10 ms·

Ask HN: What have you found the most useful interview question to be?

80 points by kejaed 8y ago

Hiring or applicant side, is there a question you’ve found that over time has helped you out the most in getting a better understanding about the people on the other side of the table?

projectramo 8y ago
I am considered a great hirer, and it is because of this "one weird trick." The most useful "question" is any generic task. It can be as simple as -- please put this spreadsheet in alphabetical order -- I have misplaced your resume, could you send me another copy? -- That sounds like an interesting article, would you send me a copy later on Even the most trivial task will really illuminate the difference between candidates. Compared to a task, merely talking is entirely useless. Some very polished candidates will simply ignore the request and do nothing. Some will do one of two or three. Some very quiet candidates who are not "impressive" will do all the requests, thoroughly and with obvious care. How can someone handle the request to forward an article with care? You have to see it to understand. They may remind you of the context, say a word about the article, and add another one for more context for example.
- bashmydotfiles 8y ago
  I can get the first task, but what is your reasoning behind the two other tasks?
  - theamk 8y ago
    Presumably to see how attentive to details the candidates are? I have worked with some people would would promise things and the immediately forget that they did so. This was extremely irritating. There are also people who never bother with conversation context when sending emails. Asking for a trivial thing which needs to be done after interview shows the response to both of those questions. Will candidate forget this completely? Will they send an email with no subject or body and just an attachment alone?
  - krackers 8y ago
    >That sounds like an interesting article, would you send me a copy later on This one makes sense to me since it roughly gauges the non-verbal aspects of interpersonal communication. If the interviewee does send a copy, it's a signal that he's dependable in some sense but perhaps more importantly if he goes a bit beyond and sends a few other articles on the topic, it shows passion for the topic and a desire to communicate that knowledge to others.
  - projectramo 8y ago
    I use the verbal ones for interviews where I haven't had time to prepare, or they are not there in person. Really, listening to a request and following up is just one of those key things. If I had them come in and do a longer interview which I had prepared for, I still find it useful!
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- kwoff 8y ago
  You might be turning away people who are just sensitive to being manipulated. I can't find a reference, but it's a common trick for manipulative people to "task" someone with a trivial thing. Once they've done that, it can become more difficult to refuse to do slightly less trivial things, because, hey, you didn't have a problem doing that other thing... so what's the big deal now?
  - projectramo 8y ago
    Yeah, I am tricking them into sending me a copy of their resume during an interview. I hope they see through this garbage manipulation and fight the man. I wonder what they think of FizzBuzz tests!
- milesvp 8y ago
  Assuming you're not trolling (your first sentence gave me pause at first). I want this to be a surprising observation, because I consider following up on things to be sort of second nature, but I've noticed how bad people are in general at following up on something they say they'd do. Even professionally, finding the people in an organization who will do what they say they'll do, and, more importantly, not agree to something that they won't, is a big key in getting projects pushed through larger departments. To add to this idea. I know someone who used to be very deeply embedded in an organization that has historically skirted the line of being a cult. Apparently one of the key tenets of this group is the importance of integrity, which they partly define as doing what you say you'll do. (From what I can tell, this is important for the organization, because then, they can set up environments where they can get you to agree to things then know that you'll follow through even if you come to your senses later.) What my friend noticed, is that people who moved on from this organization tended to be pretty successful in their careers, and they commonly attribute the ease of their success being that they simply do what they say they're going to do, and not in a woo-woo self-actualization sort of way. They simply do the types of simple tasks that others don't bother with, or forget about, like forward an article to someone who they said they would.
  - projectramo 8y ago
    I am usually sarcastic but am not trolling this time. I agree with your observation. I will add that one simple reason people fail to do the task is because they try to remember it in their heads and then procrastinate. That is a deadly combo. A simple to-do list can solve this issue. However, a good manager can be the to do list. You can use an app to assign tasks. That is partly why Trello boards and the like work so well. It simply gets people to focus on things and not just have a bunch of tasks in memory. I must also add that a Trello board can force the manager to put down what they expect to get done in writing.
- insomniacity 8y ago
  I've read the other comments, but I'm still not enlightened as to the request for another copy of the resume. It's an interview - who on earth is going to fail this particular item? Do you mean during the interview? Or after, like the 'interesting article'?
  - itronitron 8y ago
    It's a test of the candidate's willingness to repeat something they have done in order to accommodate either a system glitch or colleague's mistake/oversight. I have worked with people who would sincerely reply that they already submitted the resume, and others that might take it as a personal insult that their resume was 'lost'. This filters out those types of people, as well as those that aren't very interested in getting hired for the position.
  - projectramo 8y ago
    During the interview, I will say something like I have the physical copy in front of me but would you please send me another copy in my email? I think their assumption may be that someone printed it out for me, but didn't forward the email. Or that it was accidentally deleted. I don't pretend I've never seen the resume, and I do ask questions about the resume.
- gumby 8y ago
  This is really great (as is your amusing lead-in BTW!). I struggle with candidate responses because it's quite possible to get bad answers from great candidates due to nervousness, monetary confusion, accidental use of company-specific jargon that can be misrepresented etc. And interviews are abnormal, so you're selecting for people who do well in interviews hoping it's correlated with the skill you actually need. Yet I don't know of a good alternative to almost anything beyond a truly unskilled job. But these examples are great because they normalize out most of the realtime "high stakes" stuff. Sure, they can stress about precisely the right phrasing to put above whatever attachment they might be sending, but that's still an easier problem. My favorite example of "interview perspective imbalance" comes from the Allied occupation of Japan: when the first allied troops arrived (after the Japanese had signaled surrender) they were lead to a brief reception. Apparently the Japanese representatives had worried that the orange juice they set out was at the right temperature while the American troopers were worried that they might be assassinated. Quite an imbalance of expectation!
- laurentl 8y ago
  Reading your post made me realize that I've unwittingly used your technique, without clearly understanding why it works. When hiring for an intern/junior position, I will often ask for a sample of a candidate's school projects. My rationale for this request is to see an example of their code. In practice, some candidates never follow up on my request; some send me a big hairy zip file with no context; and some obviously take the time to clean up their code and add comments before sending it to me. I've even had one or two create a GitHub account and push their code to a public repo to share with me, after we've gotten to talk about their knowledge of git. Thank you for the insight that while trying to gauge technical skill I ended up evaluating thoroughness and care ;)
PM_ME_YOUR_PUFZ 8y ago
Just stare at them until you know whether or not they're a good employee. You can tell from their face.
seanwilson 8y ago
I find this one short and useful: "so you know language X and Y, can you compare some features between them that you like and dislike?". If they get into deep comparisons about the tradeoffs between type safety, state, maintainability, multithreading, undefined behaviour, functional vs OO, libraries etc. that's a good indicator to me.
- estomagordo 8y ago
  +1 I've been asked this question in interviews on more than one occasion. I find it gives me a good opportunity to show off some knowledge, and with a good interviewer, it's a very good conversation starter for something that can end up being quite deep diving.
avitzurel 8y ago
1) Tell me a little bit about yourself. 2) Tell me about an interesting challenge you had in your current position and how you solved it.
JSeymourATL 8y ago
Let's use our time together well. I know you've read the position summary. Met with HR and members of our team here. What questions do you have for me? Behind the question-- I'm probing for curiosity and intellection. Also, what's important and top of mind to them.
itronitron 8y ago
Applicant side (and software focused), asking interviewers how new functionality is defined, developed, and deployed gives a lot of insight to how the team works within the organization.
gvand 8y ago
More important than trying to find a question of adamantine perfection and blinding luster is the knowledge that regardless of how many hours you have to interview a candidate, your opinion will still be partial, influenced by biases and to some degree wrong.
- gvand 8y ago
  More on topic, interviewee side: Describe me a typical day here. Expected answer contains: Overall process, roles distribution (who does what), project management style, issues triage, etc...
EnderMB 8y ago
In interviews I like to try and get a reaction, and the best way to do that is to sit down with a coffee or two (or three) and just chat about their experience over the last few years, in a judgement-free zone - dev to dev. In terms of an actual question, the only useful ones are ones that come from this chat, because it's where we have a back-and-forth conversation about tech decisions, what issues they had, what they had to overcome, and what decisions that particular dev made. My goal is to get a reaction, negative or positive, and dig into why that situation happened, what they did to overcome it, and what they'd do with hindsight. Not only does it make an interview more interesting for all involved, it tells you more about the candidate than a quiz would. You learn what they do under pressure, what pisses them off, and what experience they have for the kind of work you do, because you've been using your experience against theirs in conversation. Sometimes, to make it fair, I tell them (without dropping client names) issues I've had recently, and I see if any of the solutions were raised by the team, or are ultimately the solution we went for. I've had enough success with this approach that (when I did interviews) this was my approach: 1. A really basic take home test, probably in a language they don't use, just to see if they can write any code. Literally something that takes an hour to do. A favourite of mine was to get them to write an application in a given language to hit an endpoint, with a given code and their email address. When done correctly, an email is sent to our HR team, who then set up an interview. Based on our logs, you'd be surprised at how many candidates couldn't do this - by which I mean had clearly worked on the test, submitted something, and had failed to send a PUT request with the correct data. 2. A relaxed interview, like above, in neutral ground like a coffee shop. I use the walk from office to coffee shop to handle company questios, and the standard interview stuff,
- kstenerud 8y ago
  I would have failed your test. I'd have assumed that you didn't want your server inundated by requests, set up my own server to verify what my client was doing, and then submitted the code. Even if you specifically told me that I must actually hit your server, I'd still test on my own server, and then possibly forget to change the endpoint before submitting (no way to unit test that). Shit happens, and you lose someone on a technicality. Also, what if your server stops working? Now you're wasting people's time. Don't rely on magic; it eventually bites you in the ass.
basseq 8y ago
Hiring side. "Tell me more about what you did." Can be asked off almost any line of conversation. I'm seeking two outcomes: 1. Candidate's ability to quickly articulate a complex process, organization, problem, etc. to someone who has absolutely no understanding of it (i.e., me). 2. An understanding of their specific role and impact, as well as how the team worked together. You often have to coach people through the latter, as many candidates will default to the royal-we. The other one I'm playing with is, "Let's say you start working here, but six months later, you leave for another opportunity. Why would you leave?" I'm still figuring out the delivery on that one, but you get an interesting insight into what matters to the candidate.
- ohithereyou 8y ago
  The first question you propose is the first question I ask in every interview that I conduct, and I can count on my fingers the number of people who have given me a satisfactory answer to this question. It really colors my perception of your skills - whether you lied on your resume, whether you were dead weight on your team while they did all of the work, whether you were clueful about what was going on where you were working before, and so on. The only time that I have recommended someone be hired who was not able to answer this question was when they were under an NDA and were not able to talk about the work they had done. That candidate aced the practical side of the interview that I gave ("Here's a scenario at a high level using the skills you claim to have, what would you do and why?") and is the best worker I have ever recommended to hire.
- vkou 8y ago
  The honest answers to the second question aren't very nice, and have everything to do with the character of the persons employed at a firm. Why would I leave a firm in six months? Most likely because my boss is an asshole. Am I daft enough to get into that with an interviewer, who may be that boss? No.
  - tilolebo 8y ago
    I'd rather not get a job that very probably do not fit me anyway, instead of finding out after having left that my new boss is an asshole. The overhead of starting again the job search from scratch, explaining why I want to quit after 6 months (for real this time) is much bigger.
sageabilly 8y ago
Applicant side: "What's the biggest struggle that you're currently working through?" coupled with "Tell me a bit about how you're working through that struggle." I find this tells me a lot about the person who's interviewing me and the current climate they're operating in. Asking follow-up questions helps a lot here too. It's a good way to find out if the interviewer (frequently the hiring manager) is struggling with an unmotivated team, overly-onerous bureaucracy, lack of funding, staff turnover, outdated software, etc.
paulcole 8y ago
When interviewing someone, "What will your next job be after this one and how can we help you get there?" My follow-up is usually something like, "Explain that job title/position to me. What does that person do? What skills do they have?"
pwaivers 8y ago
From the applicant side: Why are you hiring for this role? Is it a new position, or did someone leave it?
- insomniacity 8y ago
  Yes, always my number one applicant question. I even had one interview where that question basically lead to the interviewer explaining just how bad it was, and how unlikely it was that I actually wanted the job (and I had no reason to believe that was a trick or bluff). I certainly left feeling like I dodged a bullet.
neerkumar 8y ago
Ironically, when interviewers talk about how they interview, they pretty much all seem to believe they are very good in evaluating candidates. But when candidates talk about job interviews, they all seem to agree interviews are done badly. A rule I have is that everyone is good in something and bad in something else. So, if by the end of the interview I haven't found a topic where the candidate excels and a topic where sucks, the interview hasn't been effective.
- ishjoh 8y ago
  If you've found what they're good at, and it matches what your needs are, does the information on what they suck at help you decide between multiple candidates?
tmaly 8y ago
I like to ask about a project, could even be something from university days. I ask them to explain how they approached the problem, what were the challenges, how did they overcome them, and what was the final result of the project.
snowwrestler 8y ago
From the hiring side: "Tell me about a result or achievement you're very proud of. How did it come to be a goal for you, and what did you do to accomplish it?" (Crucial followup after they answer) "Now tell me about a mistake you made along the way and how you overcame it." Talking about real work provides insight into motivations and enthusiasms, and gives you permission to dive into details as they talk. It also helps show whether they have a healthy attitude about mistakes. This question can also provide some insight into team dynamics since very few big things are accomplished solo these days. From the applicant side: "Let's say I get hired and I do an amazing job. You're going to write my 6-month or annual review--what would you write?" Like Amazon's trick of writing the press release first, this helps hiring managers get specific about their expectations for the hire. It's amazing how often companies hire folks with only a vague sense of what success should look like.
darkhorn 8y ago
When they ask "Do you live with your family? What jobs your family members have? What are your hobbies? Where you were born? Are you married? How old are you?" then I know that I don't want to work there.
- zer00eyz 8y ago
  I dont mind the hobbies question at all. I enjoy asking it as an interviewer, with the follow up of asking about why it excites you, and if you have any good stories related to it. I'm curious about hearing from you about the things that excite you in some way. It helps set the tone for the rest of our conversation, and helps me to gauge your level of engagement with the questions and answers after that.
- sns989 8y ago
  not sure if you live/work in the United States, but the majority of those questions are illegal to ask.
kstenerud 8y ago
"Tell me about one or two projects you've done in the past that stand out for some reason. Maybe you learned a new technology over the course of it, got to interact with cool people, got shipped off to a different country, had weird clients, got a killer contact. Maybe the project was a total disaster. Doesn't matter what happened or how long ago, just something you found memorable." Get them talking about what things they get emotionally invested in. You learn a lot about someone this way. The trick to good interviewing is putting the candidate at ease. When someone's future is on the line, they behave very differently, and preform worse than they would in a regular work environment. Asking questions like "what have you done well" and "what mistakes have you made" will favor narcissists, because they will embellish, whereas those more on the neurotic side will take more blame, and dislike taking credit. So put them at ease. You'll get far more real answers that way.
- andrewf 8y ago
  > Get them talking about what things they get emotionally invested in. Yep. I ask something similar and explicitly tell the candidate I'm NOT necessarily after "tell me a time you delivered strong business impact", "tell me a time you added a new skill to your resume", or the other stereotypical things that make a good "interview story".
palidanx 8y ago
"Tell me about the last time you failed" It usually reveals character on how a person deals with tough situations.
athst 8y ago
On the applicant side, one of the more interesting questions I've been asked (as a product manager) was something to the effect of: "What is something you believe about product management that differs from conventional wisdom (or what the majority of other product managers believe?)" I thought it was a good question, because it gives the chance for the candidate to talk about how they think, and it gives them a license to speak a little more honestly than they ordinarily would say in a normal interview. It shows you how much thought the person has given to their profession and how they approach their job. If you were asking this during hiring, I think it should be done with care on your end, because I could see it easily being misinterpreted by the wrong team/interviewer. For example, if someone came in and said something like "Compared to others, I think A/B testing is a waste of time", it would behoove you to dive in a little bit more to understand why they think that. It shouldn't be disqualifying if you're a team that does a lot of A/B testing.
7402 8y ago
When interviewing someone for a more senior position, I would always ask, "What was your worst [work-related] mistake?" If they couldn't come up with anything, they were either lying or they just coasted through their previous jobs. If their answer was mostly about how it was really someone else's fault, then I'd consider them lacking in the kind of attitude I consider important in a co-worker.
- mbrock 8y ago
  I wonder if it’s okay for an interviewee to ask something like “What’s the worst thing about this company?”
OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago
what are the next lottery quick pick numbers
zer00eyz 8y ago
For me there are two critical questions I ask of a candidate. 1. I tell them the story about a massive screw up in my career (its funny) about how I thought I was getting fired about being frank about it... etc. I then ask "do you have a story about a major screw up in your career. The answer should say a lot. Dealing with crisis, dealing with mistakes, can you laugh about traumatic things (a great coping mechanism as a programer). I'm looking for insight into you in a professional setting. There have been occasions that this one question takes up the BULK of my allotted time and has on occasion gone over. 2. Can you read and talk about a piece of code GIVEN to you. The bulk of the battle for most devs is READING existing code and trying to figure out where to fit fixes in, or how to integrate what they are doing into a larger, standing system. The provided sample should have errors, room for improvement and plenty of ambiguity where the reader has to make assumptions or ask questions.
elmarschraml 8y ago
Generally, asking opinions rather than specific technical answers. Asking "Do you have experience with technology X" is useless - everybody knows that "yes" is the expected answer. Asking specific technical questions is random - they might or might not have come across that particular problem. Also, in practice the answer would simply be looked up, and you don't want to hire for memorization. Instead, ask things like"How did you find working with <technology X>? Can you compare it to <common alternative>, or <similar tech also listed on their resume>?". Or maybe "what worked really well with <technology X>? What pitfalls did you fall into? Anything for which you would, or would not, recommed it?" This kind of info is hard to fake, gives you good insight into their thought process and priorities, or just gets people talking about their projects more easily than a generic "tell me about your work on project y".
elmarschraml 8y ago
Having them do a code review (about 10-15 minutes), i.e. have a short (about 50-80 lines) piece of real code, that I have prepared with plenty of problem, messes, non-idiomatic code, or little ugly things. NOT a test as in "find the 10 hidden mistakes", but an invitation to talk about ways to improve the code. I make it clear to the candidate that it's not about the syntax, or any algorithm, but about quality. It's really good to see what kinds of things they care about (e.g. do they look into low-level performance, or more into things like variable naming and method length), how deep their knowledge of the language is (e.g. do they recognize non-idiomatic code, and suggest more modern approaches), if they are more of a high-level thinker or more detail-oriented etc. And of course, it nicely weeds out the (surprisingly high) number of people who cannot really program, without relying on any memorization of keywords. Plus, it's pretty realistic - nobody ever writes code on a whiteboard, but doing code reviews of code somebody else wrote is something that happens all the time. Most candidates find that task quite fun - and with really good candidates I quite frequently learn something new myself. I was planning to do a blog post about why and how I do that review - let me know if that would be of interest to you.
- filoeleven 8y ago
  I would love to be asked to do a code review during the interview process. What a great idea. I can imagine that another good thing about it is that it takes enough focus and is a familiar enough task that even if I’m in nervous-applicant mode, it will kick me over into acting like I’m already working there.
tboyd47 8y ago
I can answer on the hiring side when it comes to programming jobs. In a 100% honest world, you wouldn't even need to interview for technical positions; you could look at the person's resume and tell instantly whether or not they are capable of doing the job. But people lie a lot and over-embellish. So best questions to ask are about the items listed on their resume, because you find out who's telling the truth and who's not.
laurentl 8y ago
I have a generic question which I ask in all interviews, whether hiring for a dev, manager, project leader. It works wonders for me. For each position in the candidate's resume (or the last 3 if the resume is too long) I ask "what did you like about the job? what did you dislike? What made you happy to go to work and what made you drag your feet? It can be anything: boss, coworkers, how work was organized, office politics or lack thereof, visibility/interest of the job, commute time, offices... There are no wrong answers". Then I let them talk. When it's done right, I find this is a great way to understand what motivates them and to make sure their intrinsic motivation is aligned with the position they're applying for and the company context. For instance, for a developer I'll be interested in someone who likes fixing problems; for a project manager, being result-oriented is usually a good thing. Someone who likes having a clear set of steps to follow is probably not a good match for my management style. Another thing that I can check is how they coped with a situation they disliked. Did they try to address it, work around it, or did they give up/avoid it? I was first exposed to this approach as a candidate. I remember spending 90 minutes talking about all my previous positions, reflecting about what I'd liked and disliked for each of them, and coming out of there knowing more about myself than I did going in.

80 points by kejaed 8y ago

Hiring or applicant side, is there a question you’ve found that over time has helped you out the most in getting a better understanding about the people on the other side of the table?

projectramo 8y ago

I am considered a great hirer, and it is because of this "one weird trick." The most useful "question" is any generic task. It can be as simple as -- please put this spreadsheet in alphabetical order -- I have misplaced your resume, could you send me another copy? -- That sounds like an interesting article, would you send me a copy later on Even the most trivial task will really illuminate the difference between candidates. Compared to a task, merely talking is entirely useless. Some very polished candidates will simply ignore the request and do nothing. Some will do one of two or three. Some very quiet candidates who are not "impressive" will do all the requests, thoroughly and with obvious care. How can someone handle the request to forward an article with care? You have to see it to understand. They may remind you of the context, say a word about the article, and add another one for more context for example.

bashmydotfiles 8y ago
I can get the first task, but what is your reasoning behind the two other tasks?
- theamk 8y ago
  Presumably to see how attentive to details the candidates are? I have worked with some people would would promise things and the immediately forget that they did so. This was extremely irritating. There are also people who never bother with conversation context when sending emails. Asking for a trivial thing which needs to be done after interview shows the response to both of those questions. Will candidate forget this completely? Will they send an email with no subject or body and just an attachment alone?
- krackers 8y ago
  >That sounds like an interesting article, would you send me a copy later on This one makes sense to me since it roughly gauges the non-verbal aspects of interpersonal communication. If the interviewee does send a copy, it's a signal that he's dependable in some sense but perhaps more importantly if he goes a bit beyond and sends a few other articles on the topic, it shows passion for the topic and a desire to communicate that knowledge to others.
- projectramo 8y ago
  I use the verbal ones for interviews where I haven't had time to prepare, or they are not there in person. Really, listening to a request and following up is just one of those key things. If I had them come in and do a longer interview which I had prepared for, I still find it useful!
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
kwoff 8y ago
You might be turning away people who are just sensitive to being manipulated. I can't find a reference, but it's a common trick for manipulative people to "task" someone with a trivial thing. Once they've done that, it can become more difficult to refuse to do slightly less trivial things, because, hey, you didn't have a problem doing that other thing... so what's the big deal now?
- projectramo 8y ago
  Yeah, I am tricking them into sending me a copy of their resume during an interview. I hope they see through this garbage manipulation and fight the man. I wonder what they think of FizzBuzz tests!
milesvp 8y ago
Assuming you're not trolling (your first sentence gave me pause at first). I want this to be a surprising observation, because I consider following up on things to be sort of second nature, but I've noticed how bad people are in general at following up on something they say they'd do. Even professionally, finding the people in an organization who will do what they say they'll do, and, more importantly, not agree to something that they won't, is a big key in getting projects pushed through larger departments. To add to this idea. I know someone who used to be very deeply embedded in an organization that has historically skirted the line of being a cult. Apparently one of the key tenets of this group is the importance of integrity, which they partly define as doing what you say you'll do. (From what I can tell, this is important for the organization, because then, they can set up environments where they can get you to agree to things then know that you'll follow through even if you come to your senses later.) What my friend noticed, is that people who moved on from this organization tended to be pretty successful in their careers, and they commonly attribute the ease of their success being that they simply do what they say they're going to do, and not in a woo-woo self-actualization sort of way. They simply do the types of simple tasks that others don't bother with, or forget about, like forward an article to someone who they said they would.
- projectramo 8y ago
  I am usually sarcastic but am not trolling this time. I agree with your observation. I will add that one simple reason people fail to do the task is because they try to remember it in their heads and then procrastinate. That is a deadly combo. A simple to-do list can solve this issue. However, a good manager can be the to do list. You can use an app to assign tasks. That is partly why Trello boards and the like work so well. It simply gets people to focus on things and not just have a bunch of tasks in memory. I must also add that a Trello board can force the manager to put down what they expect to get done in writing.
insomniacity 8y ago
I've read the other comments, but I'm still not enlightened as to the request for another copy of the resume. It's an interview - who on earth is going to fail this particular item? Do you mean during the interview? Or after, like the 'interesting article'?
- itronitron 8y ago
  It's a test of the candidate's willingness to repeat something they have done in order to accommodate either a system glitch or colleague's mistake/oversight. I have worked with people who would sincerely reply that they already submitted the resume, and others that might take it as a personal insult that their resume was 'lost'. This filters out those types of people, as well as those that aren't very interested in getting hired for the position.
- projectramo 8y ago
  During the interview, I will say something like I have the physical copy in front of me but would you please send me another copy in my email? I think their assumption may be that someone printed it out for me, but didn't forward the email. Or that it was accidentally deleted. I don't pretend I've never seen the resume, and I do ask questions about the resume.
gumby 8y ago
This is really great (as is your amusing lead-in BTW!). I struggle with candidate responses because it's quite possible to get bad answers from great candidates due to nervousness, monetary confusion, accidental use of company-specific jargon that can be misrepresented etc. And interviews are abnormal, so you're selecting for people who do well in interviews hoping it's correlated with the skill you actually need. Yet I don't know of a good alternative to almost anything beyond a truly unskilled job. But these examples are great because they normalize out most of the realtime "high stakes" stuff. Sure, they can stress about precisely the right phrasing to put above whatever attachment they might be sending, but that's still an easier problem. My favorite example of "interview perspective imbalance" comes from the Allied occupation of Japan: when the first allied troops arrived (after the Japanese had signaled surrender) they were lead to a brief reception. Apparently the Japanese representatives had worried that the orange juice they set out was at the right temperature while the American troopers were worried that they might be assassinated. Quite an imbalance of expectation!
laurentl 8y ago
Reading your post made me realize that I've unwittingly used your technique, without clearly understanding why it works. When hiring for an intern/junior position, I will often ask for a sample of a candidate's school projects. My rationale for this request is to see an example of their code. In practice, some candidates never follow up on my request; some send me a big hairy zip file with no context; and some obviously take the time to clean up their code and add comments before sending it to me. I've even had one or two create a GitHub account and push their code to a public repo to share with me, after we've gotten to talk about their knowledge of git. Thank you for the insight that while trying to gauge technical skill I ended up evaluating thoroughness and care ;)

PM_ME_YOUR_PUFZ 8y ago

Just stare at them until you know whether or not they're a good employee. You can tell from their face.

seanwilson 8y ago

I find this one short and useful: "so you know language X and Y, can you compare some features between them that you like and dislike?". If they get into deep comparisons about the tradeoffs between type safety, state, maintainability, multithreading, undefined behaviour, functional vs OO, libraries etc. that's a good indicator to me.

estomagordo 8y ago
+1 I've been asked this question in interviews on more than one occasion. I find it gives me a good opportunity to show off some knowledge, and with a good interviewer, it's a very good conversation starter for something that can end up being quite deep diving.

avitzurel 8y ago

1) Tell me a little bit about yourself. 2) Tell me about an interesting challenge you had in your current position and how you solved it.

JSeymourATL 8y ago

Let's use our time together well. I know you've read the position summary. Met with HR and members of our team here. What questions do you have for me? Behind the question-- I'm probing for curiosity and intellection. Also, what's important and top of mind to them.

itronitron 8y ago

Applicant side (and software focused), asking interviewers how new functionality is defined, developed, and deployed gives a lot of insight to how the team works within the organization.

gvand 8y ago

More important than trying to find a question of adamantine perfection and blinding luster is the knowledge that regardless of how many hours you have to interview a candidate, your opinion will still be partial, influenced by biases and to some degree wrong.

gvand 8y ago
More on topic, interviewee side: Describe me a typical day here. Expected answer contains: Overall process, roles distribution (who does what), project management style, issues triage, etc...

EnderMB 8y ago

In interviews I like to try and get a reaction, and the best way to do that is to sit down with a coffee or two (or three) and just chat about their experience over the last few years, in a judgement-free zone - dev to dev. In terms of an actual question, the only useful ones are ones that come from this chat, because it's where we have a back-and-forth conversation about tech decisions, what issues they had, what they had to overcome, and what decisions that particular dev made. My goal is to get a reaction, negative or positive, and dig into why that situation happened, what they did to overcome it, and what they'd do with hindsight. Not only does it make an interview more interesting for all involved, it tells you more about the candidate than a quiz would. You learn what they do under pressure, what pisses them off, and what experience they have for the kind of work you do, because you've been using your experience against theirs in conversation. Sometimes, to make it fair, I tell them (without dropping client names) issues I've had recently, and I see if any of the solutions were raised by the team, or are ultimately the solution we went for. I've had enough success with this approach that (when I did interviews) this was my approach: 1. A really basic take home test, probably in a language they don't use, just to see if they can write any code. Literally something that takes an hour to do. A favourite of mine was to get them to write an application in a given language to hit an endpoint, with a given code and their email address. When done correctly, an email is sent to our HR team, who then set up an interview. Based on our logs, you'd be surprised at how many candidates couldn't do this - by which I mean had clearly worked on the test, submitted something, and had failed to send a PUT request with the correct data. 2. A relaxed interview, like above, in neutral ground like a coffee shop. I use the walk from office to coffee shop to handle company questios, and the standard interview stuff,

kstenerud 8y ago
I would have failed your test. I'd have assumed that you didn't want your server inundated by requests, set up my own server to verify what my client was doing, and then submitted the code. Even if you specifically told me that I must actually hit your server, I'd still test on my own server, and then possibly forget to change the endpoint before submitting (no way to unit test that). Shit happens, and you lose someone on a technicality. Also, what if your server stops working? Now you're wasting people's time. Don't rely on magic; it eventually bites you in the ass.

basseq 8y ago

Hiring side. "Tell me more about what you did." Can be asked off almost any line of conversation. I'm seeking two outcomes: 1. Candidate's ability to quickly articulate a complex process, organization, problem, etc. to someone who has absolutely no understanding of it (i.e., me). 2. An understanding of their specific role and impact, as well as how the team worked together. You often have to coach people through the latter, as many candidates will default to the royal-we. The other one I'm playing with is, "Let's say you start working here, but six months later, you leave for another opportunity. Why would you leave?" I'm still figuring out the delivery on that one, but you get an interesting insight into what matters to the candidate.

ohithereyou 8y ago
The first question you propose is the first question I ask in every interview that I conduct, and I can count on my fingers the number of people who have given me a satisfactory answer to this question. It really colors my perception of your skills - whether you lied on your resume, whether you were dead weight on your team while they did all of the work, whether you were clueful about what was going on where you were working before, and so on. The only time that I have recommended someone be hired who was not able to answer this question was when they were under an NDA and were not able to talk about the work they had done. That candidate aced the practical side of the interview that I gave ("Here's a scenario at a high level using the skills you claim to have, what would you do and why?") and is the best worker I have ever recommended to hire.
vkou 8y ago
The honest answers to the second question aren't very nice, and have everything to do with the character of the persons employed at a firm. Why would I leave a firm in six months? Most likely because my boss is an asshole. Am I daft enough to get into that with an interviewer, who may be that boss? No.
- tilolebo 8y ago
  I'd rather not get a job that very probably do not fit me anyway, instead of finding out after having left that my new boss is an asshole. The overhead of starting again the job search from scratch, explaining why I want to quit after 6 months (for real this time) is much bigger.

sageabilly 8y ago

Applicant side: "What's the biggest struggle that you're currently working through?" coupled with "Tell me a bit about how you're working through that struggle." I find this tells me a lot about the person who's interviewing me and the current climate they're operating in. Asking follow-up questions helps a lot here too. It's a good way to find out if the interviewer (frequently the hiring manager) is struggling with an unmotivated team, overly-onerous bureaucracy, lack of funding, staff turnover, outdated software, etc.

paulcole 8y ago

When interviewing someone, "What will your next job be after this one and how can we help you get there?" My follow-up is usually something like, "Explain that job title/position to me. What does that person do? What skills do they have?"

pwaivers 8y ago

From the applicant side: Why are you hiring for this role? Is it a new position, or did someone leave it?

insomniacity 8y ago
Yes, always my number one applicant question. I even had one interview where that question basically lead to the interviewer explaining just how bad it was, and how unlikely it was that I actually wanted the job (and I had no reason to believe that was a trick or bluff). I certainly left feeling like I dodged a bullet.

neerkumar 8y ago

Ironically, when interviewers talk about how they interview, they pretty much all seem to believe they are very good in evaluating candidates. But when candidates talk about job interviews, they all seem to agree interviews are done badly. A rule I have is that everyone is good in something and bad in something else. So, if by the end of the interview I haven't found a topic where the candidate excels and a topic where sucks, the interview hasn't been effective.

ishjoh 8y ago
If you've found what they're good at, and it matches what your needs are, does the information on what they suck at help you decide between multiple candidates?

tmaly 8y ago

I like to ask about a project, could even be something from university days. I ask them to explain how they approached the problem, what were the challenges, how did they overcome them, and what was the final result of the project.

snowwrestler 8y ago

From the hiring side: "Tell me about a result or achievement you're very proud of. How did it come to be a goal for you, and what did you do to accomplish it?" (Crucial followup after they answer) "Now tell me about a mistake you made along the way and how you overcame it." Talking about real work provides insight into motivations and enthusiasms, and gives you permission to dive into details as they talk. It also helps show whether they have a healthy attitude about mistakes. This question can also provide some insight into team dynamics since very few big things are accomplished solo these days. From the applicant side: "Let's say I get hired and I do an amazing job. You're going to write my 6-month or annual review--what would you write?" Like Amazon's trick of writing the press release first, this helps hiring managers get specific about their expectations for the hire. It's amazing how often companies hire folks with only a vague sense of what success should look like.

darkhorn 8y ago

When they ask "Do you live with your family? What jobs your family members have? What are your hobbies? Where you were born? Are you married? How old are you?" then I know that I don't want to work there.

zer00eyz 8y ago
I dont mind the hobbies question at all. I enjoy asking it as an interviewer, with the follow up of asking about why it excites you, and if you have any good stories related to it. I'm curious about hearing from you about the things that excite you in some way. It helps set the tone for the rest of our conversation, and helps me to gauge your level of engagement with the questions and answers after that.
sns989 8y ago
not sure if you live/work in the United States, but the majority of those questions are illegal to ask.

kstenerud 8y ago

"Tell me about one or two projects you've done in the past that stand out for some reason. Maybe you learned a new technology over the course of it, got to interact with cool people, got shipped off to a different country, had weird clients, got a killer contact. Maybe the project was a total disaster. Doesn't matter what happened or how long ago, just something you found memorable." Get them talking about what things they get emotionally invested in. You learn a lot about someone this way. The trick to good interviewing is putting the candidate at ease. When someone's future is on the line, they behave very differently, and preform worse than they would in a regular work environment. Asking questions like "what have you done well" and "what mistakes have you made" will favor narcissists, because they will embellish, whereas those more on the neurotic side will take more blame, and dislike taking credit. So put them at ease. You'll get far more real answers that way.

andrewf 8y ago
> Get them talking about what things they get emotionally invested in. Yep. I ask something similar and explicitly tell the candidate I'm NOT necessarily after "tell me a time you delivered strong business impact", "tell me a time you added a new skill to your resume", or the other stereotypical things that make a good "interview story".

palidanx 8y ago

"Tell me about the last time you failed" It usually reveals character on how a person deals with tough situations.

athst 8y ago

On the applicant side, one of the more interesting questions I've been asked (as a product manager) was something to the effect of: "What is something you believe about product management that differs from conventional wisdom (or what the majority of other product managers believe?)" I thought it was a good question, because it gives the chance for the candidate to talk about how they think, and it gives them a license to speak a little more honestly than they ordinarily would say in a normal interview. It shows you how much thought the person has given to their profession and how they approach their job. If you were asking this during hiring, I think it should be done with care on your end, because I could see it easily being misinterpreted by the wrong team/interviewer. For example, if someone came in and said something like "Compared to others, I think A/B testing is a waste of time", it would behoove you to dive in a little bit more to understand why they think that. It shouldn't be disqualifying if you're a team that does a lot of A/B testing.

7402 8y ago

When interviewing someone for a more senior position, I would always ask, "What was your worst [work-related] mistake?" If they couldn't come up with anything, they were either lying or they just coasted through their previous jobs. If their answer was mostly about how it was really someone else's fault, then I'd consider them lacking in the kind of attitude I consider important in a co-worker.

mbrock 8y ago
I wonder if it’s okay for an interviewee to ask something like “What’s the worst thing about this company?”

OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago

what are the next lottery quick pick numbers

zer00eyz 8y ago

For me there are two critical questions I ask of a candidate. 1. I tell them the story about a massive screw up in my career (its funny) about how I thought I was getting fired about being frank about it... etc. I then ask "do you have a story about a major screw up in your career. The answer should say a lot. Dealing with crisis, dealing with mistakes, can you laugh about traumatic things (a great coping mechanism as a programer). I'm looking for insight into you in a professional setting. There have been occasions that this one question takes up the BULK of my allotted time and has on occasion gone over. 2. Can you read and talk about a piece of code GIVEN to you. The bulk of the battle for most devs is READING existing code and trying to figure out where to fit fixes in, or how to integrate what they are doing into a larger, standing system. The provided sample should have errors, room for improvement and plenty of ambiguity where the reader has to make assumptions or ask questions.

elmarschraml 8y ago

Generally, asking opinions rather than specific technical answers. Asking "Do you have experience with technology X" is useless - everybody knows that "yes" is the expected answer. Asking specific technical questions is random - they might or might not have come across that particular problem. Also, in practice the answer would simply be looked up, and you don't want to hire for memorization. Instead, ask things like"How did you find working with <technology X>? Can you compare it to <common alternative>, or <similar tech also listed on their resume>?". Or maybe "what worked really well with <technology X>? What pitfalls did you fall into? Anything for which you would, or would not, recommed it?" This kind of info is hard to fake, gives you good insight into their thought process and priorities, or just gets people talking about their projects more easily than a generic "tell me about your work on project y".

elmarschraml 8y ago

Having them do a code review (about 10-15 minutes), i.e. have a short (about 50-80 lines) piece of real code, that I have prepared with plenty of problem, messes, non-idiomatic code, or little ugly things. NOT a test as in "find the 10 hidden mistakes", but an invitation to talk about ways to improve the code. I make it clear to the candidate that it's not about the syntax, or any algorithm, but about quality. It's really good to see what kinds of things they care about (e.g. do they look into low-level performance, or more into things like variable naming and method length), how deep their knowledge of the language is (e.g. do they recognize non-idiomatic code, and suggest more modern approaches), if they are more of a high-level thinker or more detail-oriented etc. And of course, it nicely weeds out the (surprisingly high) number of people who cannot really program, without relying on any memorization of keywords. Plus, it's pretty realistic - nobody ever writes code on a whiteboard, but doing code reviews of code somebody else wrote is something that happens all the time. Most candidates find that task quite fun - and with really good candidates I quite frequently learn something new myself. I was planning to do a blog post about why and how I do that review - let me know if that would be of interest to you.

filoeleven 8y ago
I would love to be asked to do a code review during the interview process. What a great idea. I can imagine that another good thing about it is that it takes enough focus and is a familiar enough task that even if I’m in nervous-applicant mode, it will kick me over into acting like I’m already working there.

tboyd47 8y ago

I can answer on the hiring side when it comes to programming jobs. In a 100% honest world, you wouldn't even need to interview for technical positions; you could look at the person's resume and tell instantly whether or not they are capable of doing the job. But people lie a lot and over-embellish. So best questions to ask are about the items listed on their resume, because you find out who's telling the truth and who's not.

laurentl 8y ago

I have a generic question which I ask in all interviews, whether hiring for a dev, manager, project leader. It works wonders for me. For each position in the candidate's resume (or the last 3 if the resume is too long) I ask "what did you like about the job? what did you dislike? What made you happy to go to work and what made you drag your feet? It can be anything: boss, coworkers, how work was organized, office politics or lack thereof, visibility/interest of the job, commute time, offices... There are no wrong answers". Then I let them talk. When it's done right, I find this is a great way to understand what motivates them and to make sure their intrinsic motivation is aligned with the position they're applying for and the company context. For instance, for a developer I'll be interested in someone who likes fixing problems; for a project manager, being result-oriented is usually a good thing. Someone who likes having a clear set of steps to follow is probably not a good match for my management style. Another thing that I can check is how they coped with a situation they disliked. Did they try to address it, work around it, or did they give up/avoid it? I was first exposed to this approach as a candidate. I remember spending 90 minutes talking about all my previous positions, reflecting about what I'd liked and disliked for each of them, and coming out of there knowing more about myself than I did going in.