupied over 20% of their working hours proving their worth to The Company, which had hired Prefects to wander the endless halls. The Prefects started administering the Voight-Kampf employee aptitude tests on proles, but soon began testing each other on their own effectiveness in administering the test. Before The Fall, the end state of the system was that The Company existed only to vet its own employees, all of whom were in charge of secretly monitoring other groups of employees. They had their nominal tasks such as programming or planning, but employee evaluation was based solely on the ability to evaluate others in their nominal tasks.
- jacobkg 8y ago
  This is the best thing I’ve seen on HN in a long time
- avip 8y ago
  You should either write more, or (assuming you already write more), lmk somehow next time you write something.
- patientplatypus 8y ago
  You're not crazy, just ahead of the curve :P.
- jammygit 8y ago
  Not looking forward to when captchas get replaced by the Voight-Kampf
- Derek_MK 8y ago
  Solid piece, I'd give it a B+. We'll see if there's any improvement at our next review.
aristus 8y ago
If you forgive the self-post: "The theme is familiar to anyone who's tried to join a country club or high-school clique. It's not supposed to make sense. You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth. What wearing a suit really indicates is —I am not making this up— non-conformity, one of the gravest of sins. For extra excitement, the rules are unwritten and ever-changing, and you will never be told how you screwed up." http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html
- im_down_w_otp 8y ago
  I've noticed this phenomenon seemingly distilled down to its purest form when fundraising especially. Once you accept it for what it is, the process doesn't become anymore sane or reasonable, but it does at least become less disorienting and demoralizing.
- ultrasounder 8y ago
  Absolutely love your writing esp,Get That Job at Facebook. Perhaps,time for a "Get That Job at Lyft"??
- draw_down 8y ago
  Fantastic.
- jaclaz 8y ago
  Thank you, very nice article, actually this sentence made my day: >The pioneers who are connecting the global human family and removing barriers of time and space won't take you seriously unless you brunch at the same restaurants they do.
TeMPOraL 8y ago
On an interview, I was once asked, "Why shouldn't we hire you?". This got me totally confused, I was speechless for like 10 seconds. I don't remember the answer, it wasn't really anything remarkable. Still, I got the job.
avip 8y ago
I always thought "why should we hire you" is the new "tell me about yourself". Just an open, completely dumb question to estimate the ability of candidates to generally speak.
victor_ronin 8y ago
There are a lot of ways to translate these questions. As an example: "Tell Me About A Time You Failed". It can mean "Can you stomach failing until we figure things out?" or it can mean "Are you willing to be vulnerable by exposing your failures?" or "What kind of problems you perceive as a failure?". I can probably write another half a dozen of translations of such questions. I don't think there should be a right/wrong translation. And based on that, there are rarely terrible answers. These questions are open-ended on purpose, so people will talk and say things which are essential to them. As an example: “I didn't get along with a coworker.” isn't a terrible answer. It means that interpersonal relations for this person are important. “I struggled to balance work and life.” isn't a terrible answer, but rather show that he/she prefers an environment where the work doesn't occupy all the time/energy. The only answer which I wound consider bad is a dismissive answer (trying to ignore/deflect the question).
- kenhwang 8y ago
  I'd say there's very few terrible answers, since terrible answers are the ones that dodge and deflect and most people don't do that. However it's still very easy to for a good answer to reflect poorly on your candidacy. "I was terminated due to repeated negligence causing millions of dollars of damage" is a wonderful answer, it just torpedoes your chances of getting an offer.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
badpun 8y ago
> Why should we hire you? Because you need a programmer and I am one? Stupid questions get you stupid answers.
scaryclam 8y ago
Perhaps I have a vastly different idea of what these questions mean (though reading other replies here, I don't think I do), but the "translations" to these questions are just horrible. "1. Tell Me About A Time You Failed Translation: Can you stomach failing until we figure things out?" No. No it doesn't. It's far more likely that they're asking you if you can identify that you've got something wrong in the past and have learned something from it. Rambling on about things that you didn't get wrong, but someone else did and were out of your control will only serve to make the interviewer wonder why you're avoiding the question. "2. Where Do You See Yourself In Five Years? Translation: Are you ambitious enough for a startup?" Again, no. This is a simple question to find out what sort of direction you want your career to go in. It's a common question to help evaluate whether the company and you are going to be a good match. If you want to be a CTO and they want someone who's OK staying more hands-on, this is the sort of question to help make sure you're not going to be unhappy later on. "3. Why Should We Hire You? Translation: Do you really understand the problem we're solving?" I'm really unsure how the author got to this conclusion. This is the same old question that's been asked for donkeys years, and the underlying reason for it (if any) is that they want you to sell yourself to them. Any halfway competent interviewer is going to have some much better questions for finding out if you understand the problem they're solving than this would give them. Now, of course, different hiring managers are going to disagree with what I've just written there, and that's just fine! We're all going to have different motives for interview questions, whichever side of the table you're on. Point is, you can't "translate" common interview questions like the article attempts to do as you have no idea what the interviewer is actually looking for. Be honest, be friendly, and be yourself. edit: formatting and duplication
btilly 8y ago
I strongly disagree with their "translations". Here are mine. Tell Me About A Time You Failed Theirs: Can you stomach failing until we figure things out? Mine: When the shit hits the fan, do I have to worry that you will engage in defensive CYA? Where Do You See Yourself In Five Years? Theirs: Are you ambitious enough for a startup? Mine: What are your long-term values? (For the record, I think that this is a terrible question. But I answer the translation honestly.) Why Should We Hire You? Theirs: Do you really understand the problem we're solving? Mine: What value do you think you bring?
kthejoker2 8y ago
Our interview question matrix has 3 columns: * the question * Why we ask this question * What a good answer looks like, and often what a bad answer looks like; and occasionally follow up questions depending on their answer. This is nice because then we can all internally debate about columns 2 and 3, and any new question you want to ask has to come with a 2 and 3 yourself. We actually learn a lot about our own values with this method.
jfarmer 8y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Strive where we run management workshops, including ones around evidence-based interviewing. If you're interested in learning more, reach out to me at jesse@strive.co! An evidence-based approach (aka the scientific method) + a little knowledge about cognitive biases shows why questions like "Where Do You See Yourself In Five Years?" are not great. All the research into interviewing and cognitive biases says that asking questions for "color" reduces interviewer's ability to predict outcomes while simultaneously increasing their confidence that they've gleaned information from the interview. There are experiments where interviewers are given some diagnostic information (e.g., hard facts about background) and conduct closed-form interviews (yes/no, this/that questions) with the interviewees responding randomly. They'll still believe they've "learned more" about the candidate than they did from the candidates who they had biographical information alone. See the Dilution Effect (https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/social-psychology/social... https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/social-psychology/social...) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking. Here's a fun paper: http://journal.sjdm.org/12/121130a/jdm121130a.html http://journal.sjdm.org/12/121130a/jdm121130a.html A good interview process reduces an interviewer's exposure to non-diagnostic information and directs their attention so they only evaluate diagnostic information (and does so in a consistent way). This is the basis for the "structured interview". "But Jesse," you say, "'Where will you be in 5 years?' seems diagnostic to me!" Questions aren't diagnostic; responses are! So you have to think about the nature of the responses and how those responses will be evaluated. Here are some alternate questions. Consider the responses you might get to these vs. the 5-year one. Are those responses more diagnostic? (Note: I just thought of these off the top of my head and haven't fully evaluated them). - At your last job, what career goals did you have when you joined? Did you achieve them? How? - Imagine you've been working here for 18 months. What would need to happen between now and then for you to not feel disappointed you joined? - Think back to a manager who helped you define and achieve a professional goal (big or small). What was that goal? How did they help you achieve it? Why did that work? As a first pass, these questions control for more and are likely to get higher-signal responses that are easier to evaluate in a consistent, interpretable way. How can you tell the original 5-year question isn't great, though? Think like a scientist. Why 5 years? Why not 1? Why not 10? 2? 4? How might those numbers change the answers you receive? Are you even testing to see how people's responses change as a function of that number? Are you even coding the responses in a way that would be able to detect how their responses change in response to that number? Is the variance in the responses small enough that you can even come up with a way to code them? For example, if the interviewee is startup savvy and you ask the 5-year question then they understand the vesting cliffs are at play. Suddenly you're taking into account how savvy the interviewee is about the way vesting works. Was that the intention? If not: more variance! Is it clear what the question is trying to get at? Do all candidates understand what it's trying to get at? Could candidate misinterpret the intent of the question given the fact that they're in an interview? Could different interviewers interpret the same response differently? It's a "bad" question because it controls for very little and therefore inherently produces non-diagnostic information (such is the nature of humans). The level of variance in all the components of this question is exactly the surface area on which cognitive biases become the determining factor. And the nature of cognitive biases is that you become more confident when they're operational, not less. The upshot for startups is that implementing a structured process is easier than doing so at a larger company. Half (or more) of the challenge of implementing a structured process is the package + selling + training + rolling out + reinforcement of the "new" approach. At a startup, you can get everyone on the same page much more quickly and bake it into the culture from the start (or close to it).
dickeytk 8y ago
where is that leetcode link supposed to go to? I'm getting a 404. Link is https://angel.co/leetcode-1 https://angel.co/leetcode-1
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ken 8y ago
"Make Your Questions As Good As Your Answers" sounds like exactly the opposite of Spolsky: > Some interviewees try to judge if the candidate asks “intelligent” questions. Personally, I don’t care what questions they ask; by this point I’ve already made my decision. I maintain my belief that nobody in software has a clue how to do technical interviews.
Pmop 8y ago
I'm finishing my degree, haven't dealt with hiring yet but, god. Couldn't everything be easier if one could just say he wants the job for the money and wants to do a really good work for every cent? Modern society is getting annoyingly over-complicated.
- sidlls 8y ago
  One of the reasons software engineers in general are underpaid relative to their value to a company is because collectively not only do we not understand the social aspect of employment but we deride it as beneath us.
tiredwired 8y ago
Engineers need to ask a startup why the position is open. If you find out there were 3+ engineers in that position in the last 2-3 years then run away.
qwerty456127 8y ago
> Even with the most labyrinthian Leetcode[https://angel.co/leetcode-1 https://angel.co/leetcode-1] exercise, you don't have to guess at what the interviewer is “really” asking. It's 404. Can somebody provide a working URL? Or is finding one is itself the exercise and you are supposed to hack around the error someway?
satuenpoo 8y ago
Tell them to fuck off or just walk out when they ask with this kind of arrogance. They need you more than you need them. (And if not, then you made bad life choices and need to recalibrate yourself)
luord 8y ago
I can't stand this type of "gotcha" questions like "tell me about a time you failed". They're almost designed to make the interviewed misstep and, in so, waste everyone's time. "Why should we hire you?" Is a weird one, specially if it was the company who contacted the interviewed. They should already know why they want to hire and instead ask specific questions to corroborate. In general, this article assumes that the company holds all the cards and the applicants should be grateful (and waste plenty of time doing the "homework") just because they were given an interview. This is very often not the case.

131 points by joeyespo 8y ago

Ok I read it nothing that interesting until this 'What?' moment: 'Plastiq—a startup that allows users to pay their bills with credit cards' Is that a thing in America or someplace you can't use credit cards to pay your bills? I followed the link thinking that it would be something else but it seems that really that's what it does.

spiffytech 8y ago
I've had some bills like car insurance and some apartments insist on bank drafts for automatic payments, cards not accepted.
wlesieutre 8y ago
My gas[1] and electric[2] companies are both subsidiaries of Avangrid, their websites and payment portals are practically identical, but one of them lets me use a credit card and the other doesn't. I always wondered if there was a regulatory reason for it, or maybe if it dates back to arbitrarily different company policies when they were independent of each other. [1] https://www.soconngas.com https://www.soconngas.com [2] https://www.uinet.com https://www.uinet.com
polynomial 8y ago
Did not read the article, but a wild guess would be they are just looking for a hook to get users to opt-in to Plaid (presumably before the inevitable media backlash once alarmists figure out what it is.)

wrs 8y ago

This is a surprisingly good article when it comes to describing the needs of a startup, but it makes me wonder why it’s taken for granted that these interview questions have to be asked in subtextual code...

skrebbel 8y ago

FWIW I run a startup and I think every single one of these questions is terrible. We can gauge your ambition and your resilience just fine in your first few weeks (in which we've signed you on as a contractor-under-evaluation - if your situation allows). And yes, we've had to learn how to do this the hard way (having kept people on for longer than was good for anyone). But I think it's nuts to think that you can test someone's ambition asking "where do you see yourself in 5 years?". I'm pretty convinced that that place deep down where people's natural drive comes from is, especially for engineers and other creative roles, very disconnected from conscious career planning. If you want to tap that natural drive, you need to create an environment where it can flourish. I don't think that asking "Why should we hire you?" when you mean "Do you understand what problem we're solving?" contributes to such an environment. You want to be open, clear, direct, and honest, not play guessing games.

kenhwang 8y ago
We ask the "where do you see yourself in 5 years" question as part of our standard interview. We don't put very much weight on it, but it adds color to the candidates ambitions. Most engineers say they would try to stay as engineers, some say maybe product/project/people management; these are all fine answers. Then we have the candidates that just blank or give a response like "I just want to make money". Not dealbreakers, but not great answers. But I've also gotten a surprising amount of really terrible answers, like "at Google" and "ideally I finally paid off all my student debt so I can finally be a comedian". These are the people we don't hire.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > But I've also gotten a surprising amount of really terrible answers, like "at Google" and "ideally I finally paid off all my student debt so I can finally be a comedian". These are the people we don't hire. I wonder why? Those are the most, if not the only, honest answers you got. In current state of software industry, unless the candidate happens to believe in your mission, anyone answering they'll want to still work for you is either lying or naïve.
  - 8y ago

im_down_w_otp 8y ago

There is an enormous amount of consideration and nuance being projected by this article onto these questions and the context they're often asked in. I've been in this industry a long time, I've been in startups and in big enterprises, and I've been a hiring manager in both cases and an executive in the former. Very, very rarely would I say that my hiring manager or executive peers (especially of the typically inexperienced startup variety) would be asking questions like these with the awareness of intent and interpretation being claimed here. Mostly these questions are being asked because, just like the fairly pointless "whiteboarding" questions, they're just the questions everybody thinks they're supposed to ask. That is of course until an alternative model is presented and nurtured. If you find a great hiring manager who is actually putting in a lot of forethought, intent, and consideration into their hiring and interviewing process, then do whatever you can to work with them. But, one of the ways you'll be able to detect such a person is they won't likely be asking cookie-cutter questions or giving you cookie-cutter quizes.

zwkrt 8y ago

As the interview was further and further analyzed by both The Company and the proletariat, an arms race developed. The Company asked esoteric questions and the proles studied. The proles learned to FizzBuzz and The Company developed FooBaz. Whiteboards gave way to take home interviews which gave way to probationary offers. Personal questions were supplanted by a form of subtextual sparring in which small facial movements, pauses, and hand movements spoke volumes. By 2034 the majority of proles were on illegal performance-evaluation enhancing drugs, necessitated by the fact that the average prole was also on The Company's indefinite performance improvement probation. They occupied over 20% of their working hours proving their worth to The Company, which had hired Prefects to wander the endless halls. The Prefects started administering the Voight-Kampf employee aptitude tests on proles, but soon began testing each other on their own effectiveness in administering the test. Before The Fall, the end state of the system was that The Company existed only to vet its own employees, all of whom were in charge of secretly monitoring other groups of employees. They had their nominal tasks such as programming or planning, but employee evaluation was based solely on the ability to evaluate others in their nominal tasks.

jacobkg 8y ago
This is the best thing I’ve seen on HN in a long time
avip 8y ago
You should either write more, or (assuming you already write more), lmk somehow next time you write something.
patientplatypus 8y ago
You're not crazy, just ahead of the curve :P.
jammygit 8y ago
Not looking forward to when captchas get replaced by the Voight-Kampf
Derek_MK 8y ago
Solid piece, I'd give it a B+. We'll see if there's any improvement at our next review.

aristus 8y ago

If you forgive the self-post: "The theme is familiar to anyone who's tried to join a country club or high-school clique. It's not supposed to make sense. You are expected to conform to the rules of The Culture before you are allowed to demonstrate your actual worth. What wearing a suit really indicates is —I am not making this up— non-conformity, one of the gravest of sins. For extra excitement, the rules are unwritten and ever-changing, and you will never be told how you screwed up." http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html http://carlos.bueno.org/2014/06/mirrortocracy.html

im_down_w_otp 8y ago
I've noticed this phenomenon seemingly distilled down to its purest form when fundraising especially. Once you accept it for what it is, the process doesn't become anymore sane or reasonable, but it does at least become less disorienting and demoralizing.
ultrasounder 8y ago
Absolutely love your writing esp,Get That Job at Facebook. Perhaps,time for a "Get That Job at Lyft"??
draw_down 8y ago
Fantastic.
jaclaz 8y ago
Thank you, very nice article, actually this sentence made my day: >The pioneers who are connecting the global human family and removing barriers of time and space won't take you seriously unless you brunch at the same restaurants they do.

TeMPOraL 8y ago

On an interview, I was once asked, "Why shouldn't we hire you?". This got me totally confused, I was speechless for like 10 seconds. I don't remember the answer, it wasn't really anything remarkable. Still, I got the job.

avip 8y ago

I always thought "why should we hire you" is the new "tell me about yourself". Just an open, completely dumb question to estimate the ability of candidates to generally speak.

victor_ronin 8y ago

There are a lot of ways to translate these questions. As an example: "Tell Me About A Time You Failed". It can mean "Can you stomach failing until we figure things out?" or it can mean "Are you willing to be vulnerable by exposing your failures?" or "What kind of problems you perceive as a failure?". I can probably write another half a dozen of translations of such questions. I don't think there should be a right/wrong translation. And based on that, there are rarely terrible answers. These questions are open-ended on purpose, so people will talk and say things which are essential to them. As an example: “I didn't get along with a coworker.” isn't a terrible answer. It means that interpersonal relations for this person are important. “I struggled to balance work and life.” isn't a terrible answer, but rather show that he/she prefers an environment where the work doesn't occupy all the time/energy. The only answer which I wound consider bad is a dismissive answer (trying to ignore/deflect the question).

kenhwang 8y ago
I'd say there's very few terrible answers, since terrible answers are the ones that dodge and deflect and most people don't do that. However it's still very easy to for a good answer to reflect poorly on your candidacy. "I was terminated due to repeated negligence causing millions of dollars of damage" is a wonderful answer, it just torpedoes your chances of getting an offer.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

badpun 8y ago

> Why should we hire you? Because you need a programmer and I am one? Stupid questions get you stupid answers.

scaryclam 8y ago

Perhaps I have a vastly different idea of what these questions mean (though reading other replies here, I don't think I do), but the "translations" to these questions are just horrible. "1. Tell Me About A Time You Failed Translation: Can you stomach failing until we figure things out?" No. No it doesn't. It's far more likely that they're asking you if you can identify that you've got something wrong in the past and have learned something from it. Rambling on about things that you didn't get wrong, but someone else did and were out of your control will only serve to make the interviewer wonder why you're avoiding the question. "2. Where Do You See Yourself In Five Years? Translation: Are you ambitious enough for a startup?" Again, no. This is a simple question to find out what sort of direction you want your career to go in. It's a common question to help evaluate whether the company and you are going to be a good match. If you want to be a CTO and they want someone who's OK staying more hands-on, this is the sort of question to help make sure you're not going to be unhappy later on. "3. Why Should We Hire You? Translation: Do you really understand the problem we're solving?" I'm really unsure how the author got to this conclusion. This is the same old question that's been asked for donkeys years, and the underlying reason for it (if any) is that they want you to sell yourself to them. Any halfway competent interviewer is going to have some much better questions for finding out if you understand the problem they're solving than this would give them. Now, of course, different hiring managers are going to disagree with what I've just written there, and that's just fine! We're all going to have different motives for interview questions, whichever side of the table you're on. Point is, you can't "translate" common interview questions like the article attempts to do as you have no idea what the interviewer is actually looking for. Be honest, be friendly, and be yourself. edit: formatting and duplication

btilly 8y ago

I strongly disagree with their "translations". Here are mine. Tell Me About A Time You Failed Theirs: Can you stomach failing until we figure things out? Mine: When the shit hits the fan, do I have to worry that you will engage in defensive CYA? Where Do You See Yourself In Five Years? Theirs: Are you ambitious enough for a startup? Mine: What are your long-term values? (For the record, I think that this is a terrible question. But I answer the translation honestly.) Why Should We Hire You? Theirs: Do you really understand the problem we're solving? Mine: What value do you think you bring?

kthejoker2 8y ago

Our interview question matrix has 3 columns: * the question * Why we ask this question * What a good answer looks like, and often what a bad answer looks like; and occasionally follow up questions depending on their answer. This is nice because then we can all internally debate about columns 2 and 3, and any new question you want to ask has to come with a 2 and 3 yourself. We actually learn a lot about our own values with this method.

jfarmer 8y ago

Disclaimer: I work at Strive where we run management workshops, including ones around evidence-based interviewing. If you're interested in learning more, reach out to me at jesse@strive.co! An evidence-based approach (aka the scientific method) + a little knowledge about cognitive biases shows why questions like "Where Do You See Yourself In Five Years?" are not great. All the research into interviewing and cognitive biases says that asking questions for "color" reduces interviewer's ability to predict outcomes while simultaneously increasing their confidence that they've gleaned information from the interview. There are experiments where interviewers are given some diagnostic information (e.g., hard facts about background) and conduct closed-form interviews (yes/no, this/that questions) with the interviewees responding randomly. They'll still believe they've "learned more" about the candidate than they did from the candidates who they had biographical information alone. See the Dilution Effect (https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/social-psychology/social... https://psychology.iresearchnet.com/social-psychology/social...) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensemaking. Here's a fun paper: http://journal.sjdm.org/12/121130a/jdm121130a.html http://journal.sjdm.org/12/121130a/jdm121130a.html A good interview process reduces an interviewer's exposure to non-diagnostic information and directs their attention so they only evaluate diagnostic information (and does so in a consistent way). This is the basis for the "structured interview". "But Jesse," you say, "'Where will you be in 5 years?' seems diagnostic to me!" Questions aren't diagnostic; responses are! So you have to think about the nature of the responses and how those responses will be evaluated. Here are some alternate questions. Consider the responses you might get to these vs. the 5-year one. Are those responses more diagnostic? (Note: I just thought of these off the top of my head and haven't fully evaluated them). - At your last job, what career goals did you have when you joined? Did you achieve them? How? - Imagine you've been working here for 18 months. What would need to happen between now and then for you to not feel disappointed you joined? - Think back to a manager who helped you define and achieve a professional goal (big or small). What was that goal? How did they help you achieve it? Why did that work? As a first pass, these questions control for more and are likely to get higher-signal responses that are easier to evaluate in a consistent, interpretable way. How can you tell the original 5-year question isn't great, though? Think like a scientist. Why 5 years? Why not 1? Why not 10? 2? 4? How might those numbers change the answers you receive? Are you even testing to see how people's responses change as a function of that number? Are you even coding the responses in a way that would be able to detect how their responses change in response to that number? Is the variance in the responses small enough that you can even come up with a way to code them? For example, if the interviewee is startup savvy and you ask the 5-year question then they understand the vesting cliffs are at play. Suddenly you're taking into account how savvy the interviewee is about the way vesting works. Was that the intention? If not: more variance! Is it clear what the question is trying to get at? Do all candidates understand what it's trying to get at? Could candidate misinterpret the intent of the question given the fact that they're in an interview? Could different interviewers interpret the same response differently? It's a "bad" question because it controls for very little and therefore inherently produces non-diagnostic information (such is the nature of humans). The level of variance in all the components of this question is exactly the surface area on which cognitive biases become the determining factor. And the nature of cognitive biases is that you become more confident when they're operational, not less. The upshot for startups is that implementing a structured process is easier than doing so at a larger company. Half (or more) of the challenge of implementing a structured process is the package + selling + training + rolling out + reinforcement of the "new" approach. At a startup, you can get everyone on the same page much more quickly and bake it into the culture from the start (or close to it).

dickeytk 8y ago

where is that leetcode link supposed to go to? I'm getting a 404. Link is https://angel.co/leetcode-1 https://angel.co/leetcode-1

deleted 8y ago

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ken 8y ago

"Make Your Questions As Good As Your Answers" sounds like exactly the opposite of Spolsky: > Some interviewees try to judge if the candidate asks “intelligent” questions. Personally, I don’t care what questions they ask; by this point I’ve already made my decision. I maintain my belief that nobody in software has a clue how to do technical interviews.

Pmop 8y ago

I'm finishing my degree, haven't dealt with hiring yet but, god. Couldn't everything be easier if one could just say he wants the job for the money and wants to do a really good work for every cent? Modern society is getting annoyingly over-complicated.

sidlls 8y ago
One of the reasons software engineers in general are underpaid relative to their value to a company is because collectively not only do we not understand the social aspect of employment but we deride it as beneath us.

tiredwired 8y ago

Engineers need to ask a startup why the position is open. If you find out there were 3+ engineers in that position in the last 2-3 years then run away.

qwerty456127 8y ago

> Even with the most labyrinthian Leetcode[https://angel.co/leetcode-1 https://angel.co/leetcode-1] exercise, you don't have to guess at what the interviewer is “really” asking. It's 404. Can somebody provide a working URL? Or is finding one is itself the exercise and you are supposed to hack around the error someway?

satuenpoo 8y ago

Tell them to fuck off or just walk out when they ask with this kind of arrogance. They need you more than you need them. (And if not, then you made bad life choices and need to recalibrate yourself)

luord 8y ago

I can't stand this type of "gotcha" questions like "tell me about a time you failed". They're almost designed to make the interviewed misstep and, in so, waste everyone's time. "Why should we hire you?" Is a weird one, specially if it was the company who contacted the interviewed. They should already know why they want to hire and instead ask specific questions to corroborate. In general, this article assumes that the company holds all the cards and the applicants should be grateful (and waste plenty of time doing the "homework") just because they were given an interview. This is very often not the case.