
Favorite Interview Questions - feifan
https://firstround.com/review/40-favorite-interview-questions-from-some-of-the-sharpest-folks-we-know/
======
modwest
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.

~~~
hibikir
There's a secondary problem too: They are questions that have right and wrong
answers, and they break down quickly if the candidate realizes that the truth
is a liability.

Having been in panels where we had to ask some of those specific questions
(specifically for hiring managers), and then seeing how those managers acted
later on the job, the very worst hires (manipulative people who have no
interest in the company as a whole, but gaining power) always ace those
questions. The best hires of the lot, in practice, tended to give worse
answers with some red flags, and only double checking on said red flags showed
that yes, the rough edges in the answers were absolutely justified by their
experiences.

So I'd not ask those questions myself when I can help it, as I'd rather not
select for the best available manipulator.

~~~
modwest
> There's a secondary problem too: They are questions that have right and
> wrong answers, and they break down quickly if the candidate realizes that
> the truth is a liability.

Excellent point; thought-provoking and well-put. Agreed completely.

The article does have a few good questions, and the best, IMO, is #36:

> 36\. How would you build a product for people who are looking for an
> apartment?

That is such a good question because it's incredibly open-ended. There is no
wrong answer. It doesn't even necessarily require a computer-based solution.

If the interviewer moderates the interview well, a single open-ended question
with a broad scope can lead to wide-ranging conversations that shed light on
more than just technical prowess.

Open-ended questions also present the interviewer the opportunity to ask
spontaneous questions, digging into the thought processes behind a candidate's
choices. That digging can and should yield lots of valuable, relevant
information about the candidate. Assuming, of course, the interviewer has the
skills necessary to extract that value from the interview.

Ask "Why?" enough in these situations, and you eventually get something close
to the truth[1].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Whys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Whys)

~~~
wpietri
> If the interviewer moderates the interview well, a single open-ended
> question with a broad scope can lead to wide-ranging conversations that shed
> light on more than just technical prowess.

Yes, this is my favorite kind of interview question. These days my goal as an
interviewer is more to find somebody's strengths than their weaknesses. Nobody
knows everything; nobody's good at everything. So what I'm trying to figure
out in an interview is what this person can add to the team.

Sure, you do need to keep an eye out for red flags. But you won't find all of
those in an interview anyhow, because people can hide those. It's much harder
to fake a strength, and it's their strengths are ultimately what we hire
people for.

~~~
modwest
We'd probably get along well then.

------
romaaeterna
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.

~~~
patthebunny
> I hire a lot of people, and the difference between a good hire and a bad
> hire is hugely important.

This narrative is pushed constantly, to the point where it's started to lose
believability with me. It's used by large companies to justify their BS hiring
practices when the reality is a bad hire won't hurt the company that much.
It's used by small companies to justify nonsensical interview practices.

> 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?

I try not to display much of myself socially when I'm at work. I'm there to
work. I'll gladly go out for lunch and be friendly with coworkers, but it's
not hanging out with friends. It never will be.

~~~
marshray
This is not about being friendly at lunch.

Most jobs involve working with others. Due to the nature of 'work', it's not
always easy. The ability to work together towards a shared goal even in the
presence of pressures that would challenge interpersonal harmony is an
important skill.

~~~
patthebunny
Which you aren't going to judge in an interview without abusive and
humiliating tactics, which may not even work because at that point as an
interviewee I'm not trying to maintain a relationship and have no real reason
not to treat you like a jerk.

~~~
scarface74
I’m at a small company where we as senior software engineers often have to
deal directly with demanding customers. I have to know how to be tactful and
that’s something we filter for.

------
braythwayt
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
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.

------
colechristensen
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
After a certain point in your career diplomacy is important.

~~~
colechristensen
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
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.

------
lazyant
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.”

------
deeg
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.

~~~
foobarian
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
"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."

------
ahartmetz
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.

~~~
shantly
> 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.

~~~
hermitdev
I once got called while on vacation for a bug in a library I owned. Pressure
was coming down all the way from CEO and CIO to meet the "non-negotiable"
deadline in 6 weeks. I just laughed at first. We were already 6 months late
(my work, minus the bug) had been ready for 12 months at this point.

My boss was insistent that I return to the office immediately to fix the bug
in development. Thing is, I'd driven over 2000 miles and was about 30 minutes
from leaving the country (US into Canada).

Told my boss if he wanted me back in the office immediately, I'd hop on a
flight in Vancouver with just my passport and laptop, the company was going to
pay for my flight and I was flying first class. Also, I wanted all of my
vacation time back, they'd have to reimburse me for my chartered fishing trip,
then fly me back to my parents' so I could retrieve my car (I met up with my
Dad and he was driving when I received the call). This all went down on a
Thursday afternoon. Gave him an option: do all that I just laid out, or wait
until Tuesday when I'm back online, and I'll fix the bug remotely, then return
once it's fixed and ive exhausted the remaining scheduled vacation time.

He decided the 10s of thousands to get me back immediately wasn't worth it amd
it could wait a few days. Ended up extending my vacation by a week. So, non-
negotiable, my ass.

In the end, my big didnt hold up the release, and we slipped another 3 months.
I was just a convenient scape goat as a back office developer by the front
office devs at a hedge fund.

------
crispyambulance
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
“ 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.

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more-entropy
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
Yes it does. People aren't robots. You have to interact with your coworkers.
Communication matters. Full stop.

------
thom
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.

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

------
ryloric
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.

------
bespoke_engnr
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.

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

------
neilobremski
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.

------
gandutraveler
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.

------
jkingsbery
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.

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

------
bspates
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!

------
kreck
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)

------
Zenst
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.

------
newsbinator
> 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.

------
cjfd
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.

------
viach
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.

------
JustSomeNobody
> 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!"

------
ergothus
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.

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

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cryptozeus
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.

------
lepetitpedre
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?"

------
Myrmornis
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?

------
crsv
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
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
And yet most have no problem with getting asked leetCode questions to work on
yet another software as a service CRUD app.

------
siempreb
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
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.

------
reaperducer
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
> 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.

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

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

~~~
sanbor
That would be easy. Invert the binary tree it's the tricky one.

~~~
rvz
> 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).

------
hozefaa
shouldn't it be more output-oriented?

------
graycat
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.

------
patthebunny
> 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
I lol'd at "[...] they think I'm psychic". Nice one.

