
Ask HN: What is your faviorte interview question? - jax_the_dog
What is the best interview question you have asked&#x2F;have been asked? It can be either technical or professional. If possible please provide what you are looking for in a response from a candidate.
======
remyp
“Is there anything I didn’t ask that you wish I had?”

I recognize that I’m not perfect at interviewing and want to give people the
opportunity to brag about themselves and express something I might have
missed.

~~~
massung
I like this one. I'll have to add it to my list.

------
massung
So, this is from the other side of the table. Every place I interview, with
every person who interviews me (phone and in-person), I always ask:

"If there was one problem here that you could snap your fingers and magically
'fix', what would it be?"

Then I usually follow-up asking what they consider the "fix" to be.

If there's a systemic problem at the company, usually the answers among the
different employees will be quite similar. If I notice that, along with
possibly similar solutions proposed, as I interview up the food chain I'll ask
specifically about it. If I get a dismissive response, then I know to turn
down any offer.

------
jlangemeier
"What's something that you f*'d up on where you thought you might be fired for
it?"

Most any engineer or developer above a junior level position should have at
least one of these stories. It also gives you the chance to ask what they
learned, how they fixed it, what resources they used, what they did to prevent
it in the future, etc, etc, etc. It's also a really humbling moment to have to
explain one of your failures and will show you a lot of the person's
personality when they're explaining it.

The two big negatives I have seen with this question is either someone
becoming combative as you ask more questions, or they go full 'used car
salesman.' If either of those happen, you can safely run away screaming from
the interview.

This is a gut/understanding question that is best given/asked by another
technical user and has been a solid divining rod for interviews that I've
done.

~~~
dangwu
I’ve never been worried about being fired for something. Not everyone makes
huge fireable mistakes.

~~~
jlangemeier
Well aren't you lucky! And in my experience with this question, there's a big
difference between "felt fireable" and "is fireable", which also gives
insight.

I have my own go-to example that I'll use if they give back your type of
answer (which has happened). I messed up packaging a demo version of our
software that almost sank a 300k sale (~5% of revenue on the P&L for that
year).

Was I going to get fired? no Did 23 year old me think I might get fired? yes

Essentially it boils down to what's a large mistake you've made while employed
(or otherwise) and how did you resolve it.

------
acesubido
This:

"There's a feature you and several other co-workers are building. The deadline
is 3 days from now.

You and 'Co-worker A' are tasked in building a module of that feature. You've
already written several classes and tried abstracting some repetitive parts
that would allow you to hit the target deadline for the team.

However 'Co-worker A' has also worked on those same classes and wrote more
methods that are too tightly coupled and doesn't read well underneath. He
claims this is a better design than yours just to finish the feature and
doesn't budge on changing it during code reviews.

How do handle this situation?"

I like this question since there's a wide range of answers of how people deal
with conflict under pressure.

~~~
mcv
A deadline 3 days from now and we're still discussing how we're going to
approach it? Does it need to be in production? Does it need to be tested and
deployed? I think I'd first inform our stakeholders that we've got a delay and
are not going to make the deadline unless we drop this feature.

------
CVLinked
My favorite 2 interview questions are

1\. "What is the hardest thing you've ever done?"

The answer can be personal or professional. What the candidate accomplished
isn't as important as how -- and why. What were the hurdles? What were the
roadblocks? Did the candidate seek help? Does the candidate credit the people
who helped?

The answer also can provide insight into how the candidate defines "hard," and
how their perspective align with the challenges your business faces.

2\. "When have you experienced stellar customer service, and how did that
change how you deal with customers?"

This question is a great way to see how candidates define "stellar customer
service" \-- not just as they experience it, but also in the service they
expect themselves to provide.

------
muzani
Not a single question, but I find the best thing to do is just have a
discussion on the software architecture, business problems, organization
chart, etc.

When interviewing someone senior, they'll ask back a lot of good questions.
The good candidate tries to identify what props up the structure, whether it's
code or certain people. Especially in a startup, where sometimes even the code
owners forget that they have that big batch of unpaid technical debt.

The passive candidate is usually the ones we try to reject, because when
something bad happens, they won't flag it, and when you don't ask them to do
things, they just idle instead of improving random things.

------
EnderMB
"Tell me about a time when technology really pissed you off"

I usually word this is a more "work-safe" way, but I find that this question
has the benefit of both relaxing a candidate, and giving them a great
opportunity to talk about their experiences without a filter. I usually
follow-up with questions about the tech if it's not something I'm familiar
with, and some questions around what they did to get around the issue, or what
they'd do if they could change the particular bit of software.

~~~
jlangemeier
Piggybacking that:

"What's your least favorite feature of <language X> and why?" Where <language
X> is obviously part of the tech stack that you're hiring for. You can tool
the depth you're looking for in a response based on the level you're hiring
for as well on this.

Don't even get me started on the GIL in python...

------
gitgud
When should tests be written for code?

The answer will quickly reveal their methodology and how they approach a
project. Generally people don't use tests when prototyping. Some people use
tests when things break, others write tests before they code something.

Each type of response is appropriate for a specific role or business and that
question is good at determining that.

~~~
sgillen
> Each type of response is appropriate for a specific role or business

I feel like answering that testing needs to be appropriate for the use case is
the only "correct" answer to this question. If a candidate was overly dogmatic
about one form of testing that would raise red flags for me.

------
mstaoru
I like the YC question: please tell me about the time you most successfully
hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage? In my team I place high
value on resourcefulness, and seeing whether people can come up with solutions
rather than deferring to their superiors with every difficult situation.

~~~
bradknowles
Can you give me some examples?

Would it count if I had walked around the halls of the Pentagon, looking for
good stuff that people had left out in the hallway (and therefore presumably
excess and no longer wanted on their part), and then moved it to my office?

Or the time that the Team Chief of the Logistics Readiness Center in the
National Military Command Center had locked himself out of his own office and
didn’t remember the combination, and was supposed to be briefing the Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs in five minutes? All I did was brute-force the
combination, but I was able to do it quickly and he wasn’t too late to his
briefing.

Examples of the kind of thing you would be looking for would be very useful.

------
kosmodrom
Remember that interviews are also castings for new teammates so present
yourself as a person they would like to spend time with. So asking people that
you will be probably working closely with about their hobbies and interests is
a good way to find connection with them.

------
mustafaekim
"How do you think your contribution to the business can be calculated? Please
make me a step by step calculation so that hiring you is actually a good
decision for our business"

PS. we are small SAAS, hence any one's contribution can clearly be seen.
([https://www.testinvite.com](https://www.testinvite.com))

------
dizzydes
As an interviewee:

“What’s one thing you wish you knew before you started here?”

Makes the interviewer think and its hard to BS, so you’ll usually get an
memorable answer.

------
probinso
Starting from high-school, describe the professional path and motivation that
got you here. Feel free to go earlier, if it helps.

~~~
pepper_sauce
What does a good answer look like? It could be very easy to veer into a
"culture fit" bias against the working class with a question like this.

------
yitchelle
What's your biggest mistake and how did you recover from it?

It was for an Engineering Project Manager role. Yep, got the role.

------
gentran
After interviewing with my department head I went in to a second interview
with the VP of HR before they offered me the job.

He asked what my biggest failure was and that was very jarring initially.

------
java-man
when can you start?

~~~
gitgud
Appreciate the honesty and humor

------
randompi
Call me weird but I like IQ questions. They're fun to do albeit not a fair
judge of candidacy.

~~~
wikibob
And also illegal.

------
cvaidya1986
What motivates them and the intricacies of how their favorite technology or
company works.

------
kasey_junk
What do you want for lunch?

Interviews are effectively worthless for engineers. Figuring out where to eat
isn’t.

~~~
quickthrower2
??? so grab some peeps from the street and make them senior engineers?

~~~
dagw
What? The implication of interviews are worthless for finding the best senior
engineers is not to hire random people off the street. It's to hire people
based on their previous work, reputation and recommendations.

~~~
tptacek
Aaaah no, no no no. Hiring based on reputation and recommendations is also
terrible, and not just because it's tautological; it also doesn't work. The
industry is full of people with sterling reputations gradually failing
upwards.

------
aalindg
"What's your developer story?". Like, I ask them how they ended up being a
developer. Not something that helps me judge them, but the stories sometimes
are pretty interesting and sometimes shows if someone really loves their job,
or are a developer just for the sake of working.

