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Favorite Interview Questions

322 points by feifan 7y ago

virtuous_signal 7y ago
I kept scrolling, hoping to see "serialize a binary tree" or something I could answer. Disappointed.
- sanbor 7y ago
  That would be easy. Invert the binary tree it's the tricky one.
  - rvz 7y ago
    > Invert the binary tree it's the tricky one. This is too easy for everyone in this thread. Try this: Mathematically prove that the time complexity of the DFS algorithm is O(V+E).
crispyambulance 7y ago
These questions are not easily answered. It also takes significant skills to ask them, interpret the responses, and follow-up with other questions. I see them as really good starters for a behavioral-style interview. It's not easy to prepare for these. You "prepare" for them by doing your job well and being introspective about it as you're doing it. The problem is that not everyone easily indexes their job-experiences into neat, well-narrated vignettes that can be called up and summarized to an interviewer in real-time. It's hard stuff but it's better than other forms of interviewing.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  “ It also takes significant skills to ask them, interpret the responses, and follow-up with other questions.” Agreed. In interviews I have been in some interviewers asked this kind of question but couldn’t really do anything useful with the answers. It didn’t lead to a conversation.
- patthebunny 7y ago
  > It also takes significant skills to ask them, interpret the responses, and follow-up with other questions. Most people are shit at interviewing. Those that aren't still aren't qualified to psychoanalyze people. > The problem is that not everyone easily indexes their job-experiences into neat, well-narrated vignettes that can be called up and summarized to an interviewer in real-time. It's hard stuff but it's better than other forms of interviewing. > Tell me about a time you disagreed with your boss? We disagreed and then I quit because I felt like there was a pattern of him not listening. Oops wrong answer. These questions just get gamed. People tell dressed up versions of cherry picked stories. No one tells the story of why they finally had enough and quit. No one tells the story of a discussion turning heated because both sides got a bit too attached to their opinion. No one tells the story of just giving up and accepting that they won't win.
braythwayt 7y ago
One thing I'm divided about: A number of these questions select for people who are deeply introspective. I like both asking and answering these kinds of questions, in part because at 57 I have spent a lot of time working out who I am, what I value, what I'm good at but do not want to do any more (enterprise sales, for example), and what I ought to be better at but lack the discipline to improve. But also in part because I have that "meta" personality that not only sold things, but asked questions about how to get better at sales. And so on and so forth in software development. It seems like a slam-dunk to hire for this kind of person, but I have found that there are a lot of people who are really, really good at what they do without being obsessed with thinking about why they're good at what they do. I conjecture it's a little like hiring a great athlete. Some great athletes make lousy coaches or managers, because they care more about the game than about why people are good at the game and how to get better: They hire great coaches and follow those coaches, but coaching always takes a back seat to practising and playing. So... I love the tenor of these questions, but I am always wondering if asking a bunch of questions like these my force some false negatives from people who are good at what they do but aren't inclined to be introspective about it. (I realize that we can always argue that being introspective makes you better at what you do, but all-too-often that's a kind of selection bias: The kind of person who is interested in interview questions is the kind of person who is introspective, and is the kind of person who got to where they are being introspective, so they argue passionately that being introspective is necessary to be good. But maybe it's not the only way to be good.)
- scarface74 7y ago
  I’m 45, and I love these questions. I like these a lot more than being asked to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard style questions. It’s just as easy to prepare for and do well on soft skill questions as technical questions. At some level, dealing with people is just as mechanical as dealing with computers and just as easy to optimize.
modwest 7y ago
Some of the items on this list are pretty bad IMO if you put yourself in the shoes of the candidate. Some of the ones I think are Not Good Questions: > 3. For the last few companies you've been at, take me through: (i) When you left, why did you leave? (ii) When you joined the next one, why did you choose it? (The (ii) is the only non-yikes part) > 18. What's one part of your previous company's culture that you hope to bring to your next one? What one part do you hope to not find? > 26. If I were to go and speak to people who don't think very highly of you, what would they say? What they share in common is they're inviting the candidate into a negative position, where they must think negative thoughts about their past employers (who may also be their _current_ employer). Then, on the spot and extemporaneously, the candidate has to negotiate those negative feelings that were prompted by the interviewer to come up with an answer that translates those negative feelings into some kind of positive learning experience that the manager will be able to understand. The candidate also has to deal with the stress from having to do that negotiation, then diffuse that stress provoked by the question in a positive, open way so that it doesn't impact the rest of the interview. edit: What's really wild about #26 is the person who explained why they like the question made it about empathy. > "When I pose this question to candidates, I’m always looking to see how much empathy they have for the people who don’t like them,” says Otte... How is a candidate supposed to tap into their empathy when this question seems deliberately engineered to put candidates on the defensive? "Why don't people like you?" is, in my opinion, a really terrible interview question that shows a lack of empathy from the interviewer.
- braythwayt 7y ago
  I agree. This kind of question ("Tell me about your weaknesses," "Tell me one thing you think your (current|ex) manager could do better to manage you," &c.) often test for one of two behaviours: 1. Diplomacy and tact, and/or; 2. Ability to regurgitate a template answer you can find in any rudimentary book on handling behavioural interviews. It takes extreme skill to get a candid answer out of everyone, so it is easy to get gamed by the tactful people at the expense of people who don't read a book about how to ace the interview. But people who don't read books about interviews can be very competent at their actual jobs.
  - 7y ago
patthebunny 7y ago
> 7. What motivates you to work? Money. Fat stacks. The desire for food and shelter, which I obtain with said money. I'm not working for you because I just love your product so much, if that's what you mean. > What do you believe you can achieve with us personally or professionally that you can't anywhere else in the world? Tell me why I'm special? > It's September 5, 2020. What impact on the business have you made in the year since you’ve joined? This is only a fair question if you give me any idea whatsoever what I'll be working on. There are many companies where they won't do that. > Tell me about the best and worst bosses you’ve ever had, specifically, in your career. What was the difference? Asking people to crap on old bosses doesn't really seem like a great question. On the other hand, I'd like potential managers to answer this. > When was the last time you changed your mind about something important? define important? > What's the most important thing you've learned from a peer and how have you used that lesson in your day-to-day life? Guy taught me to open a beer with another beer once. > What’s one misconception your coworkers have about you? For some reason they also think I'm psychic. > Why shouldn't we hire you? Because you want people who answer inane questions. > What should our team be doing differently that could yield 10x improvement? Damn, this must be the best endeavor in human history if they only hire people who improve the company 10x. > Teach me something. ... do you have 2 beers? > How would you build a product for people who are looking for an apartment? I actually like this question a lot. > What are 10 ways to speed up Domino’s pizza delivery? What are they looking for here? > What can I tell you about working here? Everything awful please. > If you were in my shoes, what attributes would you look for in hiring for this role? It's both necessary and sufficient that the candidate wear blue shoes. > What have I not asked you that I should have? Maybe something about skills and experience, just for once?
- xanadohnt 7y ago
  I lol'd at "[...] they think I'm psychic". Nice one.
- falcongod082 7y ago
  I'm reasonably sure that you aced the test.
romaaeterna 7y ago
I hire a lot of people, and the difference between a good hire and a bad hire is hugely important. I've had some good results over time, and I like to think that my skill and process for interviewing has been helpful, in addition to a great deal of luck in having had the chance to talk with some amazing people. Looking over this list...it's bad. A lot of the questions are phone it in questions that you can pick off of Google. They are the same questions that get asked at beauty pageants or political debates. The great fail at interviewing is that if you go into without a plan or process, you will wind up simply hiring people based on whether or not they have a similar personality to you. This is generally severely non-optimal. Classes of useful questions to ask at interviews: Diagnostic questions. Does this question let you separate or rank order the candidates in some way that is deeply meaningful for the position? Experiential questions. Does this question allow the candidate to discuss areas of his work experience in an in-depth way that would not be gathered from his resume or other information. Human questions. Does this question give the candidate a chance to display a wide enough range of himself, socially, that you are comfortable that he can work well with other people? There are probably more. But the next phase is that you have to match up each of these questions to your available interviewers (assuming your running a team interview). It takes a technical or numbers-orientated person to ask the diagnostic question, an experienced person to ask the experiential question -- hopefully one who will not be looking for people who have had the same experiences as himself, and a socially astute observer to ask the human questions. And then in the hiring phase, you need to know how exactly each one of these questions can go wrong (there are some very standard ways for the question types, and generally standard ways for the individual interviewer), and then you have to interview your interviewers to make sure that none of the traps were stumbled into. And then use this to make determinations of not only who the top candidates are, but even more importantly, who the possibly undervalued candidates are.
- dominotw 7y ago
  > A lot of the questions are phone it in questions that you can pick off of Google. Do you have an example of an interview question that can't be picked off of google?
  - 7y ago
Ididntdothis 7y ago
Seems a lot of them are more for management level roles. During engineering interviews I rarely get very insightful questions.
lepetitpedre 7y ago
A list of the typical questions in my opinion. I was hoping that they would at least list: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"
bespoke_engnr 7y ago
I'm making a video series on DevOps interviews right now. I haven't seen the questions above much, but for non-technical 'warmup' questions I see these repeatedly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mIkRM7ytWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mIkRM7ytWc Things like "what's your favorite software environment," "what tech hobbies have you played around with," "what's the most complicated infrastructure you've ever had to work with," "talk about a difficult outage that you were a part of diagnosing and fixing." I guess I've chosen to stay technical, so I haven't seen a lot of the questions mentioned in the original article. They seem pretty like fairly easy behavioral questions to game, I'm not sure what the false positive vs. false negative ratio looks like there. Although I guess you can say that for any interview question.
gandutraveler 7y ago
One of the behavioral interview questions I really like is : "How do you identify junior vs mid level vs senior engineer?" Answer to this question helps in leveling the candidate.
more-entropy 7y ago
I don't understand all that screening bullshit -- what do you proud of, why so, why such? Somebody, tell them (HR people), it doesn't matter for a person who codes, does an architecture, ops your stuff, etc...
- drstewart 7y ago
  Yes it does. People aren't robots. You have to interact with your coworkers. Communication matters. Full stop.
deeg 7y ago
My problem with most of these questions is that they can be answered with bullshit and it can be very difficult to detect; you're optimizing for good bullshitters. These might be fine in conjunction with technical questions but I probably wouldn't work for a company that just asked these kinds of questions.
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  I mean, based on a fair bit of the news coming out of corporations lately, being adept at bullshitting is probably exactly what they want. Corporate reps talking to the public need to bullshit. Corporate bosses don't want to hear the truth, they want to be bullshitted. Corporate management want to know the problems aren't their fault, so they want to be bullshitted too. And then when the whole thing implodes and all the executives fly away on golden chutes to ruin other companies, they'll end up bullshitting people too about everything they "learned" spending billions of other people's dollars, most of which was in turn bullshit spun to them by their subordinates. I see a lot of room for good bullshitting to be a part of a resume.
- foobarian 7y ago
  It's worse, not answering with bullshit seems it could lead to negative results. If the real reason I would love working at company X is because the commute is 1/2 the other equal choices instead of making the world a better place, I won't admit it because 1) it makes me sound banal, and 2) in prisoners dilemma style I expect other candidates are bullshitting and I would be at a disadvantage.
  - sethammons 7y ago
    "I believe that work life balance is key for happy people and happy people deliver better results. It so happens that working here with this company would allow me to cut my commute, providing better work life balance, allowing me to provide even better results than I already do today."
colechristensen 7y ago
I hate nearly every one of those questions, with a few exceptions which are excellent. It comes down to this: I am not willing to be psychoanalyzed by my future coworkers. Most of those questions would test my ability to come up with diplomatic answers or straight up lies about the past (or my willingness to prepare those sorts of things). Some of them I am straight up unwilling to answer; no, I'm not going to dig deep and tell you how I feel about my personal flaws and the failings of the people around me. If you're not willing to hire someone without putting them through that and I'm not willing to work for anyone who wants that from candidates, we've both figured out something quite useful. Some people have protectable disabilities which those kinds of questions would very well filter out. Do they have to ask for reasonable accommodation that their job interview be about things directly related to the position?
- scarface74 7y ago
  After a certain point in your career diplomacy is important.
  - colechristensen 7y ago
    Absolutely, nothing wrong with diplomacy or decorum. There is something wrong with constant -- forgive the lack of decorum -- bullshit. That is a problem which I think is pervasive after "a certain point in your career". That is, bullshit masquerading as diplomacy.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      All of our casual interactions are based on bullshit and cultural expectations. For example, when someone asks how you are doing, you’re not expected to say anything meaningful in response. If anything about the interview was honest, when the interviewer asked you “why do you want this job?”, the answer would usually either be. - “I’m passionate about paying my mortgage” or - “The stingy assholes at my current company won’t pay me market rate and I want more money” But instead we all give some banal answer about “new challenges” and “being excited about the technology/company’s mission” even it is just another software as a service CRUD app.
neilobremski 7y ago
It may sound strange but the focus of my interview questions is to encourage the candidate to express an OPINION which I hope becomes a STORY. To that end I'll ask questions that at a glance seem to be objective through a lens of sound bites on "best practices" but are really subjective. What is good code? What is good data? (And bad, of course.) Skills can be learned quickly to produce A result but experience gained over time will have wrought something more interesting.
ergothus 7y ago
I was part of a team that revised the interview process at my last company (for positions like my own, not all hiring). One thing that came up was that most everyone's "favorite" questions helped reveal a strength if answered well, but didn't reveal much more than the lack of that particular area if they didn't answer it well. It was easy to go through an interview of such questions and end up with no real idea of the candidate was good or bad - they just hadn't happened to hit any of the particular strengths. Our goal was to make it so that - After an interview we had confidence in our evaluations - We had clear criteria to minimize impact of unconscious bias - Separate interviews would generate similar results for the same basic skill (this is subjective but still a goal) Some tactics we tried: - Present a coding question with a business case. This ended up being much the same: candidates familiar with the business area could show strength here as they asked the right questions and had a larger context of understanding, but people who didn't but produced acceptable code showed only that they couldn't take in an unfamiliar context in 5-10 minutes (an entirely reasonable "lack"). This was fine if we expected devs to be familiar with our business case, but often it caused familiarity/lack to cover for/highlight lack of coding comfort. - Present a list of topics to have someone pick from to discuss. The idea was that if we wanted them to know, say, ONE of a list of seven topics, we'd let them pick their strongest and discuss it, with the assumption that if they can show mastery of a concept they demonstrate the ability to handle (or learn) the others. In practice this never worked. People always went for the first topic (we tried scrambling the order - they went for whatever was first) even if they later showed they understood a different topic better. We didn't run this a huge number of times, but the first several tries didn't work out. I was very disappointed in this result, as I had high hopes for this approach. - Gave them "broken" code and asked them to fix it (testing to see if they could understand the intention of the code, as well as handle basic debugging). I really like the "understand the intention of the code" part of this, but the "debug and fix" turned out to be highly subject to whether they had run into this class of problem before, which returns to the original problem of "favorite questions". Ultimately I left before the effort was mostly successful. The changes WERE a dramatic improvement over the pre-effort interviews - if nothing else, all questions were vetted by a small group in advance to weed out the ones that were very misrepresentative or out of line for difficulty. However the key difficulties of getting a grasp on a nuanced set of skills in a short time period were never truly resolved. Some takeaways I walked away with (all subjective): - Start with a quick, easy coding question (when you get to coding questions). 5 mins on something trivial can give them a confidence boost that will save you more than 5 minutes later, both in getting them out of a mental block of recrimination and in them showing you their best self in a situation that otherwise encourages less than that. You can even tell the candidate this in advance - So long as it is quick they shouldn't judge, and it helps establish to them what to expect from YOU with a more involved question (such as how nit-picky you are with syntax, if you emote your opinion, etc) - Vet your questions in advance. You want four things: (1) Does doing well show a skill or skills we desire? (2) Does doing poorly on this question truly speak generically to their capability? (3) Do I have ways to provide hints or direction to someone blocked that doesn't render the question useless? (4) Do I have places to go, both more and less advanced, if this question is going easily/poorly? - I personally stress that I don't expect perfect answers. If (when) they screw something up, I say things like "Great, this gives us a chance to look at your debugging, which is something we do all the time" - this should be reassuring, and has the benefit of being completely true. Interviewing is still something we (humans) are learning how to do well, and even if I know how _I'd_ like to be interviewed, that isn't true for everyone.
Zenst 7y ago
Can't say I recall any single question that stood out over the years, but the worst one was - "£21,000 - that's a lot of money for somebody your age" HR person interview prior to interview with the technical boss and guru's, which went really well and for me did have a few good questions. "What do you know about postcodes and barcodes", which at the time was 7 formats of postcode and area I knew much about as also barcodes and why kyocera laser printers did well in many industries as they had the ability to print them built in unlike many other more expensive models. Then I also outgeeked the guru's and ended up showing them how to use hidden debug mode in dataease that they didn't even know about. Aced it, got offered £25,000 and turned it down due to the HR interview. More so took another job at a software company doing new things for less money. Was more focused on learning new stuff back then than the money. But sometimes it is worth it in the long run. But overall - may favorite questions would be ones in which you have to give a technical answer - tests I love. Though not keen on psycometric ones as they always mess up with people on the autistic spectrum and if you able to be proactive and equally reactive when needed - they get way confused. Spent 5 hours in an interview going around in circles over that one, nightmare for all I suspect in the end and didn't help that I was more suited for the job they had offered out the previous week to the person doing the interview who I would be working for. That I would put down as a messy interview and did nobody any favours as ended up sticking my head in one pidgeon hole and my rear in another when they were looking for somebody who fitted in just one of those. Also had tests which you could draw parralel lines across the sheet as the answers patterned out that way and turned out, that was how they marked them and got upset that I spotted that pattern based upon the right answers, so they voided my whole result even though I'd done it honestly. Luckly techinical person in interview spoke up and said that is the type of person I want, somebody who can see the patterns and swung it. But with everything, no single cookie cutter question you can ask for every area, but plenty you can ask that can go down the rabbit hole. With that, everybody will have a favorite question and that favorite question is bound to be somebody elses worst question. Gets down to experience and as individuals - we will all have different perspectives upon bad and worst questions going by how we handled those questions in the context of that role.
lazyant 7y ago
These questions and similar ones can be prepared, there's nothing really new here. What's terrifying is the quick interpretation of the answers and how sure they are, this reads like a horoscope: 8. Looking back on the last five years of your career, what’s the highlight? “For example, if they tell me about a personal accomplishment, then I know personal career development is a huge area of focus. If they tell me about the accomplishment of a direct report or the team, then I know they care about developing people,” says Vaughan. “If they tell me about a company feat, then I know that they tie their own success to the company's success — which is a great mentality for weathering the early stages of a startup.”
paulkon 7y ago
"Product lead of monetization at Slack" ...hmm
JustSomeNobody 7y ago
> What motivates you to work? Interesting projects. Money. Interesting projects for myself. I like a good challenge and something I find interesting. Money, not because I need more, but because I know that if we're successful, we'll be making money and the E team will take theirs so I want mine. I'm tired of the "Oh, we're a family so take one for the team" BS when things are flat, but then not hearing, "Because we're a family and we did great, here's yours!"
thom 7y ago
If someone is this high-maintenance as an interviewer, they'll be unbearable as a manager, and I do not think I'd last a whole interview bothering to pretend that this was a normal human interaction.
whorleater 7y ago
I would rather have you whiteboard me 20x then answer these questions
reaperducer 7y ago
Once place I worked, after week-long reviews of your work, and a day-long interview, the final question in the process was, "Is golf a sport?" Answer incorrectly, and your resume immediately went in the round file.
- msla 7y ago
  > Once place I worked, after week-long reviews of your work, and a day-long interview, the final question in the process was, "Is golf a sport?" Of course it is. It has sponsorships. Sponsorships make something a sport. Well-known fact.
herbturbo 7y ago
Useful read. I now have a few additions to the list of places I'd never bother applying to.
jkingsbery 7y ago
Interviews are two-way conversations: a lot of what candidates do (or should be doing) is finding out about the team/company etc., since anything that research would show based on press releases, etc., is superficial. Questions like "What do you believe you can achieve with us personally or professionally that you can't anywhere else in the world?" make very little sense - even if I've read everything there is to read, I still know very little about your company, so there's no way I could answer a question like this. This, however, is excellent advice: "It is amazing how many candidates won’t premeditate before diving into interview questions. Those who take the time to stop, think it through and have a few crystal clear points are amongst the best people I’ve ever worked with." I interview quite a bit at my current company, and it is amazing how few people stop to think before they answer questions.
ahartmetz 7y ago
I'm a freelance developer, so I get many interviews for possible engagements. My favorite recent question was (badly paraphrased): Some developers overdesign, i.e. they design for possible future features. Some developers underdesign, i.e. they solve the current problem without too much design at all. Where are you on that spectrum? My answer: Hard to really answer this neutrally about yourself, but I try not to prevent future changes by making things overly clever or specific. Another one was: The project has a non-negotiable deadline and feature list and it looks like it's going to be late. What do you do? My answer: overtime doesn't work for highly intellectual work, so I'll see which features have the worst effort to usefulness ratio and cut them. They didn't like that. Good riddance to that project.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
  > The project has a non-negotiable deadline and feature list and it looks like it's going to be late. What do you do? Answer: Polish my resume, and update my LinkedIn profile.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    You forgot about collecting all the paperwork about unreasonable demands of they decide to blame or smear you in some way. Scapegoats are a thing. This can be essential if you give a particularly evil company that tries to hold you hostage for a rehire.
- shantly 7y ago
  > Another one was: The project has a non-negotiable deadline and feature list and it looks like it's going to be late. What do you do? If both the deadline and feature list are actually non-negotiable and I'm quite certain it's gonna be late I'd advise them to halt it immediately to cut their losses, I guess. I don't know what else would be a sane response. Of course "non-negotiable" when it comes to feature lists and deadlines is usually grade-A horseshit so they don't actually mean it. Hell "deadline" is more often than not an exaggeration itself—you're not gonna drop the work in the trash if it's not delivered by 12:01AM on such-and-such day. TL;DR I'd assume "non-negotiable" was a lie because it basically always is. Bet they'd love that answer. [EDIT] Alternate answer: fortunately I'm in possession of a clock that changes reality when something's non-negotiable, so I'd just let it know what was up and it'd go ahead and make every hour twice as long for me.
bspates 7y ago
I feel like so many of these questions require the applicant's identity and sense of self to be completely rolled up in their career. Even the question about passion for hobbies is just a proxy for understanding if the candidate will put an unhealthy amount of their life into their work. We're more than what we produce!
crsv 7y ago
Judging from this thread a pretty straightforward approach would be to start by getting their hackernews name, searching for them in this thread, and if they’re found promptly ending the interview. This community is incredibly entitled and insufferable when discussing the hiring process.
- drstewart 7y ago
  I couldn't agree more. Everyone trying to one-up each other over how banal and offensive they find the questions. I'd say if these questions only serve to filter out people like this, they've done their job.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    And yet most have no problem with getting asked leetCode questions to work on yet another software as a service CRUD app.
kreck 7y ago
This is basically just the contents of the “Top Grading” interview questionnaire [1] spiced up with some unnecessary prose. [1] http://www.jamesgwee.com/uploaded/file/Topgrading.pdf http://www.jamesgwee.com/uploaded/file/Topgrading.pdf
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cryptozeus 7y ago
Many of these questions are coming from product managers and design managers, I think they all make sense. Some of these roles do require storytelling and awkward meta discussions. How you answer and not what you answer is being tested here. May not be the best questions for engineers though.
graycat 7y ago
Nutty questions: First, most of the questions have hidden goals or obscure and indirect paths to unclear information. The goals and information obtained this way are clearly highly unreliable. To believe that such obscure and indirect searching can yield the desired goals or information needs a questioner who is just delusional. Second, a lot of the questions have to do with efforts by the candidate to learn things. Okay: Nearly all of us want to learn things to get ahead in our careers and lives. E.g., that's the main reason people expend the time, money, and effort to go to college. So, there really are some good ways to know, but the interview questions are really poor ways. In my experience, here is some GOOD evidence: (1) Learning. In my career, I was doing applied math and computing for US national security. So, when I encountered what seemed to be important topics, I got relevant books and papers and learned. (A) I accumulated a professional library that filled three bookcases, each 1' deep, 3' wide, and 6' high on math and computing. (B) From this library, I studied carefully in whole or major parts of dozens of the books and had the rest available for more. (C) I set aside my career and went for a focused Ph.D. and got it. Point: I was trying REALLY hard to learn; indeed, I went for one of the best paths, a focused Ph.D. The interview questions never mentioned any such effort, and what the questions did mention were far inferior to a Ph.D. Bummer. (2) Initiative. (A) From what I had done before entering the Ph.D. program, I had already picked my dissertation research problem and made good progress on it. For the five Ph.D. qualifying exams, I did the best in the class on four of them and for three of them just used what I had already taught myself before entering the Ph.D. program. I did the rest of my research for my Ph.D. independently in my first summer. I did the final software development, writing, and typing independent of any advisors. That was a LOT of "initiative". I did give a seminar on my work, and some other students then did related Ph.D. dissertations. So, the results of my "initiative" were seen as high quality stuff. (B) At one point, I saw a problem, got a course to address the problem, not necessarily solve it, but in two weeks found a solid solution with a nice, new theorem. The work was publishable, and later I did publish it in the respected journal JOTA. So, that was some nice "initiative" with results that were fast and good. (C) Before my Ph.D. I was in a software house bidding on a development project for the Navy. At one point, some of the material from the Navy didn't make sense. In five days, independently I educated myself on power spectral estimation (mostly from Blackman and Tukey), wrote and ran illustrative software, and on the last evening called in the relevant Navy engineer, gave him a fast tutorial on the power spectral estimation he wanted, and showed him the illustrative software I'd written and the results showing how with more data the estimates converged to the right answer. As a result our software house got "sole source" on the development contract. That was fast, successful "initiative". I've got a long list of such. Bottom line it: In a job, from an employee, people HATE such initiative. Similarly for learning, knowing, and applying stuff. Such learning and initiative are for self-funded, sole-solo founder CEOs. By the way, VCs totally ignore any such learning or initiative.
newsbinator 7y ago
> What do you believe you can achieve with us personally or professionally that you can't anywhere else in the world? Not every company is SpaceX or even an industry unicorn. It's possible to do great work at a great company without it being the sole place in the world where things can happen.
d--b 7y ago
oh god. The difficult part of the interview is not rolling your eyes when the guy asks you “teach me something”.
viach 7y ago
This looks to me like the sort of questions probably asked on the stock image database photos with tags "job interview". Good looking people in suits sit around the table and looking on each other and none of them really gives a clue what are they doing.
Myrmornis 7y ago
Do these people not need to ask questions aimed at determining how skillfully the candidates can do their job? Why are all these questions fluff?
hozefaa 7y ago
shouldn't it be more output-oriented?
siempreb 7y ago
Lets try to be a little more honest. > 1. What do you want to do differently in your next role? Earn more money > 2. Imagine yourself in three years. What do you hope will be different about you then compared to now? Being more wealthy > 3. For the last few companies you've been at, take me through: (i) When you left, why did you leave? (ii) When you joined the next one, why did you choose it? 1. Because the job sucked 2. Because I need to pay the bills > 4. Among the people you've worked with, who do you admire and why? The CEO of company X, because she managed to free herself from this life sucking process > 5. Tell me about a time you took unexpected initiative. Follow-up: Can you tell me about another? I left several jobs because the code base and the colleagues sucked too much > 7. What motivates you to work? The need for money > 8. Looking back on the last five years of your career, what’s the highlight? Every time again, the holiday > 9. What are you really good at, but never want to do anymore? Being a brown noser > 10. What’s the difference between someone who’s great in your role versus someone who’s outstanding? Even better ass licking > 11. How did you prepare for this interview? I didn't prepare, I just try to be honest > 12. What do you believe you can achieve with us personally or professionally that you can't anywhere else in the world? Hopefully I can up my salary for the next gig > 13. What are the three most important characteristics of this function? How would you stack rank yourself from strongest to least developed among these traits? It is not sane to rank myself against unknown factors > 14. Tell me about your ideal next role. What characteristics does it have from a responsibility, team, and company culture perspective? What characteristics does it not have? My ideal next role is developing software for my own product. The main characteristic would be: - no annoying managers to manipulate me - no forced 'happy team' - no agile or scrum - no spaghetti codebase - no code reviews - no managers and self made 'important' people taking a cut of my produce - no need to lick ass of colleagues to survive the office politics - no traffic jams, no commuting - a healthier and happier life in general At this point I expect to be rejected from the interview, and wish them all the best.
- ryloric 7y ago
  I'd hire you over a candidate who gives the 'ideal' answers given in the article. Atleast I'd get an honest no BS assessments about work without having to coax it out.
cjfd 7y ago
Tell me about the hardest project you have had. Give me examples about both over-engineering and under-engineering. If either or both of the examples are on the extreme side ask them for less extreme examples until you get an idea where the boundary between the two things is for them.
ryloric 7y ago
Might be an unpopular opinion, but I think this is BS. Do people really questions like this in interviews or are these "smart folk" trying to look good in an article that can be shared on Linkedin and wherever else? I've only interviewed a few times in my life, and apart from smalltalk at the beginning they were mostly about judging how I think and to a lesser extent what my knowledge level is for the position.

322 points by feifan 7y ago

virtuous_signal 7y ago

I kept scrolling, hoping to see "serialize a binary tree" or something I could answer. Disappointed.

sanbor 7y ago
That would be easy. Invert the binary tree it's the tricky one.
- rvz 7y ago
  > Invert the binary tree it's the tricky one. This is too easy for everyone in this thread. Try this: Mathematically prove that the time complexity of the DFS algorithm is O(V+E).

crispyambulance 7y ago

These questions are not easily answered. It also takes significant skills to ask them, interpret the responses, and follow-up with other questions. I see them as really good starters for a behavioral-style interview. It's not easy to prepare for these. You "prepare" for them by doing your job well and being introspective about it as you're doing it. The problem is that not everyone easily indexes their job-experiences into neat, well-narrated vignettes that can be called up and summarized to an interviewer in real-time. It's hard stuff but it's better than other forms of interviewing.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
“ It also takes significant skills to ask them, interpret the responses, and follow-up with other questions.” Agreed. In interviews I have been in some interviewers asked this kind of question but couldn’t really do anything useful with the answers. It didn’t lead to a conversation.
patthebunny 7y ago
> It also takes significant skills to ask them, interpret the responses, and follow-up with other questions. Most people are shit at interviewing. Those that aren't still aren't qualified to psychoanalyze people. > The problem is that not everyone easily indexes their job-experiences into neat, well-narrated vignettes that can be called up and summarized to an interviewer in real-time. It's hard stuff but it's better than other forms of interviewing. > Tell me about a time you disagreed with your boss? We disagreed and then I quit because I felt like there was a pattern of him not listening. Oops wrong answer. These questions just get gamed. People tell dressed up versions of cherry picked stories. No one tells the story of why they finally had enough and quit. No one tells the story of a discussion turning heated because both sides got a bit too attached to their opinion. No one tells the story of just giving up and accepting that they won't win.

braythwayt 7y ago

One thing I'm divided about: A number of these questions select for people who are deeply introspective. I like both asking and answering these kinds of questions, in part because at 57 I have spent a lot of time working out who I am, what I value, what I'm good at but do not want to do any more (enterprise sales, for example), and what I ought to be better at but lack the discipline to improve. But also in part because I have that "meta" personality that not only sold things, but asked questions about how to get better at sales. And so on and so forth in software development. It seems like a slam-dunk to hire for this kind of person, but I have found that there are a lot of people who are really, really good at what they do without being obsessed with thinking about why they're good at what they do. I conjecture it's a little like hiring a great athlete. Some great athletes make lousy coaches or managers, because they care more about the game than about why people are good at the game and how to get better: They hire great coaches and follow those coaches, but coaching always takes a back seat to practising and playing. So... I love the tenor of these questions, but I am always wondering if asking a bunch of questions like these my force some false negatives from people who are good at what they do but aren't inclined to be introspective about it. (I realize that we can always argue that being introspective makes you better at what you do, but all-too-often that's a kind of selection bias: The kind of person who is interested in interview questions is the kind of person who is introspective, and is the kind of person who got to where they are being introspective, so they argue passionately that being introspective is necessary to be good. But maybe it's not the only way to be good.)

scarface74 7y ago
I’m 45, and I love these questions. I like these a lot more than being asked to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard style questions. It’s just as easy to prepare for and do well on soft skill questions as technical questions. At some level, dealing with people is just as mechanical as dealing with computers and just as easy to optimize.

modwest 7y ago

Some of the items on this list are pretty bad IMO if you put yourself in the shoes of the candidate. Some of the ones I think are Not Good Questions: > 3. For the last few companies you've been at, take me through: (i) When you left, why did you leave? (ii) When you joined the next one, why did you choose it? (The (ii) is the only non-yikes part) > 18. What's one part of your previous company's culture that you hope to bring to your next one? What one part do you hope to not find? > 26. If I were to go and speak to people who don't think very highly of you, what would they say? What they share in common is they're inviting the candidate into a negative position, where they must think negative thoughts about their past employers (who may also be their _current_ employer). Then, on the spot and extemporaneously, the candidate has to negotiate those negative feelings that were prompted by the interviewer to come up with an answer that translates those negative feelings into some kind of positive learning experience that the manager will be able to understand. The candidate also has to deal with the stress from having to do that negotiation, then diffuse that stress provoked by the question in a positive, open way so that it doesn't impact the rest of the interview. edit: What's really wild about #26 is the person who explained why they like the question made it about empathy. > "When I pose this question to candidates, I’m always looking to see how much empathy they have for the people who don’t like them,” says Otte... How is a candidate supposed to tap into their empathy when this question seems deliberately engineered to put candidates on the defensive? "Why don't people like you?" is, in my opinion, a really terrible interview question that shows a lack of empathy from the interviewer.

braythwayt 7y ago
I agree. This kind of question ("Tell me about your weaknesses," "Tell me one thing you think your (current|ex) manager could do better to manage you," &c.) often test for one of two behaviours: 1. Diplomacy and tact, and/or; 2. Ability to regurgitate a template answer you can find in any rudimentary book on handling behavioural interviews. It takes extreme skill to get a candid answer out of everyone, so it is easy to get gamed by the tactful people at the expense of people who don't read a book about how to ace the interview. But people who don't read books about interviews can be very competent at their actual jobs.
- 7y ago

patthebunny 7y ago

> 7. What motivates you to work? Money. Fat stacks. The desire for food and shelter, which I obtain with said money. I'm not working for you because I just love your product so much, if that's what you mean. > What do you believe you can achieve with us personally or professionally that you can't anywhere else in the world? Tell me why I'm special? > It's September 5, 2020. What impact on the business have you made in the year since you’ve joined? This is only a fair question if you give me any idea whatsoever what I'll be working on. There are many companies where they won't do that. > Tell me about the best and worst bosses you’ve ever had, specifically, in your career. What was the difference? Asking people to crap on old bosses doesn't really seem like a great question. On the other hand, I'd like potential managers to answer this. > When was the last time you changed your mind about something important? define important? > What's the most important thing you've learned from a peer and how have you used that lesson in your day-to-day life? Guy taught me to open a beer with another beer once. > What’s one misconception your coworkers have about you? For some reason they also think I'm psychic. > Why shouldn't we hire you? Because you want people who answer inane questions. > What should our team be doing differently that could yield 10x improvement? Damn, this must be the best endeavor in human history if they only hire people who improve the company 10x. > Teach me something. ... do you have 2 beers? > How would you build a product for people who are looking for an apartment? I actually like this question a lot. > What are 10 ways to speed up Domino’s pizza delivery? What are they looking for here? > What can I tell you about working here? Everything awful please. > If you were in my shoes, what attributes would you look for in hiring for this role? It's both necessary and sufficient that the candidate wear blue shoes. > What have I not asked you that I should have? Maybe something about skills and experience, just for once?

xanadohnt 7y ago
I lol'd at "[...] they think I'm psychic". Nice one.
falcongod082 7y ago
I'm reasonably sure that you aced the test.

romaaeterna 7y ago

I hire a lot of people, and the difference between a good hire and a bad hire is hugely important. I've had some good results over time, and I like to think that my skill and process for interviewing has been helpful, in addition to a great deal of luck in having had the chance to talk with some amazing people. Looking over this list...it's bad. A lot of the questions are phone it in questions that you can pick off of Google. They are the same questions that get asked at beauty pageants or political debates. The great fail at interviewing is that if you go into without a plan or process, you will wind up simply hiring people based on whether or not they have a similar personality to you. This is generally severely non-optimal. Classes of useful questions to ask at interviews: Diagnostic questions. Does this question let you separate or rank order the candidates in some way that is deeply meaningful for the position? Experiential questions. Does this question allow the candidate to discuss areas of his work experience in an in-depth way that would not be gathered from his resume or other information. Human questions. Does this question give the candidate a chance to display a wide enough range of himself, socially, that you are comfortable that he can work well with other people? There are probably more. But the next phase is that you have to match up each of these questions to your available interviewers (assuming your running a team interview). It takes a technical or numbers-orientated person to ask the diagnostic question, an experienced person to ask the experiential question -- hopefully one who will not be looking for people who have had the same experiences as himself, and a socially astute observer to ask the human questions. And then in the hiring phase, you need to know how exactly each one of these questions can go wrong (there are some very standard ways for the question types, and generally standard ways for the individual interviewer), and then you have to interview your interviewers to make sure that none of the traps were stumbled into. And then use this to make determinations of not only who the top candidates are, but even more importantly, who the possibly undervalued candidates are.

dominotw 7y ago
> A lot of the questions are phone it in questions that you can pick off of Google. Do you have an example of an interview question that can't be picked off of google?
- 7y ago

Ididntdothis 7y ago

Seems a lot of them are more for management level roles. During engineering interviews I rarely get very insightful questions.

lepetitpedre 7y ago

A list of the typical questions in my opinion. I was hoping that they would at least list: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?"

bespoke_engnr 7y ago

I'm making a video series on DevOps interviews right now. I haven't seen the questions above much, but for non-technical 'warmup' questions I see these repeatedly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mIkRM7ytWc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mIkRM7ytWc Things like "what's your favorite software environment," "what tech hobbies have you played around with," "what's the most complicated infrastructure you've ever had to work with," "talk about a difficult outage that you were a part of diagnosing and fixing." I guess I've chosen to stay technical, so I haven't seen a lot of the questions mentioned in the original article. They seem pretty like fairly easy behavioral questions to game, I'm not sure what the false positive vs. false negative ratio looks like there. Although I guess you can say that for any interview question.

gandutraveler 7y ago

One of the behavioral interview questions I really like is : "How do you identify junior vs mid level vs senior engineer?" Answer to this question helps in leveling the candidate.

more-entropy 7y ago

I don't understand all that screening bullshit -- what do you proud of, why so, why such? Somebody, tell them (HR people), it doesn't matter for a person who codes, does an architecture, ops your stuff, etc...

drstewart 7y ago
Yes it does. People aren't robots. You have to interact with your coworkers. Communication matters. Full stop.

deeg 7y ago

My problem with most of these questions is that they can be answered with bullshit and it can be very difficult to detect; you're optimizing for good bullshitters. These might be fine in conjunction with technical questions but I probably wouldn't work for a company that just asked these kinds of questions.

FussyZeus 7y ago
I mean, based on a fair bit of the news coming out of corporations lately, being adept at bullshitting is probably exactly what they want. Corporate reps talking to the public need to bullshit. Corporate bosses don't want to hear the truth, they want to be bullshitted. Corporate management want to know the problems aren't their fault, so they want to be bullshitted too. And then when the whole thing implodes and all the executives fly away on golden chutes to ruin other companies, they'll end up bullshitting people too about everything they "learned" spending billions of other people's dollars, most of which was in turn bullshit spun to them by their subordinates. I see a lot of room for good bullshitting to be a part of a resume.
foobarian 7y ago
It's worse, not answering with bullshit seems it could lead to negative results. If the real reason I would love working at company X is because the commute is 1/2 the other equal choices instead of making the world a better place, I won't admit it because 1) it makes me sound banal, and 2) in prisoners dilemma style I expect other candidates are bullshitting and I would be at a disadvantage.
- sethammons 7y ago
  "I believe that work life balance is key for happy people and happy people deliver better results. It so happens that working here with this company would allow me to cut my commute, providing better work life balance, allowing me to provide even better results than I already do today."

colechristensen 7y ago

I hate nearly every one of those questions, with a few exceptions which are excellent. It comes down to this: I am not willing to be psychoanalyzed by my future coworkers. Most of those questions would test my ability to come up with diplomatic answers or straight up lies about the past (or my willingness to prepare those sorts of things). Some of them I am straight up unwilling to answer; no, I'm not going to dig deep and tell you how I feel about my personal flaws and the failings of the people around me. If you're not willing to hire someone without putting them through that and I'm not willing to work for anyone who wants that from candidates, we've both figured out something quite useful. Some people have protectable disabilities which those kinds of questions would very well filter out. Do they have to ask for reasonable accommodation that their job interview be about things directly related to the position?

scarface74 7y ago
After a certain point in your career diplomacy is important.
- colechristensen 7y ago
  Absolutely, nothing wrong with diplomacy or decorum. There is something wrong with constant -- forgive the lack of decorum -- bullshit. That is a problem which I think is pervasive after "a certain point in your career". That is, bullshit masquerading as diplomacy.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    All of our casual interactions are based on bullshit and cultural expectations. For example, when someone asks how you are doing, you’re not expected to say anything meaningful in response. If anything about the interview was honest, when the interviewer asked you “why do you want this job?”, the answer would usually either be. - “I’m passionate about paying my mortgage” or - “The stingy assholes at my current company won’t pay me market rate and I want more money” But instead we all give some banal answer about “new challenges” and “being excited about the technology/company’s mission” even it is just another software as a service CRUD app.

neilobremski 7y ago

It may sound strange but the focus of my interview questions is to encourage the candidate to express an OPINION which I hope becomes a STORY. To that end I'll ask questions that at a glance seem to be objective through a lens of sound bites on "best practices" but are really subjective. What is good code? What is good data? (And bad, of course.) Skills can be learned quickly to produce A result but experience gained over time will have wrought something more interesting.

ergothus 7y ago

I was part of a team that revised the interview process at my last company (for positions like my own, not all hiring). One thing that came up was that most everyone's "favorite" questions helped reveal a strength if answered well, but didn't reveal much more than the lack of that particular area if they didn't answer it well. It was easy to go through an interview of such questions and end up with no real idea of the candidate was good or bad - they just hadn't happened to hit any of the particular strengths. Our goal was to make it so that - After an interview we had confidence in our evaluations - We had clear criteria to minimize impact of unconscious bias - Separate interviews would generate similar results for the same basic skill (this is subjective but still a goal) Some tactics we tried: - Present a coding question with a business case. This ended up being much the same: candidates familiar with the business area could show strength here as they asked the right questions and had a larger context of understanding, but people who didn't but produced acceptable code showed only that they couldn't take in an unfamiliar context in 5-10 minutes (an entirely reasonable "lack"). This was fine if we expected devs to be familiar with our business case, but often it caused familiarity/lack to cover for/highlight lack of coding comfort. - Present a list of topics to have someone pick from to discuss. The idea was that if we wanted them to know, say, ONE of a list of seven topics, we'd let them pick their strongest and discuss it, with the assumption that if they can show mastery of a concept they demonstrate the ability to handle (or learn) the others. In practice this never worked. People always went for the first topic (we tried scrambling the order - they went for whatever was first) even if they later showed they understood a different topic better. We didn't run this a huge number of times, but the first several tries didn't work out. I was very disappointed in this result, as I had high hopes for this approach. - Gave them "broken" code and asked them to fix it (testing to see if they could understand the intention of the code, as well as handle basic debugging). I really like the "understand the intention of the code" part of this, but the "debug and fix" turned out to be highly subject to whether they had run into this class of problem before, which returns to the original problem of "favorite questions". Ultimately I left before the effort was mostly successful. The changes WERE a dramatic improvement over the pre-effort interviews - if nothing else, all questions were vetted by a small group in advance to weed out the ones that were very misrepresentative or out of line for difficulty. However the key difficulties of getting a grasp on a nuanced set of skills in a short time period were never truly resolved. Some takeaways I walked away with (all subjective): - Start with a quick, easy coding question (when you get to coding questions). 5 mins on something trivial can give them a confidence boost that will save you more than 5 minutes later, both in getting them out of a mental block of recrimination and in them showing you their best self in a situation that otherwise encourages less than that. You can even tell the candidate this in advance - So long as it is quick they shouldn't judge, and it helps establish to them what to expect from YOU with a more involved question (such as how nit-picky you are with syntax, if you emote your opinion, etc) - Vet your questions in advance. You want four things: (1) Does doing well show a skill or skills we desire? (2) Does doing poorly on this question truly speak generically to their capability? (3) Do I have ways to provide hints or direction to someone blocked that doesn't render the question useless? (4) Do I have places to go, both more and less advanced, if this question is going easily/poorly? - I personally stress that I don't expect perfect answers. If (when) they screw something up, I say things like "Great, this gives us a chance to look at your debugging, which is something we do all the time" - this should be reassuring, and has the benefit of being completely true. Interviewing is still something we (humans) are learning how to do well, and even if I know how _I'd_ like to be interviewed, that isn't true for everyone.

Zenst 7y ago

Can't say I recall any single question that stood out over the years, but the worst one was - "£21,000 - that's a lot of money for somebody your age" HR person interview prior to interview with the technical boss and guru's, which went really well and for me did have a few good questions. "What do you know about postcodes and barcodes", which at the time was 7 formats of postcode and area I knew much about as also barcodes and why kyocera laser printers did well in many industries as they had the ability to print them built in unlike many other more expensive models. Then I also outgeeked the guru's and ended up showing them how to use hidden debug mode in dataease that they didn't even know about. Aced it, got offered £25,000 and turned it down due to the HR interview. More so took another job at a software company doing new things for less money. Was more focused on learning new stuff back then than the money. But sometimes it is worth it in the long run. But overall - may favorite questions would be ones in which you have to give a technical answer - tests I love. Though not keen on psycometric ones as they always mess up with people on the autistic spectrum and if you able to be proactive and equally reactive when needed - they get way confused. Spent 5 hours in an interview going around in circles over that one, nightmare for all I suspect in the end and didn't help that I was more suited for the job they had offered out the previous week to the person doing the interview who I would be working for. That I would put down as a messy interview and did nobody any favours as ended up sticking my head in one pidgeon hole and my rear in another when they were looking for somebody who fitted in just one of those. Also had tests which you could draw parralel lines across the sheet as the answers patterned out that way and turned out, that was how they marked them and got upset that I spotted that pattern based upon the right answers, so they voided my whole result even though I'd done it honestly. Luckly techinical person in interview spoke up and said that is the type of person I want, somebody who can see the patterns and swung it. But with everything, no single cookie cutter question you can ask for every area, but plenty you can ask that can go down the rabbit hole. With that, everybody will have a favorite question and that favorite question is bound to be somebody elses worst question. Gets down to experience and as individuals - we will all have different perspectives upon bad and worst questions going by how we handled those questions in the context of that role.

lazyant 7y ago

These questions and similar ones can be prepared, there's nothing really new here. What's terrifying is the quick interpretation of the answers and how sure they are, this reads like a horoscope: 8. Looking back on the last five years of your career, what’s the highlight? “For example, if they tell me about a personal accomplishment, then I know personal career development is a huge area of focus. If they tell me about the accomplishment of a direct report or the team, then I know they care about developing people,” says Vaughan. “If they tell me about a company feat, then I know that they tie their own success to the company's success — which is a great mentality for weathering the early stages of a startup.”

paulkon 7y ago

"Product lead of monetization at Slack" ...hmm

JustSomeNobody 7y ago

> What motivates you to work? Interesting projects. Money. Interesting projects for myself. I like a good challenge and something I find interesting. Money, not because I need more, but because I know that if we're successful, we'll be making money and the E team will take theirs so I want mine. I'm tired of the "Oh, we're a family so take one for the team" BS when things are flat, but then not hearing, "Because we're a family and we did great, here's yours!"

thom 7y ago

If someone is this high-maintenance as an interviewer, they'll be unbearable as a manager, and I do not think I'd last a whole interview bothering to pretend that this was a normal human interaction.

whorleater 7y ago

I would rather have you whiteboard me 20x then answer these questions

reaperducer 7y ago

Once place I worked, after week-long reviews of your work, and a day-long interview, the final question in the process was, "Is golf a sport?" Answer incorrectly, and your resume immediately went in the round file.

msla 7y ago
> Once place I worked, after week-long reviews of your work, and a day-long interview, the final question in the process was, "Is golf a sport?" Of course it is. It has sponsorships. Sponsorships make something a sport. Well-known fact.

herbturbo 7y ago

Useful read. I now have a few additions to the list of places I'd never bother applying to.

jkingsbery 7y ago

Interviews are two-way conversations: a lot of what candidates do (or should be doing) is finding out about the team/company etc., since anything that research would show based on press releases, etc., is superficial. Questions like "What do you believe you can achieve with us personally or professionally that you can't anywhere else in the world?" make very little sense - even if I've read everything there is to read, I still know very little about your company, so there's no way I could answer a question like this. This, however, is excellent advice: "It is amazing how many candidates won’t premeditate before diving into interview questions. Those who take the time to stop, think it through and have a few crystal clear points are amongst the best people I’ve ever worked with." I interview quite a bit at my current company, and it is amazing how few people stop to think before they answer questions.

ahartmetz 7y ago

I'm a freelance developer, so I get many interviews for possible engagements. My favorite recent question was (badly paraphrased): Some developers overdesign, i.e. they design for possible future features. Some developers underdesign, i.e. they solve the current problem without too much design at all. Where are you on that spectrum? My answer: Hard to really answer this neutrally about yourself, but I try not to prevent future changes by making things overly clever or specific. Another one was: The project has a non-negotiable deadline and feature list and it looks like it's going to be late. What do you do? My answer: overtime doesn't work for highly intellectual work, so I'll see which features have the worst effort to usefulness ratio and cut them. They didn't like that. Good riddance to that project.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
> The project has a non-negotiable deadline and feature list and it looks like it's going to be late. What do you do? Answer: Polish my resume, and update my LinkedIn profile.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  You forgot about collecting all the paperwork about unreasonable demands of they decide to blame or smear you in some way. Scapegoats are a thing. This can be essential if you give a particularly evil company that tries to hold you hostage for a rehire.
shantly 7y ago
> Another one was: The project has a non-negotiable deadline and feature list and it looks like it's going to be late. What do you do? If both the deadline and feature list are actually non-negotiable and I'm quite certain it's gonna be late I'd advise them to halt it immediately to cut their losses, I guess. I don't know what else would be a sane response. Of course "non-negotiable" when it comes to feature lists and deadlines is usually grade-A horseshit so they don't actually mean it. Hell "deadline" is more often than not an exaggeration itself—you're not gonna drop the work in the trash if it's not delivered by 12:01AM on such-and-such day. TL;DR I'd assume "non-negotiable" was a lie because it basically always is. Bet they'd love that answer. [EDIT] Alternate answer: fortunately I'm in possession of a clock that changes reality when something's non-negotiable, so I'd just let it know what was up and it'd go ahead and make every hour twice as long for me.

bspates 7y ago

I feel like so many of these questions require the applicant's identity and sense of self to be completely rolled up in their career. Even the question about passion for hobbies is just a proxy for understanding if the candidate will put an unhealthy amount of their life into their work. We're more than what we produce!

crsv 7y ago

Judging from this thread a pretty straightforward approach would be to start by getting their hackernews name, searching for them in this thread, and if they’re found promptly ending the interview. This community is incredibly entitled and insufferable when discussing the hiring process.

drstewart 7y ago
I couldn't agree more. Everyone trying to one-up each other over how banal and offensive they find the questions. I'd say if these questions only serve to filter out people like this, they've done their job.
- scarface74 7y ago
  And yet most have no problem with getting asked leetCode questions to work on yet another software as a service CRUD app.

kreck 7y ago

This is basically just the contents of the “Top Grading” interview questionnaire [1] spiced up with some unnecessary prose. [1] http://www.jamesgwee.com/uploaded/file/Topgrading.pdf http://www.jamesgwee.com/uploaded/file/Topgrading.pdf

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

cryptozeus 7y ago

Many of these questions are coming from product managers and design managers, I think they all make sense. Some of these roles do require storytelling and awkward meta discussions. How you answer and not what you answer is being tested here. May not be the best questions for engineers though.

graycat 7y ago

Nutty questions: First, most of the questions have hidden goals or obscure and indirect paths to unclear information. The goals and information obtained this way are clearly highly unreliable. To believe that such obscure and indirect searching can yield the desired goals or information needs a questioner who is just delusional. Second, a lot of the questions have to do with efforts by the candidate to learn things. Okay: Nearly all of us want to learn things to get ahead in our careers and lives. E.g., that's the main reason people expend the time, money, and effort to go to college. So, there really are some good ways to know, but the interview questions are really poor ways. In my experience, here is some GOOD evidence: (1) Learning. In my career, I was doing applied math and computing for US national security. So, when I encountered what seemed to be important topics, I got relevant books and papers and learned. (A) I accumulated a professional library that filled three bookcases, each 1' deep, 3' wide, and 6' high on math and computing. (B) From this library, I studied carefully in whole or major parts of dozens of the books and had the rest available for more. (C) I set aside my career and went for a focused Ph.D. and got it. Point: I was trying REALLY hard to learn; indeed, I went for one of the best paths, a focused Ph.D. The interview questions never mentioned any such effort, and what the questions did mention were far inferior to a Ph.D. Bummer. (2) Initiative. (A) From what I had done before entering the Ph.D. program, I had already picked my dissertation research problem and made good progress on it. For the five Ph.D. qualifying exams, I did the best in the class on four of them and for three of them just used what I had already taught myself before entering the Ph.D. program. I did the rest of my research for my Ph.D. independently in my first summer. I did the final software development, writing, and typing independent of any advisors. That was a LOT of "initiative". I did give a seminar on my work, and some other students then did related Ph.D. dissertations. So, the results of my "initiative" were seen as high quality stuff. (B) At one point, I saw a problem, got a course to address the problem, not necessarily solve it, but in two weeks found a solid solution with a nice, new theorem. The work was publishable, and later I did publish it in the respected journal JOTA. So, that was some nice "initiative" with results that were fast and good. (C) Before my Ph.D. I was in a software house bidding on a development project for the Navy. At one point, some of the material from the Navy didn't make sense. In five days, independently I educated myself on power spectral estimation (mostly from Blackman and Tukey), wrote and ran illustrative software, and on the last evening called in the relevant Navy engineer, gave him a fast tutorial on the power spectral estimation he wanted, and showed him the illustrative software I'd written and the results showing how with more data the estimates converged to the right answer. As a result our software house got "sole source" on the development contract. That was fast, successful "initiative". I've got a long list of such. Bottom line it: In a job, from an employee, people HATE such initiative. Similarly for learning, knowing, and applying stuff. Such learning and initiative are for self-funded, sole-solo founder CEOs. By the way, VCs totally ignore any such learning or initiative.

newsbinator 7y ago

> What do you believe you can achieve with us personally or professionally that you can't anywhere else in the world? Not every company is SpaceX or even an industry unicorn. It's possible to do great work at a great company without it being the sole place in the world where things can happen.

d--b 7y ago

oh god. The difficult part of the interview is not rolling your eyes when the guy asks you “teach me something”.

viach 7y ago

This looks to me like the sort of questions probably asked on the stock image database photos with tags "job interview". Good looking people in suits sit around the table and looking on each other and none of them really gives a clue what are they doing.

Myrmornis 7y ago

Do these people not need to ask questions aimed at determining how skillfully the candidates can do their job? Why are all these questions fluff?

hozefaa 7y ago

shouldn't it be more output-oriented?

siempreb 7y ago

Lets try to be a little more honest. > 1. What do you want to do differently in your next role? Earn more money > 2. Imagine yourself in three years. What do you hope will be different about you then compared to now? Being more wealthy > 3. For the last few companies you've been at, take me through: (i) When you left, why did you leave? (ii) When you joined the next one, why did you choose it? 1. Because the job sucked 2. Because I need to pay the bills > 4. Among the people you've worked with, who do you admire and why? The CEO of company X, because she managed to free herself from this life sucking process > 5. Tell me about a time you took unexpected initiative. Follow-up: Can you tell me about another? I left several jobs because the code base and the colleagues sucked too much > 7. What motivates you to work? The need for money > 8. Looking back on the last five years of your career, what’s the highlight? Every time again, the holiday > 9. What are you really good at, but never want to do anymore? Being a brown noser > 10. What’s the difference between someone who’s great in your role versus someone who’s outstanding? Even better ass licking > 11. How did you prepare for this interview? I didn't prepare, I just try to be honest > 12. What do you believe you can achieve with us personally or professionally that you can't anywhere else in the world? Hopefully I can up my salary for the next gig > 13. What are the three most important characteristics of this function? How would you stack rank yourself from strongest to least developed among these traits? It is not sane to rank myself against unknown factors > 14. Tell me about your ideal next role. What characteristics does it have from a responsibility, team, and company culture perspective? What characteristics does it not have? My ideal next role is developing software for my own product. The main characteristic would be: - no annoying managers to manipulate me - no forced 'happy team' - no agile or scrum - no spaghetti codebase - no code reviews - no managers and self made 'important' people taking a cut of my produce - no need to lick ass of colleagues to survive the office politics - no traffic jams, no commuting - a healthier and happier life in general At this point I expect to be rejected from the interview, and wish them all the best.

ryloric 7y ago
I'd hire you over a candidate who gives the 'ideal' answers given in the article. Atleast I'd get an honest no BS assessments about work without having to coax it out.

cjfd 7y ago

Tell me about the hardest project you have had. Give me examples about both over-engineering and under-engineering. If either or both of the examples are on the extreme side ask them for less extreme examples until you get an idea where the boundary between the two things is for them.

ryloric 7y ago

Might be an unpopular opinion, but I think this is BS. Do people really questions like this in interviews or are these "smart folk" trying to look good in an article that can be shared on Linkedin and wherever else? I've only interviewed a few times in my life, and apart from smalltalk at the beginning they were mostly about judging how I think and to a lesser extent what my knowledge level is for the position.