20 ms·

Job interview questions engineers should ask, but don't

524 points by james_impliu 4y ago

omarhaneef 4y ago
okay, I expected to read another list of 7 questions to ask but this list is really excellent: each question made me think "yes, of course that should be asked and probably is not!" And this is not just for engineers. I think anyone joining a startup, or new division of a company, would benefit from thinking through these questions.
- daveslash 4y ago
  or new division of a company - yes. From a budgetary standpoint, new divisions within an established blue-chip company can somewhat be thought of as kin to startups. They're young and have to prove themselves.
cduzz 4y ago
Also: "how do you manage employee performance evaluations? What is the career advancement process like?" (if someone's got a better way to determine if a place does stack ranking without directly asking I'd love to hear it)....
- jen20 4y ago
  Why not ask directly?
  - blowski 4y ago
    Because a company says “we don’t do stock ranking, we do le rank du staq” or some fabulous name they’ve given to the same crap.
    - jen20 4y ago
      Right, but that’s a great indicator of a company that is going to have plenty of other bullshit, and can lead to follow up questions to see how they disguise it?
    - matwood 4y ago
      Yep. It's like when a company says the max bonus you can give a team member is 15%, but the pool is 5% of total salaries on the team.
- paulcole 4y ago
  "Tell me what led to the most recent time you fired someone in a role like this." A big red flag is anyone who's never fired someone or never had a bad fit. The key to me is the follow-ups you ask: • If you've never fired someone, what was the closest you've come? What was the outcome of that situation? Did they quit or did they improve? Why'd you wait for them to quit instead of addressing the issue directly? What made them improve? • If it was a performance issue, how did you know they were underperforming? What steps did you take to help them improve? • If it was a culture problem, why did it get missed in the hiring process? If they were initially a good culture fit, what changed? • How do you identify low performers? Objectively? Subjectively? A mix of the 2. The caveats are if a) you really really want this job or b) you really really need this job. In those cases, you should only be asking questions that you think make you look good to the hiring team.
  - moonchrome 4y ago
    I mean I dislike bullshit rankings and metrics as much as the next guy - but if someone asked me these questions I would just pass on the candidate - a person covering his ass about being a bottom performer, from the interview, is not really someone I would be thrilled hiring. At least OP phrased it as career progression question.
    - rockostrich 4y ago
      I don't know. I think they're useful questions for a top tier performer to ask to make sure they're not joining a shitshow where they have to clean up after people who have been underperforming for a year and haven't been given any feedback.
      - paulcole 4y ago
        Yeah, I'm not a top performer but I use those types of questions for a similar reason. Also any interviewer who's put off by those questions signals to me a company culture that I'm not particularly interested in. Additionally, I really enjoy flipping the script and interviewing the interviewer whenever possible. Of course, if I was desperate for any job, I'd do what it took to get hired, not to satisfy my curiosity and find the right job.
- ricardobayes 4y ago
  Well, in a startup, honestly, if you don't get fired you're doing good. I have seen zero early-stage startups that did evaluations or a career path. Many said they did but they really didn't.
mandeepj 4y ago
Few things you don't need to ask and can find out on your own via visiting their website (if they have) and social media (if there's one), and earnings reports as well (if they are public)
mrfusion 4y ago
I remember an interview with a startup where I couldn’t figure out what their product was and they got more and more annoyed with my questions. I ended up with something with the cloud.
viraptor 4y ago
For a large list of not-startup-oriented questions, I maintain a collection here: https://github.com/viraptor/reverse-interview/ https://github.com/viraptor/reverse-interview/
- Tade0 4y ago
  Good work. I've been keeping a similar list for private use, only mine is much smaller - less than 30 questions now that I removed the more risky ones which I never asked like "Is any of the board members actively addicted to anything?".
  - viraptor 4y ago
    Thanks. Feel free to submit anything I may be missing from mine :-) always appreciate a new one.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    Would a typical hiring manager actually know the answer to that?
    - alistairSH 4y ago
      I wouldn't have a clue. Short or knowing them socially, how would I know? Given they're 4 levels above me in the org (me->VP->SVP->CTO->BOD), I have zero reason to interact with them on any basis, let alone a social one.
    - Tade0 4y ago
      If it's a public secret and it affects the company - then yes. Of course they would rather not disclose such a thing to prospective candidates and it's rude to ask, so I dropped this question.
    - pc86 4y ago
      There is no scenario in which they would a) know the answer confidently enough they'd tell an interviewing prospective employee about it; b) be willing to do so; and, c) be stupid enough to do so.
treis 4y ago
#1 can your site handle the HN hug of death? Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220628135027/https://posthog.com/blog/what-to-ask-in-interviews https://web.archive.org/web/20220628135027/https://posthog.c...
froggertoaster 4y ago
Clickbait title - the first two questions are clearly questions to ask startups only. Not every engineering role is for a startup.
- theandrewbailey 4y ago
  Yes, you're not going to be asking about runway or product-market fit when you apply to a bank.
  - wepple 4y ago
    It’s wild to me that there are people out there who think engineers only go to work at startups
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    Actually I think those are great questions for a bank: liquidity crises still happen to banks and it's worse when other people's/user's money is also involved/entangled. Plus we are in an "exciting" era of "innovation" in banking where a bank's products aren't always as stable as you think or exactly what you think they are. If they are chasing "products" that aren't traditional accounts, that's important and useful to know. If they are chasing those and haven't any idea if they've made product-market fit, that's a good sign to run. (I've had at least one interview with a bank that I didn't bother with any next steps for exactly these sorts of reasons.)
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
A lot of these questions seem to be ones aimed at startups. I think they are good ones, but won't necessarily map to more established companies. In the "How strong is the team?" section: > "Can you tell me about the team I'd be working with most closely?" > "How do you compensate the team?" > "How do you attract and retain really strong hires?" > "Do you share board slides with the team?" I'd add: > "Who's been here the longest?" and: > "What's the median tenure of the engineering team?" I'd apply these directly to the team I'd be working on. These can tell you a bit about the management culture. And that depends almost entirely on the personality, experience, and style of individual managers. I know of what I speak. I was a very good manager, and kept senior-level engineers for many years, despite the corporation, itself, having a rather employee-hostile culture. IMNSHO, Management culture is even more important than team culture.
- rockostrich 4y ago
  To add to these, if it's an established team: > when was the last re-org this team went through and what was the reason for it?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    I worked for a major (Fortune 5) corporation, for about a year and a half (back in the 1980s). In that 18 months, they had three major reorgs. After one one of them, the new VP (a lawyer), brought the team into his (very nice, very large) office, and started the intro talk with "I hate computers." That was when I decided it was time to move on...
    - codingdave 4y ago
      On the flip side, that is the kind of boss to which you might be able to say, "Great, I'll keep things running, just leave me do my work.", and end up with a fully autonomous position with a boss who never bugs you.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
sambeau 4y ago
An interview is a two-way process. Ask as many questions as you can as you can make a terrible mistake that will badly affect your life. The more questions you ask, even ones about company culture and how things are managed will make you look super-interested and that you are already imagining yourself in the role. When I interview people I always remind them of this before we start: "Don't forget to interview us back. We might not be what you are looking for". It's surprising how many candidates ignore my advice (which, sadly, makes them look unenthusiastic).
docflabby 4y ago
My favorite question is: "Describe what a typical day would look like?"
- skeeter2020 4y ago
  Ask to have a coffee-chat / demo session with an engineer on the target team. You have decent odds you'll get someone senior who doesn't do all the interviews, so it will be much closer to the true day-to-day. You'll also get far more honest answers to things like on-call, support, performance reviews and other less-enjoyable aspects (even if it's by lack of omission, like they can only spare 15 minutes before their next meeting)
Barrera 4y ago
A lot of this can be simplified to three questions: 1. What problem is your company solving? If you don't get an answer, beware. If the answer sounds vague, beware. If the answer makes no sense, beware. If the answer is multifaceted, beware. This suggests that the company will not even begin the process of becoming profitable. 2. Who has this problem? You should get a clear picture of an actual person. If not, beware. If that person has no money, beware. If that person has no pull within an organization, beware. If that person is high maintenance or fickle, beware. This suggests that the company will never find the revenue they seek. 3. What's your solution? If the solution doesn't actually address the problem, beware. If the solution is too expensive for the customer, beware. If the solution can't be differentiated from its competitors, beware. If the solution has no competitors, beware. If there are a dozen solutions, beware. This suggests that no matter how amazing the technology or technical team, the company will not be able to execute on its business plan.
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  If I was interviewing a candidate who asked me these questions it would be a pretty negative signal because it would tell me they had not even done cursory research before interviewing. I would prefer clarifying questions about the product or market showing they had done basic research but didn't grok everything, but there are no cookie-cutter questions for this. (startup role, but I'm not sure it matters)
  - hawk_ 4y ago
    Fair enough. How many startups/company websites clearly state what they are actually doing? The problem is particularly bad in B2B space where the descriptions are replete with buzzwords and don't convey anything more than "Lorem Ipsum"
  - contravariant 4y ago
    Eh that's easily parried by just asking how you would answer those questions. It's a pretty easy argument that the company seeking to hire someone should be able to answer these questions and that a direct answer will be more valuable than a statement on a webpage.
pojzon 4y ago
I love this question: > How strong is the team? I've actually asked it always on every interview. The generic answer I get is that "You will be working with experts in the field" yada yada. When you actually join the team: - Two juniors - Few 20 years experience dudes that finished their growth at "Cobol is the best" with "Mainframe" T-Shirt on them - And the same manager that hired you! (Avoiding eye contact) So yea, one salary later you are on the new hunt for new job. I don't understand why ppl lie so much during interviews. It's a employee market, if I don't want to waste my time with teams like that -> it's a 100hunder I'll jump the ship ASAP.
- ms4720 4y ago
  Because the truth combined with the offered salary does not work, lies are seen as much cheaper than honesty and more money
- TrackerFF 4y ago
  > - Few 20 years experience dudes that finished their growth at "Cobol is the best" with "Mainframe" T-Shirt on them Probably joking, but a reminder that people with 20 years of experience started their careers after the dotcom bubble burst, and might not even have turned 40 yet.
rockostrich 4y ago
> Does the company have product-market fit? At a start-up, sure. At any company past Series C, you should know this before talking to anyone. The other questions here are fine, especially the revenue and DAU one. Even better questions are "what's your payback period?" and "what's the company's path to profitability?" Revenue doesn't matter if the company is burning 2x the money to get it. > How much runway does the company have? Does their spending look within reason? Kinda the same as asking about the path to profitability except also takes into account if the company can live to get there. > What's the culture like? I get asked this question and similar questions to the ones listed by almost every engineering candidate I've interviewed in the past 5 years... > How strong is the team? I think it's a good question but if you're just looking for someone to tell you how great the team is then you're better off not asking it. I think almost all interview questions should be asked with some level of doubt and in hopes of getting an honest answer. Also, the level of honesty matters. If you ask the engineering manager this question and they throw certain folks under the bus then you should run. > What's in store in the future? This (and more frequently the first 2 questions under it) gets asked in plenty of interviews. People want to know what they'll be working on and what kind of impact they'll have. The "Do you plan to sell the company?" question under this one makes it seem like these were all supposed to be directed at a CEO/founder. I wouldn't ask this question because even if the answer is honest it'll be ambiguous. No one is going to say they're dead set on selling the company if there's still funding rounds on the horizon but they also won't rule it out because they need to give the compensation package some hope for liquidity.
- fatnoah 4y ago
  >If you ask the engineering manager this question and they throw certain folks under the bus then you should run. I one declined an offer for this very reason. I had the option to join one of two teams, and each team's manager took the opportunity to crap on the other team.
  - rockostrich 4y ago
    Holy moly, you don't even have to ask the culture question in that kind of interview since they answered it for you: toxic.
itsmemattchung 4y ago
> Does the company have product-market fit? Interviewee: "Does the company have product-market fit?" Interviewer: "Yes, we own Wholefoods, Ring, the entire internet cloud ecosystem" Interviewee: "How much runway does the company have?" Interviewer: "We have 86.2 billion. Should last us a while" Interviewee: "What's in store in the future?" Interviewer: "Take over every market segment" ... Interviewee: "Great, where do I sign?"
- dagw 4y ago
  Interviewee: "How much runway does the company have?" Interviewer: "We have 86.2 billion. Should last us a while" In these situations you should be focusing on how much support and "runway" the product or department you'll be working on has. The company at large might not go bankrupt, but I've both seen and been involved in situations where a product/project/department went 'bankrupt' and most people involved got fired.
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    Would an interviewing manager even know the answer to that? A VP+ might, but I'm guessing they would be unable/unwilling to share. You could ask questions about how the position and product are related to the core business - should get the same result (it's mission critical vs it's VP's folly) without asking about financial info that nobody can/will share.
- nottorp 4y ago
  "When will the product I'll be working on be canceled?" is the question then...
  - itsmemattchung 4y ago
    Surely this was meant for Google right? :)
    - nottorp 4y ago
      Oh... Amazon owns Ring, not Google. Then it's "how long till stack ranking fires me?" :)
pm90 4y ago
“What does your OC rotation look like? If you get paged after hours, what actions do you take to ensure it doesn’t happen again?” This is my favorite question since it isn’t something you can generally lie about.
- muttled 4y ago
  Asking to see the pager log can be quite revealing as well. I worked at an MSP where you could expect 1-5 pages per night while on-call. It was definitely hidden during the interview process and I bet they never would have been able to hire anyone if that information was revealed.
  - usrme 4y ago
    I was actually recently discouraged from applying to GitLab after seeing their public on-call weekly reliability newsletter[1]. I've been on-call in all of my positions, but the level of incidents they seem to go through in a week seems like it would be very stressful. This isn't to throw shade on GitLab though, I absolutely adore what they do and use it on a daily basis <3 --- [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/reliability/-/issues/15954#incident-issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/reliability/-/issues/...
red_admiral 4y ago
Another one I'd ask, unless it's in a country that mandates this by law: how many days of annual leave do people get as a minimum? If you get some vague answer like "as much or as little as they need" that doesn't include a number, then assume that number is zero in practice. You might or might not still want to work there, but you should take this into account.
edouard-harris 4y ago
These are great questions to ask any early-stage startup you're considering working for. The reason they're great is that they're almost exactly what an investor would ask. And that makes sense: a startup's earliest employees are also its most committed investors.
Joel_Mckay 4y ago
Missed one question: "How much time are we going to spend dealing with unprofessional antics?" I'll give you a hint, the question was rhetorical... and the answer should be 0 minutes regardless of the applicant. ;-)
- corrral 4y ago
  Why... might the answer to that depend on the applicant at all? I don't know what you're getting at. Is this to find out how much time is spent on Mandatory Fun and other such garbage?
  - Joel_Mckay 4y ago
    Some people are talented, but can't function well in a team. Think what "antics" would mean from a kindergarten teachers perspective. Sure most adults rarely eat glue, but the number is not 0. The real insane ones will feign ignorance, and assume people will mistake it for wit. ;-)
EnderWT 4y ago
I always recommend https://www.keyvalues.com/culture-queries https://www.keyvalues.com/culture-queries for ideas on what to ask because you can narrow down the questions to the aspects of the job that are important to you.
donatj 4y ago
The most important to me, no joke, "Is there free coffee?" It's such a simple, easy and cheap morale and productivity booster to give your employees. If there isn't free coffee, it's not a place you want to work because they're skimping on their employees.
- CoffeeOnWrite 4y ago
  Love this but let’s go deeper here. “Tell me about the coffee situation.. what coffee do the team members that drink coffee drink day to day, and where does it come from?” As a consultant once on a due diligence gig at a medium-sized quasi-tech company in the Midwest, on the day I arrived, one smart and charming QA engineer took me aside and shared “the free coffee in the micro kitchens is crap, here’s our [employee-provided] coffee pot on a filing cabinet in the corner, please drink as much as you want”. That told me, among other things, this was a decent team in a mediocre company..
  - donatj 4y ago
    It didn't happen to be a midwestern book company with a digital department? Because that sounds a lot like a place I used to work.
  - woodrowbarlow 4y ago
    this is reminiscent of a recent post on Raymond Chen's blog. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220426-00/?p=106528 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220426-00/?p=10... (spoilers:) during a collab between Microsoft and IBM, Microsoft engineers were frustrated with the coffee at IBM's offices. IBM refused to let them set up their own coffee pot, but IBM was not allowed to look at anything marked "confidential". so they put a cardboard box over the coffee pot and wrote "confidential" on the side.
    - CoffeeOnWrite 4y ago
      Heh, we brewed desktop kombucha under a cardboard box at my big tech co. Facilities staff were very kind to us when it exploded during the Covid lockdowns..
rideontime 4y ago
Oh lord. I know this is off-topic and will probably get killed, but somebody really should have googled "post hog" before settling on a name for this company. e: If you do change the name please keep "hog" in there, that mascot is adorable
- hn_version_0023 4y ago
  I found that the domain was blocked by my pihole, using the following list: https://v.firebog.net/hosts/AdguardDNS.txt https://v.firebog.net/hosts/AdguardDNS.txt, which is available from https://firebog.net/ https://firebog.net/ I don't see any particular reason for it, so I've since whitelisted it. It is indeed an odd choice, but its a long-used namespace which sees a dwindling number of available and useful domain names over time, IMO.
- Izkata 4y ago
  I assume you're referring to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/9zr3h3/comment/eabv8a7/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/9zr3h3/commen... It's pretty low on google without the "your" and doesn't even have a knowyourmeme page, so I don't think it's a big deal.
wdb 4y ago
Nice list of questions :)) Always good to ask questions about the working culture and how your role looks like as it can heavily differ between companies
gigatexal 4y ago
I wish I had asked this to the few startups I’ve joined. Thank you for this list.
bigwavedave 4y ago
There've been a lot of additional great questions proposed in these comments! The one I like to ask the most has 2-parts: 1. "Why is this position open?" and if the answer is anything other than "we're doubling the size of our company", I like to follow up with: 2. "Tell me about the last person who had this role." The way #2 gets answered can usually tell me a lot about the culture.
Sevii 4y ago
My list gets longer with every new job. Do you have project managers? Do you have product owners? Do you fill out timesheets with your working hours? Do you use an RPC framework GRPC/etc What languages do you use? Are you polyglot? What is the promotion process? What would you like to see change? How big is the company and how big is your organization?
mibzman 4y ago
I don't ask challenging questions in interviews because I know I won't get hired if I ask them.
- ivraatiems 4y ago
  Can you elaborate on this belief? It hasn't been my experience at all. I love to ask difficult questions in interviews. Anecdotally, I once confronted a director about negative Glassdoor reviews which claimed the company's CEO was a serial abuser of employees. I did so in a friendly/appropriately phrased way, so it didn't come across like confrontation, but that's what it was. Not only did I still get an offer, but they tried to hire me again several months later. A company that got mad at me for asking reasonable questions about it in an interview isn't one I'd want to work for.
snapetom 4y ago
I always ask about the sales team - How many are there, how many years experience does the manager have in this sector, what's the experience of account execs, do they use BDRs, are they meeting sales goals. Then, further, how does the sales team interact with engineering. How does customer feedback come back to engineering features, who demos, etc. It doesn't matter if the engineering is top notch and there's no one to sell it. To me, if a company is past series A and the number of engineers is more than the number of sales employees, that's a warning sign.
corrral 4y ago
Ask to join a standup, ideally with the team you'd be on, if they do them. If there are five teams working on unrelated projects all in the same standup and everyone's checked out and they're all clearly only talking to their manager and listing every little thing they did and trouble they overcame yesterday, to justify why they should keep their job... run away.
- lijogdfljk 4y ago
  Nit, but our weekly standups are very similar and i'd argue they're not at all justification. Rather, they exist mostly to expand as needed on any tasks - but often expansion isn't needed. You're probably not wrong in general, but as is often the case, i imagine reality is a bit more complex.
brainwipe 4y ago
If interviewing at SMEs, tread with care - the people interviewing you won't necessarily have good answers at their finger tips and that isn't necessarily a red flag.
xrisk 4y ago
This is more on the banal side, but I just interned at a place with some weird restrictions — Windows machines, you have to remote into them if you want to WFH… stuff that really hampers my productivity. I’m going to get this stuff sorted out beforehand before working anywhere in the future.
- ivraatiems 4y ago
  Those don't seem like unusual restrictions to me? It's a little odd to not provide a laptop for WFH, but my previous employer had to do that at the start of COVID because most employees had desktops at the time. Why would you expect to do the company's work on your personal machine?
  - xrisk 4y ago
    No. I need to remote into a desktop from my laptop to WFH… which seems unusual to me?
    - easton 4y ago
      Not unusual in environments with security requirements, as many places don't want code leaving the office/datacenter if they can help it. Some places do it for performance reasons too, as they can just pay $X per hour/month to get devs an instance that's 10x faster than the corporate laptops, and if they break it, they can just generate a new one. I interned at a bank once where everyone was on Citrix, which was pretty good (they were paying a lot for it to be really good, though).
      - xrisk 4y ago
        We use Citrix too. Your choice to call it pretty good is interesting…
        easton 4y ago
        It's entirely dependent on hardware. Most installations are either not GPU-accelerated or extremely over-provisioned. A good VDI instance usually costs at least as much as per user as the equivalent desktop PC, if someone started the project because it would be cheaper per user it's a recipe for disaster. The install at the bank was a bunch of racks filled to the gills with NVIDIA Grid cards and high-end Xeons, and they had a setup in every region they did business in (you could get your instance migrated to another cluster if you had to be in another office to reduce latency, IIRC). It was super interesting to me because it was one of the few times I've seen VDI work right, leaving the only blocker to dev work being the crazy security policies.
donretag 4y ago
Surprised there are no questions regarding attrition or why people have quit. I also ask of the current managers (in the immediate department), how many were promoted and how many were hired. What is the shortest/longest someone in the company has gone with/without a promotion. If unlimited PTO, what is the average/mean of days taken off. We do not have data is an immediate "I'll pass, thank you".
cardosof 4y ago
> If the solution can't be differentiated from its competitors, beware. This is critical and not straightforward to evaluate. Complexity is a (if somewhat bad) proxy for differentiation, in the sense that if you can build it in a weekend, so does your competitor - and maybe he's got the mythical 10x engineer who'll ship it faster.
- closingcoffee 4y ago
  More than anything, experienced business and marketing folks were always the differentiator in my experience. The ability to make new and or leverage existing connections to open doors for the business mattered far more to success than “how complex” or “is this different.” I’ve seen literal $BigName clones with lesser quality systems make millions because the owner had another business and went to work on his Rolodex to get us in the door and start making money.
ivraatiems 4y ago
Two questions I like to ask in job interviews: 1. What kind of person would not work out well in this role? 2. Think back to your previous job/career/life before this company. What's one thing you'd like this company to have or do that you had or did before? I ask these because I want to know where pain points are for the team/company I am considering, but I can't just out and out say "what are your problems?" because nobody will answer honestly. I've learned some interesting things.
- Heyso 4y ago
  I like the first question. May indicate if they care about technical debt.
skeeter2020 4y ago
No company is going to answer "do you have product-market fit" with a "no". First, it's not like you hit some sort of binary inflection point where you don't have it then do. Second, even if indicators appear to point to some traction, it's a set of plateaus, some that may be permanent. If you don't know the internal details about expectations, funding, commitments, etc. you have no way if knowing that a 3-month upward trend is PMF. Finally, every company will frame their progress in the best light, even if that means subconscious outright lies. I personally think you're better asking what are you trying to do, coming to your own conclusion as to if it's a real problem that you personally believe in, asking what they've accomplished and why THIS COMPANY is better positioned to succeed.
TimPC 4y ago
Of course a start-up is asking you to ask the questions that lead you to a rose-coloured view of their equity. Most start-ups fail and most that do exit make small gains after investment capital. It’s possible to get rich by betting on the right unicorn but for the most part you should assume you will get minimal value from your equity and only accept a job offer if it’s attractive enough if the equity goes to zero. Publicly traded companies on the other hand general have equity that somewhat reliably converts to cash. Don’t take roles where so much of your compensation is equity that you have substantial market risk but do expect to get some actual cash from this type of compensation. This disparity makes publicly traded companies more attractive as the chances of you getting $400k when you want it from $200k of salary and $200k of equity is far higher. Start-ups are attractive if they give you additional responsibilities at an early stage of your career or otherwise improve your career trajectory. They are usually bad choices for senior people interested in optimizing earnings.
mateo411 4y ago
My default question is to ask the interview "If there is one thing you could change about the company, what would it be?" It gives you an idea about the pain points that person's role and gives you insight into what the company needs to improve.
kevin_nisbet 4y ago
When talking to startups, a question I love to ask is what are you not working on. The basic premise is Startups have limited resources, so in many ways what are you consciously not working on is as important as what you are working on. While not indicative on it's own, if a early stage startup tells me they're working on say AWS, and Google, and Azure, and on-premises, it creates an area to probe further that they might not be careful about selecting the right thing to work on next which does become a red flag.
throwaway5752 4y ago
Don't ask a question that you could search for and easily find. It will not reflect well on you. Think of those questions in advance, do your due-diligence, and ask questions based on what you couldn't find, or follow ups from your research on the company. It will set you apart from other candidates.
danenania 4y ago
A shorthand for this type of advice is to learn about investing and ask the same questions an investor would ask. Being a startup employee essentially makes you an angel investor with a single company in your portfolio.
kabdib 4y ago
I interviewed at a startup decades ago and talked with the CEO for about an hour. I asked questions about their customers, their competitors, their investors, and the technical challenges he thought his company had. I didn't ask for hard numbers ("How much money do you have in the bank?") Feedback from my hiring manager was that the CEO was very impressed. (This is the same place that later "extinguished" my paid-for stock options after I left, and is now a multi-billion dollar company. To hell with them).
hpcjoe 4y ago
These are good questions. And they can elicit some surprising signals from the company. One place that expressed significant interest in me for a senior leadership position, changed their mind rapidly when I asked about a number of these (early stage startup, so I was more focused on runway, buy in, etc.) The strong signal is that a company not willing to share this information, is probably not going to behave well under stress. You can evaluate your risk factors on your own, and decide whether or not you can tolerate that level. But this signal is a strong caveat to taking an offer from them.
TameAntelope 4y ago
Some of this advice seems like it's geared towards people who think they want to work at a startup, but don't. For example: > Avoid: Companies that are fundraising as they'll otherwise run out of money, but haven't closed the round That excludes a whole category of pre-seed orgs where you could make a huge positive impact.
Iv 4y ago
I am not sure if I am cynical or humble here, but my question is "Why would anyone care?". First, the company is hiring an engineer, not a CTO or a head of marketing. Why would they consider my input valid? Even in my field of expertise I have no idea of the size of markets or of the big players strategy there. Trying to keep afloat of the tech is hard enough. Second, if interviewing as an employee and not a business associate, you don't really care if the company becomes the next Facebook or, as is likely, goes into oblivion in 5 years. Know your incentives: if you don't have stock, you don't care about the company's success. Want employees that care? Give them incentives. Third, half of the founders I have met have inflated egos, delusions and/or personality issues. Never trust one who says they welcome honest feedback, especially during interviews. There is nothing in for you to gain and everything to lose. "These questions are direct, but a company that reacts badly to them may not be a good place to work." Disagree. A company with a non workable business plan can be a fantastic place to work in as the investor money burns through the various vanity project of middle managers. There are a lot much more relevant red flags to look out to anticipate a toxic workplace. In general, only give feedback when explicitly asked for it or once you understand the inner power dynamics of the place.
wiseowise 4y ago
What's with the influx of interview related topics?
twawaaay 4y ago
For me the eye opener is working with actual owners of the company that is profitable, is constantly growing, offers an honest product that is designed to provide maximum value to clients. We literally have no marketing and have to turn down clients because we can't grow fast enough. No politics, just pure honesty and problem solving. I will probably never again want to work for the company where the management has to please a lot of other people, make suboptimal (read: "stupid") decisions just for the optics of it and where there are no people you can talk to that have absolute decision power and the only goal being the good of the company.
hn_version_0023 4y ago
One question I always ask, that seems to always get good results: "Are you happy here?" Have you ever watched an interviewer change from upbeat to depressed in moments? Have you ever seen a person turn a shade of grey? Have you ever watched your interviewers start to argue about what the meaning of true happiness might be, before conceding that neither of them were happy? My all time favorite, from a gentleman at TD Waterhouse, nearly 20 years ago: "Is anyone really ever happy at work?" They made an offer, I didn't accept. Nearly everyone in Corporate America looks visibly depressed. Doubly so in our new COVID world. Someone remind me what the point of all this is again? Because I'm not really sure I get it anymore.
- catsarebetter 4y ago
  Oh I like this haha
- brtkdotse 4y ago
  Came here from Twitter to upvote this.
  - hn_version_0023 4y ago
    Honest question: why was this on Twitter? I don’t use Twitter at all.
    - brtkdotse 4y ago
      It appeared in my feed, not sure who posted it.
      - hn_version_0023 4y ago
        I’d love to see the context and reactions if possible? Thanks!
akhmatova 4y ago
"I see your job title says Program Manager / Product Owner / Tech Lead, but tell me please -- what is your real job? Remember, response time is a factor." Hoped for (but seldom received) answer: "Why of course - to be your 24x7 shit umbrella." Or some honestly inspired variant thereof.
lgleason 4y ago
One I alway like to ask is if they press charges ;). (For those who never saw it, this is from Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy)
olliej 4y ago
These all seem like the basic questions I'd be asking during any interview - with the exception of runway, because I don't like startup culture (though if I were applying I sure as hell would be checking this) - and I don't think I'm significantly different from people I've interviewed. I'm not sure why this guy's experience is so different from mine? I assume it's related to hiring/recruitment orientation (more junior/inexperienced folk?). The big one I could imagine is people failing to ask the "will the company still exist in 6 months?" question due to a default assumption that companies don't die?
tzm 4y ago
I almost always evaluate the company / team / product from an investor standpoint prior to joining any role (engineering or management). Most people find it funny, odd or refreshing to see conversations turn into an investment of time and resources etc.
autokad 4y ago
this is a really good list, I especially like "Who decides what to build?"
eschneider 4y ago
I started a job with a new company back in January. I understood what their product did and how things work need to work technically, but I have to say, it wasn't apparent from my initial research just how good a _business_ it was to be in. And yeah, getting the CEO to run through the business case for it went a long way towards selling me on the company (reasonable tech and nice people didn't hurt, either.)
conartist 4y ago
This is my favorite question to ask if I feel the company is a fit and I want to work there: - Now you've had a chance to get to know me, is there any reason you think I wouldn't be a suitable candidate for this role. Surprisingly people are super honest when I ask this and it let's you clear up an miscommunication or simply acknowledge that there reason is probably true and pitch how you would overcome it.
vfulco2 4y ago
Very strange, unsure what is going on, but I have not been able to access posthog site for 2 days. On/off VPN from mainland China.
sanj 4y ago
I wrote a version of this for recruiting almost a decade ago! https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1oD7MHHTHBkgkArtF2s8J9EoR-qd4Fj4niisH-0R8RiQ/edit https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1oD7MHHTHBkgkArtF2s8J...
arwhatever 4y ago
"What are some notable duties is the employee expected to perform, outside of software development?" I worked at one place that expected software developers to stock orders in the warehouse, and to take phone calls in the call center. "Tell me about a recent time the team was allocated time to resolve some technical debt. Tell me about a recent time the team was NOT allocated time to resolve some technical debt." I worked at once place which shifted from outsource to in-house software development, discovered that some of the primary html views of the website were built using a jumble of string concatenation, and to add a new feature using the existing string concatenation. "What percentage of my time will I spend coding in this role?" Worked at one place which assigned excessive non-coding bureaucratic duties to developers. "How often do you release software?" Worked at once place which did not release anything for the 1.5 years that I was there. "How do you incorporate the lessons learned partway through a project into the remainder of the project work?" Worked at one place that could not pivot due to inability to admit that they didn't have a perfect plan from Day 1. "Tell me about some advanced design patterns that you don't use." Worked on a team that used every advanced design pattern that mankind had ever given name to, each in 200 places without an iota of consideration to the costs that go along with the potential benefits. "Do you plan on shifting your entire tech stack into something else that can scarcely be considered software development?" Self-explanatory, but has happened to me 2x now, so be on the lookout. Fifteen+ years into my career, I've discovered that every job will give you one or more damn good reasons to move on, and each of these lessons above took 1-2 years to learn, so my latest strategy is just optimizing for pay rate. :-)
timoteostewart 4y ago
wayback machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220628135027/https://posthog.com/blog/what-to-ask-in-interviews https://web.archive.org/web/20220628135027/https://posthog.c...
raffraffraff 4y ago
Recently I've added some rather stupid ones, for reasons that should be obvious: 1. Describe your git branching strategy 2. Who releases software, how (is it packaged / deployed), and how often? 3. Do you have dev/test environments? 4. Do you keep configuration out of your code? How? Example: IaC. 5. Describe a typical incident. How do you find out about it, who gets the first alert, how does it get resolved and how (do?) you follow up afterwards? 6. What does the oncall rota look like? Follow the sun or (immediate end of discussion) 24h? 7. Do you have superheroes (people who have been around since forever, that everybody says "well I hope <superhero> doesn't get hit by a bus, because then we'd be really effed")? 8. What is the engineering staff turnover for the last 12 months? What about for the team I'm interviewing for? 9. What are the top challenges facing this team (and wider engineering team) right now? (Not only within their problem domain, but outside it, eg communication, coordination, outages, observability, direction)
hindsightRegret 4y ago
I agree with asking hard questions, but I think there's a limit to how much one can really expect an individual job applicant to determine the financial state of the company. For one, the people that are answering their questions are by pre-condition already drinking the company kool-aid.

524 points by james_impliu 4y ago

okay, I expected to read another list of 7 questions to ask but this list is really excellent: each question made me think "yes, of course that should be asked and probably is not!" And this is not just for engineers. I think anyone joining a startup, or new division of a company, would benefit from thinking through these questions.

daveslash 4y ago
or new division of a company - yes. From a budgetary standpoint, new divisions within an established blue-chip company can somewhat be thought of as kin to startups. They're young and have to prove themselves.

cduzz 4y ago

Also: "how do you manage employee performance evaluations? What is the career advancement process like?" (if someone's got a better way to determine if a place does stack ranking without directly asking I'd love to hear it)....

jen20 4y ago
Why not ask directly?
- blowski 4y ago
  Because a company says “we don’t do stock ranking, we do le rank du staq” or some fabulous name they’ve given to the same crap.
  - jen20 4y ago
    Right, but that’s a great indicator of a company that is going to have plenty of other bullshit, and can lead to follow up questions to see how they disguise it?
  - matwood 4y ago
    Yep. It's like when a company says the max bonus you can give a team member is 15%, but the pool is 5% of total salaries on the team.
paulcole 4y ago
"Tell me what led to the most recent time you fired someone in a role like this." A big red flag is anyone who's never fired someone or never had a bad fit. The key to me is the follow-ups you ask: • If you've never fired someone, what was the closest you've come? What was the outcome of that situation? Did they quit or did they improve? Why'd you wait for them to quit instead of addressing the issue directly? What made them improve? • If it was a performance issue, how did you know they were underperforming? What steps did you take to help them improve? • If it was a culture problem, why did it get missed in the hiring process? If they were initially a good culture fit, what changed? • How do you identify low performers? Objectively? Subjectively? A mix of the 2. The caveats are if a) you really really want this job or b) you really really need this job. In those cases, you should only be asking questions that you think make you look good to the hiring team.
- moonchrome 4y ago
  I mean I dislike bullshit rankings and metrics as much as the next guy - but if someone asked me these questions I would just pass on the candidate - a person covering his ass about being a bottom performer, from the interview, is not really someone I would be thrilled hiring. At least OP phrased it as career progression question.
  - rockostrich 4y ago
    I don't know. I think they're useful questions for a top tier performer to ask to make sure they're not joining a shitshow where they have to clean up after people who have been underperforming for a year and haven't been given any feedback.
    - paulcole 4y ago
      Yeah, I'm not a top performer but I use those types of questions for a similar reason. Also any interviewer who's put off by those questions signals to me a company culture that I'm not particularly interested in. Additionally, I really enjoy flipping the script and interviewing the interviewer whenever possible. Of course, if I was desperate for any job, I'd do what it took to get hired, not to satisfy my curiosity and find the right job.
ricardobayes 4y ago
Well, in a startup, honestly, if you don't get fired you're doing good. I have seen zero early-stage startups that did evaluations or a career path. Many said they did but they really didn't.

mandeepj 4y ago

Few things you don't need to ask and can find out on your own via visiting their website (if they have) and social media (if there's one), and earnings reports as well (if they are public)

mrfusion 4y ago

I remember an interview with a startup where I couldn’t figure out what their product was and they got more and more annoyed with my questions. I ended up with something with the cloud.

viraptor 4y ago

For a large list of not-startup-oriented questions, I maintain a collection here: https://github.com/viraptor/reverse-interview/ https://github.com/viraptor/reverse-interview/

Tade0 4y ago
Good work. I've been keeping a similar list for private use, only mine is much smaller - less than 30 questions now that I removed the more risky ones which I never asked like "Is any of the board members actively addicted to anything?".
- viraptor 4y ago
  Thanks. Feel free to submit anything I may be missing from mine :-) always appreciate a new one.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Would a typical hiring manager actually know the answer to that?
  - alistairSH 4y ago
    I wouldn't have a clue. Short or knowing them socially, how would I know? Given they're 4 levels above me in the org (me->VP->SVP->CTO->BOD), I have zero reason to interact with them on any basis, let alone a social one.
  - Tade0 4y ago
    If it's a public secret and it affects the company - then yes. Of course they would rather not disclose such a thing to prospective candidates and it's rude to ask, so I dropped this question.
  - pc86 4y ago
    There is no scenario in which they would a) know the answer confidently enough they'd tell an interviewing prospective employee about it; b) be willing to do so; and, c) be stupid enough to do so.

treis 4y ago

#1 can your site handle the HN hug of death? Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220628135027/https://posthog.com/blog/what-to-ask-in-interviews https://web.archive.org/web/20220628135027/https://posthog.c...

froggertoaster 4y ago

Clickbait title - the first two questions are clearly questions to ask startups only. Not every engineering role is for a startup.

theandrewbailey 4y ago
Yes, you're not going to be asking about runway or product-market fit when you apply to a bank.
- wepple 4y ago
  It’s wild to me that there are people out there who think engineers only go to work at startups
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  Actually I think those are great questions for a bank: liquidity crises still happen to banks and it's worse when other people's/user's money is also involved/entangled. Plus we are in an "exciting" era of "innovation" in banking where a bank's products aren't always as stable as you think or exactly what you think they are. If they are chasing "products" that aren't traditional accounts, that's important and useful to know. If they are chasing those and haven't any idea if they've made product-market fit, that's a good sign to run. (I've had at least one interview with a bank that I didn't bother with any next steps for exactly these sorts of reasons.)

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

A lot of these questions seem to be ones aimed at startups. I think they are good ones, but won't necessarily map to more established companies. In the "How strong is the team?" section: > "Can you tell me about the team I'd be working with most closely?" > "How do you compensate the team?" > "How do you attract and retain really strong hires?" > "Do you share board slides with the team?" I'd add: > "Who's been here the longest?" and: > "What's the median tenure of the engineering team?" I'd apply these directly to the team I'd be working on. These can tell you a bit about the management culture. And that depends almost entirely on the personality, experience, and style of individual managers. I know of what I speak. I was a very good manager, and kept senior-level engineers for many years, despite the corporation, itself, having a rather employee-hostile culture. IMNSHO, Management culture is even more important than team culture.

rockostrich 4y ago
To add to these, if it's an established team: > when was the last re-org this team went through and what was the reason for it?
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I worked for a major (Fortune 5) corporation, for about a year and a half (back in the 1980s). In that 18 months, they had three major reorgs. After one one of them, the new VP (a lawyer), brought the team into his (very nice, very large) office, and started the intro talk with "I hate computers." That was when I decided it was time to move on...
  - codingdave 4y ago
    On the flip side, that is the kind of boss to which you might be able to say, "Great, I'll keep things running, just leave me do my work.", and end up with a fully autonomous position with a boss who never bugs you.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

sambeau 4y ago

An interview is a two-way process. Ask as many questions as you can as you can make a terrible mistake that will badly affect your life. The more questions you ask, even ones about company culture and how things are managed will make you look super-interested and that you are already imagining yourself in the role. When I interview people I always remind them of this before we start: "Don't forget to interview us back. We might not be what you are looking for". It's surprising how many candidates ignore my advice (which, sadly, makes them look unenthusiastic).

docflabby 4y ago

My favorite question is: "Describe what a typical day would look like?"

skeeter2020 4y ago
Ask to have a coffee-chat / demo session with an engineer on the target team. You have decent odds you'll get someone senior who doesn't do all the interviews, so it will be much closer to the true day-to-day. You'll also get far more honest answers to things like on-call, support, performance reviews and other less-enjoyable aspects (even if it's by lack of omission, like they can only spare 15 minutes before their next meeting)

Barrera 4y ago

A lot of this can be simplified to three questions: 1. What problem is your company solving? If you don't get an answer, beware. If the answer sounds vague, beware. If the answer makes no sense, beware. If the answer is multifaceted, beware. This suggests that the company will not even begin the process of becoming profitable. 2. Who has this problem? You should get a clear picture of an actual person. If not, beware. If that person has no money, beware. If that person has no pull within an organization, beware. If that person is high maintenance or fickle, beware. This suggests that the company will never find the revenue they seek. 3. What's your solution? If the solution doesn't actually address the problem, beware. If the solution is too expensive for the customer, beware. If the solution can't be differentiated from its competitors, beware. If the solution has no competitors, beware. If there are a dozen solutions, beware. This suggests that no matter how amazing the technology or technical team, the company will not be able to execute on its business plan.

bpodgursky 4y ago
If I was interviewing a candidate who asked me these questions it would be a pretty negative signal because it would tell me they had not even done cursory research before interviewing. I would prefer clarifying questions about the product or market showing they had done basic research but didn't grok everything, but there are no cookie-cutter questions for this. (startup role, but I'm not sure it matters)
- hawk_ 4y ago
  Fair enough. How many startups/company websites clearly state what they are actually doing? The problem is particularly bad in B2B space where the descriptions are replete with buzzwords and don't convey anything more than "Lorem Ipsum"
- contravariant 4y ago
  Eh that's easily parried by just asking how you would answer those questions. It's a pretty easy argument that the company seeking to hire someone should be able to answer these questions and that a direct answer will be more valuable than a statement on a webpage.

pojzon 4y ago

I love this question: > How strong is the team? I've actually asked it always on every interview. The generic answer I get is that "You will be working with experts in the field" yada yada. When you actually join the team: - Two juniors - Few 20 years experience dudes that finished their growth at "Cobol is the best" with "Mainframe" T-Shirt on them - And the same manager that hired you! (Avoiding eye contact) So yea, one salary later you are on the new hunt for new job. I don't understand why ppl lie so much during interviews. It's a employee market, if I don't want to waste my time with teams like that -> it's a 100hunder I'll jump the ship ASAP.

ms4720 4y ago
Because the truth combined with the offered salary does not work, lies are seen as much cheaper than honesty and more money
TrackerFF 4y ago
> - Few 20 years experience dudes that finished their growth at "Cobol is the best" with "Mainframe" T-Shirt on them Probably joking, but a reminder that people with 20 years of experience started their careers after the dotcom bubble burst, and might not even have turned 40 yet.

rockostrich 4y ago

> Does the company have product-market fit? At a start-up, sure. At any company past Series C, you should know this before talking to anyone. The other questions here are fine, especially the revenue and DAU one. Even better questions are "what's your payback period?" and "what's the company's path to profitability?" Revenue doesn't matter if the company is burning 2x the money to get it. > How much runway does the company have? Does their spending look within reason? Kinda the same as asking about the path to profitability except also takes into account if the company can live to get there. > What's the culture like? I get asked this question and similar questions to the ones listed by almost every engineering candidate I've interviewed in the past 5 years... > How strong is the team? I think it's a good question but if you're just looking for someone to tell you how great the team is then you're better off not asking it. I think almost all interview questions should be asked with some level of doubt and in hopes of getting an honest answer. Also, the level of honesty matters. If you ask the engineering manager this question and they throw certain folks under the bus then you should run. > What's in store in the future? This (and more frequently the first 2 questions under it) gets asked in plenty of interviews. People want to know what they'll be working on and what kind of impact they'll have. The "Do you plan to sell the company?" question under this one makes it seem like these were all supposed to be directed at a CEO/founder. I wouldn't ask this question because even if the answer is honest it'll be ambiguous. No one is going to say they're dead set on selling the company if there's still funding rounds on the horizon but they also won't rule it out because they need to give the compensation package some hope for liquidity.

fatnoah 4y ago
>If you ask the engineering manager this question and they throw certain folks under the bus then you should run. I one declined an offer for this very reason. I had the option to join one of two teams, and each team's manager took the opportunity to crap on the other team.
- rockostrich 4y ago
  Holy moly, you don't even have to ask the culture question in that kind of interview since they answered it for you: toxic.

itsmemattchung 4y ago

> Does the company have product-market fit? Interviewee: "Does the company have product-market fit?" Interviewer: "Yes, we own Wholefoods, Ring, the entire internet cloud ecosystem" Interviewee: "How much runway does the company have?" Interviewer: "We have 86.2 billion. Should last us a while" Interviewee: "What's in store in the future?" Interviewer: "Take over every market segment" ... Interviewee: "Great, where do I sign?"

dagw 4y ago
Interviewee: "How much runway does the company have?" Interviewer: "We have 86.2 billion. Should last us a while" In these situations you should be focusing on how much support and "runway" the product or department you'll be working on has. The company at large might not go bankrupt, but I've both seen and been involved in situations where a product/project/department went 'bankrupt' and most people involved got fired.
- alistairSH 4y ago
  Would an interviewing manager even know the answer to that? A VP+ might, but I'm guessing they would be unable/unwilling to share. You could ask questions about how the position and product are related to the core business - should get the same result (it's mission critical vs it's VP's folly) without asking about financial info that nobody can/will share.
nottorp 4y ago
"When will the product I'll be working on be canceled?" is the question then...
- itsmemattchung 4y ago
  Surely this was meant for Google right? :)
  - nottorp 4y ago
    Oh... Amazon owns Ring, not Google. Then it's "how long till stack ranking fires me?" :)

pm90 4y ago

“What does your OC rotation look like? If you get paged after hours, what actions do you take to ensure it doesn’t happen again?” This is my favorite question since it isn’t something you can generally lie about.

muttled 4y ago
Asking to see the pager log can be quite revealing as well. I worked at an MSP where you could expect 1-5 pages per night while on-call. It was definitely hidden during the interview process and I bet they never would have been able to hire anyone if that information was revealed.
- usrme 4y ago
  I was actually recently discouraged from applying to GitLab after seeing their public on-call weekly reliability newsletter[1]. I've been on-call in all of my positions, but the level of incidents they seem to go through in a week seems like it would be very stressful. This isn't to throw shade on GitLab though, I absolutely adore what they do and use it on a daily basis <3 --- [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/reliability/-/issues/15954#incident-issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/reliability/-/issues/...

red_admiral 4y ago

Another one I'd ask, unless it's in a country that mandates this by law: how many days of annual leave do people get as a minimum? If you get some vague answer like "as much or as little as they need" that doesn't include a number, then assume that number is zero in practice. You might or might not still want to work there, but you should take this into account.

edouard-harris 4y ago

These are great questions to ask any early-stage startup you're considering working for. The reason they're great is that they're almost exactly what an investor would ask. And that makes sense: a startup's earliest employees are also its most committed investors.

Joel_Mckay 4y ago

Missed one question: "How much time are we going to spend dealing with unprofessional antics?" I'll give you a hint, the question was rhetorical... and the answer should be 0 minutes regardless of the applicant. ;-)

corrral 4y ago
Why... might the answer to that depend on the applicant at all? I don't know what you're getting at. Is this to find out how much time is spent on Mandatory Fun and other such garbage?
- Joel_Mckay 4y ago
  Some people are talented, but can't function well in a team. Think what "antics" would mean from a kindergarten teachers perspective. Sure most adults rarely eat glue, but the number is not 0. The real insane ones will feign ignorance, and assume people will mistake it for wit. ;-)

EnderWT 4y ago

I always recommend https://www.keyvalues.com/culture-queries https://www.keyvalues.com/culture-queries for ideas on what to ask because you can narrow down the questions to the aspects of the job that are important to you.

donatj 4y ago

The most important to me, no joke, "Is there free coffee?" It's such a simple, easy and cheap morale and productivity booster to give your employees. If there isn't free coffee, it's not a place you want to work because they're skimping on their employees.

CoffeeOnWrite 4y ago
Love this but let’s go deeper here. “Tell me about the coffee situation.. what coffee do the team members that drink coffee drink day to day, and where does it come from?” As a consultant once on a due diligence gig at a medium-sized quasi-tech company in the Midwest, on the day I arrived, one smart and charming QA engineer took me aside and shared “the free coffee in the micro kitchens is crap, here’s our [employee-provided] coffee pot on a filing cabinet in the corner, please drink as much as you want”. That told me, among other things, this was a decent team in a mediocre company..
- donatj 4y ago
  It didn't happen to be a midwestern book company with a digital department? Because that sounds a lot like a place I used to work.
- woodrowbarlow 4y ago
  this is reminiscent of a recent post on Raymond Chen's blog. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220426-00/?p=106528 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220426-00/?p=10... (spoilers:) during a collab between Microsoft and IBM, Microsoft engineers were frustrated with the coffee at IBM's offices. IBM refused to let them set up their own coffee pot, but IBM was not allowed to look at anything marked "confidential". so they put a cardboard box over the coffee pot and wrote "confidential" on the side.
  - CoffeeOnWrite 4y ago
    Heh, we brewed desktop kombucha under a cardboard box at my big tech co. Facilities staff were very kind to us when it exploded during the Covid lockdowns..

rideontime 4y ago

Oh lord. I know this is off-topic and will probably get killed, but somebody really should have googled "post hog" before settling on a name for this company. e: If you do change the name please keep "hog" in there, that mascot is adorable

hn_version_0023 4y ago
I found that the domain was blocked by my pihole, using the following list: https://v.firebog.net/hosts/AdguardDNS.txt https://v.firebog.net/hosts/AdguardDNS.txt, which is available from https://firebog.net/ https://firebog.net/ I don't see any particular reason for it, so I've since whitelisted it. It is indeed an odd choice, but its a long-used namespace which sees a dwindling number of available and useful domain names over time, IMO.
Izkata 4y ago
I assume you're referring to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/9zr3h3/comment/eabv8a7/ https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/9zr3h3/commen... It's pretty low on google without the "your" and doesn't even have a knowyourmeme page, so I don't think it's a big deal.

wdb 4y ago

Nice list of questions :)) Always good to ask questions about the working culture and how your role looks like as it can heavily differ between companies

gigatexal 4y ago

I wish I had asked this to the few startups I’ve joined. Thank you for this list.

bigwavedave 4y ago

There've been a lot of additional great questions proposed in these comments! The one I like to ask the most has 2-parts: 1. "Why is this position open?" and if the answer is anything other than "we're doubling the size of our company", I like to follow up with: 2. "Tell me about the last person who had this role." The way #2 gets answered can usually tell me a lot about the culture.

Sevii 4y ago

My list gets longer with every new job. Do you have project managers? Do you have product owners? Do you fill out timesheets with your working hours? Do you use an RPC framework GRPC/etc What languages do you use? Are you polyglot? What is the promotion process? What would you like to see change? How big is the company and how big is your organization?

mibzman 4y ago

I don't ask challenging questions in interviews because I know I won't get hired if I ask them.

ivraatiems 4y ago
Can you elaborate on this belief? It hasn't been my experience at all. I love to ask difficult questions in interviews. Anecdotally, I once confronted a director about negative Glassdoor reviews which claimed the company's CEO was a serial abuser of employees. I did so in a friendly/appropriately phrased way, so it didn't come across like confrontation, but that's what it was. Not only did I still get an offer, but they tried to hire me again several months later. A company that got mad at me for asking reasonable questions about it in an interview isn't one I'd want to work for.

snapetom 4y ago

I always ask about the sales team - How many are there, how many years experience does the manager have in this sector, what's the experience of account execs, do they use BDRs, are they meeting sales goals. Then, further, how does the sales team interact with engineering. How does customer feedback come back to engineering features, who demos, etc. It doesn't matter if the engineering is top notch and there's no one to sell it. To me, if a company is past series A and the number of engineers is more than the number of sales employees, that's a warning sign.

corrral 4y ago

Ask to join a standup, ideally with the team you'd be on, if they do them. If there are five teams working on unrelated projects all in the same standup and everyone's checked out and they're all clearly only talking to their manager and listing every little thing they did and trouble they overcame yesterday, to justify why they should keep their job... run away.

lijogdfljk 4y ago
Nit, but our weekly standups are very similar and i'd argue they're not at all justification. Rather, they exist mostly to expand as needed on any tasks - but often expansion isn't needed. You're probably not wrong in general, but as is often the case, i imagine reality is a bit more complex.

brainwipe 4y ago

If interviewing at SMEs, tread with care - the people interviewing you won't necessarily have good answers at their finger tips and that isn't necessarily a red flag.

xrisk 4y ago

This is more on the banal side, but I just interned at a place with some weird restrictions — Windows machines, you have to remote into them if you want to WFH… stuff that really hampers my productivity. I’m going to get this stuff sorted out beforehand before working anywhere in the future.

ivraatiems 4y ago
Those don't seem like unusual restrictions to me? It's a little odd to not provide a laptop for WFH, but my previous employer had to do that at the start of COVID because most employees had desktops at the time. Why would you expect to do the company's work on your personal machine?
- xrisk 4y ago
  No. I need to remote into a desktop from my laptop to WFH… which seems unusual to me?
  - easton 4y ago
    Not unusual in environments with security requirements, as many places don't want code leaving the office/datacenter if they can help it. Some places do it for performance reasons too, as they can just pay $X per hour/month to get devs an instance that's 10x faster than the corporate laptops, and if they break it, they can just generate a new one. I interned at a bank once where everyone was on Citrix, which was pretty good (they were paying a lot for it to be really good, though).
    - xrisk 4y ago
      We use Citrix too. Your choice to call it pretty good is interesting…
      - easton 4y ago
        It's entirely dependent on hardware. Most installations are either not GPU-accelerated or extremely over-provisioned. A good VDI instance usually costs at least as much as per user as the equivalent desktop PC, if someone started the project because it would be cheaper per user it's a recipe for disaster. The install at the bank was a bunch of racks filled to the gills with NVIDIA Grid cards and high-end Xeons, and they had a setup in every region they did business in (you could get your instance migrated to another cluster if you had to be in another office to reduce latency, IIRC). It was super interesting to me because it was one of the few times I've seen VDI work right, leaving the only blocker to dev work being the crazy security policies.

donretag 4y ago

Surprised there are no questions regarding attrition or why people have quit. I also ask of the current managers (in the immediate department), how many were promoted and how many were hired. What is the shortest/longest someone in the company has gone with/without a promotion. If unlimited PTO, what is the average/mean of days taken off. We do not have data is an immediate "I'll pass, thank you".

cardosof 4y ago

> If the solution can't be differentiated from its competitors, beware. This is critical and not straightforward to evaluate. Complexity is a (if somewhat bad) proxy for differentiation, in the sense that if you can build it in a weekend, so does your competitor - and maybe he's got the mythical 10x engineer who'll ship it faster.

closingcoffee 4y ago
More than anything, experienced business and marketing folks were always the differentiator in my experience. The ability to make new and or leverage existing connections to open doors for the business mattered far more to success than “how complex” or “is this different.” I’ve seen literal $BigName clones with lesser quality systems make millions because the owner had another business and went to work on his Rolodex to get us in the door and start making money.

ivraatiems 4y ago

Two questions I like to ask in job interviews: 1. What kind of person would not work out well in this role? 2. Think back to your previous job/career/life before this company. What's one thing you'd like this company to have or do that you had or did before? I ask these because I want to know where pain points are for the team/company I am considering, but I can't just out and out say "what are your problems?" because nobody will answer honestly. I've learned some interesting things.

Heyso 4y ago
I like the first question. May indicate if they care about technical debt.

skeeter2020 4y ago

No company is going to answer "do you have product-market fit" with a "no". First, it's not like you hit some sort of binary inflection point where you don't have it then do. Second, even if indicators appear to point to some traction, it's a set of plateaus, some that may be permanent. If you don't know the internal details about expectations, funding, commitments, etc. you have no way if knowing that a 3-month upward trend is PMF. Finally, every company will frame their progress in the best light, even if that means subconscious outright lies. I personally think you're better asking what are you trying to do, coming to your own conclusion as to if it's a real problem that you personally believe in, asking what they've accomplished and why THIS COMPANY is better positioned to succeed.

TimPC 4y ago

Of course a start-up is asking you to ask the questions that lead you to a rose-coloured view of their equity. Most start-ups fail and most that do exit make small gains after investment capital. It’s possible to get rich by betting on the right unicorn but for the most part you should assume you will get minimal value from your equity and only accept a job offer if it’s attractive enough if the equity goes to zero. Publicly traded companies on the other hand general have equity that somewhat reliably converts to cash. Don’t take roles where so much of your compensation is equity that you have substantial market risk but do expect to get some actual cash from this type of compensation. This disparity makes publicly traded companies more attractive as the chances of you getting $400k when you want it from $200k of salary and $200k of equity is far higher. Start-ups are attractive if they give you additional responsibilities at an early stage of your career or otherwise improve your career trajectory. They are usually bad choices for senior people interested in optimizing earnings.

mateo411 4y ago

My default question is to ask the interview "If there is one thing you could change about the company, what would it be?" It gives you an idea about the pain points that person's role and gives you insight into what the company needs to improve.

kevin_nisbet 4y ago

When talking to startups, a question I love to ask is what are you not working on. The basic premise is Startups have limited resources, so in many ways what are you consciously not working on is as important as what you are working on. While not indicative on it's own, if a early stage startup tells me they're working on say AWS, and Google, and Azure, and on-premises, it creates an area to probe further that they might not be careful about selecting the right thing to work on next which does become a red flag.

throwaway5752 4y ago

Don't ask a question that you could search for and easily find. It will not reflect well on you. Think of those questions in advance, do your due-diligence, and ask questions based on what you couldn't find, or follow ups from your research on the company. It will set you apart from other candidates.

danenania 4y ago

A shorthand for this type of advice is to learn about investing and ask the same questions an investor would ask. Being a startup employee essentially makes you an angel investor with a single company in your portfolio.

kabdib 4y ago

I interviewed at a startup decades ago and talked with the CEO for about an hour. I asked questions about their customers, their competitors, their investors, and the technical challenges he thought his company had. I didn't ask for hard numbers ("How much money do you have in the bank?") Feedback from my hiring manager was that the CEO was very impressed. (This is the same place that later "extinguished" my paid-for stock options after I left, and is now a multi-billion dollar company. To hell with them).

hpcjoe 4y ago

These are good questions. And they can elicit some surprising signals from the company. One place that expressed significant interest in me for a senior leadership position, changed their mind rapidly when I asked about a number of these (early stage startup, so I was more focused on runway, buy in, etc.) The strong signal is that a company not willing to share this information, is probably not going to behave well under stress. You can evaluate your risk factors on your own, and decide whether or not you can tolerate that level. But this signal is a strong caveat to taking an offer from them.

TameAntelope 4y ago

Some of this advice seems like it's geared towards people who think they want to work at a startup, but don't. For example: > Avoid: Companies that are fundraising as they'll otherwise run out of money, but haven't closed the round That excludes a whole category of pre-seed orgs where you could make a huge positive impact.

Iv 4y ago

I am not sure if I am cynical or humble here, but my question is "Why would anyone care?". First, the company is hiring an engineer, not a CTO or a head of marketing. Why would they consider my input valid? Even in my field of expertise I have no idea of the size of markets or of the big players strategy there. Trying to keep afloat of the tech is hard enough. Second, if interviewing as an employee and not a business associate, you don't really care if the company becomes the next Facebook or, as is likely, goes into oblivion in 5 years. Know your incentives: if you don't have stock, you don't care about the company's success. Want employees that care? Give them incentives. Third, half of the founders I have met have inflated egos, delusions and/or personality issues. Never trust one who says they welcome honest feedback, especially during interviews. There is nothing in for you to gain and everything to lose. "These questions are direct, but a company that reacts badly to them may not be a good place to work." Disagree. A company with a non workable business plan can be a fantastic place to work in as the investor money burns through the various vanity project of middle managers. There are a lot much more relevant red flags to look out to anticipate a toxic workplace. In general, only give feedback when explicitly asked for it or once you understand the inner power dynamics of the place.

wiseowise 4y ago

What's with the influx of interview related topics?

twawaaay 4y ago

For me the eye opener is working with actual owners of the company that is profitable, is constantly growing, offers an honest product that is designed to provide maximum value to clients. We literally have no marketing and have to turn down clients because we can't grow fast enough. No politics, just pure honesty and problem solving. I will probably never again want to work for the company where the management has to please a lot of other people, make suboptimal (read: "stupid") decisions just for the optics of it and where there are no people you can talk to that have absolute decision power and the only goal being the good of the company.

hn_version_0023 4y ago

One question I always ask, that seems to always get good results: "Are you happy here?" Have you ever watched an interviewer change from upbeat to depressed in moments? Have you ever seen a person turn a shade of grey? Have you ever watched your interviewers start to argue about what the meaning of true happiness might be, before conceding that neither of them were happy? My all time favorite, from a gentleman at TD Waterhouse, nearly 20 years ago: "Is anyone really ever happy at work?" They made an offer, I didn't accept. Nearly everyone in Corporate America looks visibly depressed. Doubly so in our new COVID world. Someone remind me what the point of all this is again? Because I'm not really sure I get it anymore.

catsarebetter 4y ago
Oh I like this haha
brtkdotse 4y ago
Came here from Twitter to upvote this.
- hn_version_0023 4y ago
  Honest question: why was this on Twitter? I don’t use Twitter at all.
  - brtkdotse 4y ago
    It appeared in my feed, not sure who posted it.
    - hn_version_0023 4y ago
      I’d love to see the context and reactions if possible? Thanks!

akhmatova 4y ago

"I see your job title says Program Manager / Product Owner / Tech Lead, but tell me please -- what is your real job? Remember, response time is a factor." Hoped for (but seldom received) answer: "Why of course - to be your 24x7 shit umbrella." Or some honestly inspired variant thereof.

lgleason 4y ago

One I alway like to ask is if they press charges ;). (For those who never saw it, this is from Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy)

olliej 4y ago

These all seem like the basic questions I'd be asking during any interview - with the exception of runway, because I don't like startup culture (though if I were applying I sure as hell would be checking this) - and I don't think I'm significantly different from people I've interviewed. I'm not sure why this guy's experience is so different from mine? I assume it's related to hiring/recruitment orientation (more junior/inexperienced folk?). The big one I could imagine is people failing to ask the "will the company still exist in 6 months?" question due to a default assumption that companies don't die?

tzm 4y ago

I almost always evaluate the company / team / product from an investor standpoint prior to joining any role (engineering or management). Most people find it funny, odd or refreshing to see conversations turn into an investment of time and resources etc.

autokad 4y ago

this is a really good list, I especially like "Who decides what to build?"

eschneider 4y ago

I started a job with a new company back in January. I understood what their product did and how things work need to work technically, but I have to say, it wasn't apparent from my initial research just how good a _business_ it was to be in. And yeah, getting the CEO to run through the business case for it went a long way towards selling me on the company (reasonable tech and nice people didn't hurt, either.)

conartist 4y ago

This is my favorite question to ask if I feel the company is a fit and I want to work there: - Now you've had a chance to get to know me, is there any reason you think I wouldn't be a suitable candidate for this role. Surprisingly people are super honest when I ask this and it let's you clear up an miscommunication or simply acknowledge that there reason is probably true and pitch how you would overcome it.

vfulco2 4y ago

Very strange, unsure what is going on, but I have not been able to access posthog site for 2 days. On/off VPN from mainland China.

sanj 4y ago

I wrote a version of this for recruiting almost a decade ago! https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1oD7MHHTHBkgkArtF2s8J9EoR-qd4Fj4niisH-0R8RiQ/edit https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1oD7MHHTHBkgkArtF2s8J...

arwhatever 4y ago

"What are some notable duties is the employee expected to perform, outside of software development?" I worked at one place that expected software developers to stock orders in the warehouse, and to take phone calls in the call center. "Tell me about a recent time the team was allocated time to resolve some technical debt. Tell me about a recent time the team was NOT allocated time to resolve some technical debt." I worked at once place which shifted from outsource to in-house software development, discovered that some of the primary html views of the website were built using a jumble of string concatenation, and to add a new feature using the existing string concatenation. "What percentage of my time will I spend coding in this role?" Worked at one place which assigned excessive non-coding bureaucratic duties to developers. "How often do you release software?" Worked at once place which did not release anything for the 1.5 years that I was there. "How do you incorporate the lessons learned partway through a project into the remainder of the project work?" Worked at one place that could not pivot due to inability to admit that they didn't have a perfect plan from Day 1. "Tell me about some advanced design patterns that you don't use." Worked on a team that used every advanced design pattern that mankind had ever given name to, each in 200 places without an iota of consideration to the costs that go along with the potential benefits. "Do you plan on shifting your entire tech stack into something else that can scarcely be considered software development?" Self-explanatory, but has happened to me 2x now, so be on the lookout. Fifteen+ years into my career, I've discovered that every job will give you one or more damn good reasons to move on, and each of these lessons above took 1-2 years to learn, so my latest strategy is just optimizing for pay rate. :-)

timoteostewart 4y ago

wayback machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220628135027/https://posthog.com/blog/what-to-ask-in-interviews https://web.archive.org/web/20220628135027/https://posthog.c...

raffraffraff 4y ago

Recently I've added some rather stupid ones, for reasons that should be obvious: 1. Describe your git branching strategy 2. Who releases software, how (is it packaged / deployed), and how often? 3. Do you have dev/test environments? 4. Do you keep configuration out of your code? How? Example: IaC. 5. Describe a typical incident. How do you find out about it, who gets the first alert, how does it get resolved and how (do?) you follow up afterwards? 6. What does the oncall rota look like? Follow the sun or (immediate end of discussion) 24h? 7. Do you have superheroes (people who have been around since forever, that everybody says "well I hope <superhero> doesn't get hit by a bus, because then we'd be really effed")? 8. What is the engineering staff turnover for the last 12 months? What about for the team I'm interviewing for? 9. What are the top challenges facing this team (and wider engineering team) right now? (Not only within their problem domain, but outside it, eg communication, coordination, outages, observability, direction)

hindsightRegret 4y ago

I agree with asking hard questions, but I think there's a limit to how much one can really expect an individual job applicant to determine the financial state of the company. For one, the people that are answering their questions are by pre-condition already drinking the company kool-aid.