
Questions to ask at the end of a technical interview (2017) - wheresvic3
https://smalldata.tech/blog/2017/03/27/questions-to-ask-at-the-end-of-a-technical-interview
======
buddyp450
There's one important question I haven't seen on here that's saved me on more
than one occasion.

"Are there any concerns you may have that I can address that may lead you to
believe I'm not the right candidate?"

I've been able to address: lack of previous experience, lack of a degree, time
in between jobs, time spent at the last job, all thanks to this question.

~~~
dagmx
Personally I agree with the other reply that advises against asking this.

Everything in a job interview should be to frame you in a positive light.

I see way too many candidates try and play the humble route, and all it does
is sell them short. There’s a fine line between too humble and too full of
yourself , and neither side is good to find yourself on. This particular
question seems to me to be too humble.

Questions like this may seem like it makes the candidate seem humble and open
to feedback, but in actuality whenever someone has asked something like this
it has made them appear insecure and planted more seeds of doubt in the
interviewers mind since they now have to think about their shortcomings.

Maybe phrasing it a better way would help:

“What qualities are you looking for, for this role?” “Are there things you
think i should brush up on , assuming I get this role?” “Where do you see me
best being able to contribute in this role?”

Those questions give you the same data points, leaving you to infer where you
may be lacking. It leaves the interviewer with a sense of your confidence
without seeming too full of yourself, and generally the wording makes them
consider you as if you’re in the role, versus not in it.

Again, a job interview is a sales pitch. People should be honest while
balancing keeping the tone positive.

You wouldn’t sell a car by pointing out its flaws. Don’t sell yourself the
same way.

~~~
quietbritishjim
I don't agree that asking this question _is_ taking the humble route. Asking
if they have any concerns doesn't mean you think that they should. In fact
there's an obvious subtext that if they do have concerns then you can address
them, so they're not really valid. That's almost the opposite of being humble!

Personally I don't think it sounds either arrogant or humble overall, plus it
shows a willingness to discuss difficult things in a polite manner (at least
the question as stated above was polite) which is also a plus for a candidate.

~~~
sideshowb
Agreed. It's also engaging well with the meta game.

Related - Once viewing a house to buy I asked the seller, is there anything
you think I should know about this house that I haven't asked about. Their
reply turned out to be a deal breaker (at the time - maybe it would have been
fine but the point is we got a lot more information! )

------
lukevp
If anyone is interested in doing a mock technical interview, please reach out,
email in profile. I have interviewed developers since 2015. I’m currently a
software development manager for an enterprise with a team of 4 that I
personally hired, and 4 more contractors that I also interviewed and
validated.

I really enjoy the process of interviewing, especially junior candidates, but
companies understandably limit the feedback that is able to be provided to
candidates after the fact. With a mock interview, I can go through an
interview much the way I would conduct it for a real business, but I can
provide as detailed of feedback as you would like and we can have a
conversation after the fact about how the interview went, strengths,
weaknesses, etc.

I will provide this service in 2 different ways - if you would like to keep it
private, we can do it on a paid basis. If you are willing to share it with
everyone else, it is completely free to you and it will be posted online. I’m
hoping most people take the second approach as I feel that this could be a
valuable contribution to the community. I’ll provide more details on either
option if you’re interested.

Disclaimer: this is offered by me on a personal basis, and does not reflect
the opinions, thoughts, beliefs, or anything else from any employer I
currently work for or have in the past. This is offered purely for educational
purposes with a fictitious base company, and there is no job or result from
this interview other than some additional experience and knowledge.

~~~
hinkley
Around 2008 the company I worked for was bought by a huge company so it worked
out, but if it hadn’t we fully had a plan to get a group together to review
resumes and give mock interviews. Every blip since I’ve threatened to do so
and never have.

That was also the first company I ever _gave_ interviews for, and we grew a
lot so I did quite a few. To this day, one of the most surprising things I’ve
learned about interviewing on either side was how _terrifying_ being the
responsible party for a hiring decision was.

I was confident about digging myself out of any technical problem I got myself
into (or at least, I knew my strength, and to refuse situations I couldn’t
clever my way out of). But somehow the spectre of being the person who said we
should hire the new terrible coworker was daunting.

Fixing a crashing bug? No problem. Fixing _someone_ who writes crashing bugs?
Oh boy.

For quite a few years I recalled that feeling when I interviewed and it kept
me relaxed. I suspect it worked better than the advice to picture the audience
naked.

------
rickspencer3
I have been exclusively in leadership positions since about 2005. I usually
ask potential peers and ICs interviewing me: "if I were to get this job, what
is the first thing you would ask me to do to help you."

This question often helps uncover aspects of the real (vs. stated) culture,
helps me build a view of the problems and opportunities facing the
organization, and gives me a good chance to position myself as the kind of
person who can help them with their specific problems.

~~~
thewebcount
This is one of the things that really turned me off about interviewing at
Google. When I asked a question like that, they basically said, "Oh you won't
be working with me." To which I asked, "What team will I be working on?" Their
reply was, "Nobody knows. Once you're hired, you can figure out what team you
want to work on and what you want to do."

So, uh, what are you interviewing for, then? How do I know the team I want to
work on will accept me? Or if they even have openings? Can I speak with anyone
I'd be working with? I just gave up asking questions at that point because I
knew I would never be able to work in an environment like that.

~~~
jamespollack
Google tries to "remove bias" by not having you interview with anyone you
might work with or even people in your area. During my onsites for a VR role
none of my interviewers were VR people. It's "in case you want to switch
teams". Right, because I'll suddenly decide my passion isn't the interactive
stuff that I have the terminal degree in my field in, I'm going to want to do
backend Go stuff all of a sudden /s

Spoke with a recruiter a month or two ago about a Developer Relations role and
when I asked about the total length of process (because previous Google
interviews were 6 months), I was told that they actually don't even have any
of the Developer Relations roles that I was interviewing for available. If you
do get through the interviews, you just sit in stasis until they get a 'quota'
of more jobs to fill. There's no such thing as "figure out what team you're
going to work on". Talk about making you feel like a cog.

FB recruiter on the other hand recently said they interview and hire you, then
you'd have a rotational program for a while and you pick which team. Seems
more reasonable. But who knows what the truth of it is.

Recruiters will say anything.

~~~
Shish2k
(Full disclosure: FB Engineer, not in HR) - last I checked the standard thing
for engineers was to be hired for a very generic role (eg “software
engineer”); being interviewed by people with the same role. No aiming for (or
trying to avoid) any specific team (of the ~20 people who I’ve interviewed who
ended up getting hired, I think 3 of them ended up choosing to join my team?)

Once hired, there’s 6 weeks of training on all the internal tools /
architecture / how things fit together. During the final two weeks of training
(and a week after if you’re still trying to decide), you’d pick a few teams
who look like they match your interests and skills, spend a few days with
each, then decide which to join.

> Right, because I'll suddenly decide my passion isn't the interactive stuff
> that I have the terminal degree in my field in, I'm going to want to do
> backend Go stuff all of a sudden /s

I mean, that can (and does) happen… I’ve had teammates decide they’d had
enough of fighting buggy closed-source BIOS firmware so they go spend a year
working on live video streaming, then get into AI to learn something
completely new. I’ve no idea what percentage of people make large switches
like that, but it’s common enough that the process is well known and
supported.

------
chrisbennet
A question I like to ask is: "You've seen my resume', what new things do you
think I can learn here?"

I genuinely want to know this but I discovered a side benefit: the interviewer
often starts trying to sell you on the company, flipping the dynamic i.e.
you're not chasing them, they're chasing you.

~~~
hinkley
I kinda miss the Wild West days, when nobody had much idea how to interview
and we were all winging it. I got to interview myself a few times. People like
it when they get to talk about themselves, but you also get to run through
your values in question form and the clever will pick up on this. Oh this guy
cares about <practice that is interesting but not ubiquitous>.

The reverse does not work out. Just because they ask you a bunch of questions
about a topic doesn’t mean they are good at caring about that topic. Found
that out with testing a couple times, and I one memorable case not until well
after I accepted.

------
bas_ta
I usually let myself ask whatever I genuinely want to know about the company,
without sounding tacky. Some general quetions I ask is team structure, how
many team members will I work with, what will be my job in particular etc.

Some questions I ask the interviewer: "What is currently your greatest
challenge here at work?" "How long have you been working here?" "What do you
like about this job?" "Is there a programming language/technology you enjoy
working with and why?"

Some interviewers really like these questions and I think it's a nice way of
learning stuff along the way even if you don't get the job. The "favorite
programming language" questions gave me some pretty cool insights.

Also, I think it's better to ask specific questions. Rather than asking "how's
your tipical day?", ask "how was yesterday at the office?" People tend to
approximate, forget or just skip the details when answering generic questions.
Of course, they can always lie, but a specific question might just be a better
shot at getting the information you want. Also, questions about product
development workflow can say a lot about the company. I once got the same
answer to every single question about the company's internal processes and
communication: "It depends". They had no clue what they were doing.

------
kyuudou
"What would a typical day for me in my role look like from a high-level
overview?"

Hopefully it's not "well there's morning standup then another 3 meetings and
then another meeting and then you have 2 hours in the afternoon to do pair
programming in a lively open office environment"

------
akegalj
When interviewed for engineering position at Google 6-7 years ago I asked:

"How is the weather at OfficeWhereIAppliedTo?"

It was a really honest question because sunny weather is something that I
really care for as I am from mediterian.

The reaction was really positive - everyone was laughing and interview ended
in a very positive and relaxed tone.

At the end I didn't get the offer - but that's because I was too slow at
solving algorithmic problems.

~~~
rubans
If I was interviewing someone and they asked what the weather was like at the
office, I would just think they'd wasted a question on something they could
easily Google.

------
fickleycurious
Do you get so much time to ask these questions during an interview ? The
standard white board kind of interview goes on for an hour and you are
supposed to finish the coding questions in 45-50 minutes. That hardly leaves
any time for counter questions.

~~~
hinkley
I have vowed to someone I get advice from that the next interview cycle I will
force the issue. We even worked out that I might interview a few “practice”
places to get my patter down.

Thing is, I’m tired of talking myself into being excited about a vague
opportunity. It doesn’t matter if they love me if I know nothing about them.
And honestly, I’ve seen myself sabotage an interview that was making me
uncomfortable because I don’t want to be someone’s anecdote about the guy who
walked out mid interview.

So you might learn something more about me that changes your mind in the next
ten minutes but if I don’t know more about _you_ then it’s all for nothing.

The thing nobody wants to talk about is that psychologically, you already made
up your mind 20 minutes in, now you’re just trying to justify your decision.
I’ve seen people flunk a candidate for answering a question correctly and
recommend another for getting the same question wrong.

------
seansmccullough
“How many people have quit your team in the last 6 month? Last year?” Turnover
is a major red flag. Every hiring manager thinks their team is great, so
asking subjective questions like “how’s the on-call?” Probably won’t yield
useful answers.

~~~
croisillon
That's something I always (have to) ask because otherwise nobody will tell
you. At my current job it was particularly interesting because they started
explaining me why they were looking for someone ("had to" fire the difficult
person before) and why they were kind of afraid of getting someone as
difficult as the person before.

------
aaronbrethorst
Three questions I like to ask:

1\. What's your favorite part of working here?

2\. What's your least favorite part of working here?

3\. What question did I not ask that I should have?

------
lucb1e
I recently had a phone interview and while trying to figure out what I would
want from an ideal job, I was surprised to discover I had not _ever_ seen
anyone recommend some of the questions I came up with:

\- What is [your parent company] and/or [you, the subsidiary] doing to fight
the climate crisis?

\- What about diversity, how is your male-to-female ratio and are there many
colleagues of non-European heritage? Potential follow-up: Are there any
efforts to improve that?

(Of course, replace "European" with the region where most privileged people
are typically from in your area.)

There were obviously more things I cared about, but I realized that this is
one of the things I would want and should be looking for. I hope it may
inspire others to do the same, as it has come up in my current company that
nobody noticed that candidates are even looking for this sort of thing (and
so, "from a business perspective, why should we even try if it makes no
financial sense?").

------
sailfast
One thing I haven’t seen listed yet that is important to personal happiness:

“What does your change process look like?”

Do they have boards and paperwork? Pull requests and code? Engineer just
executes? Do they make technical decisions at the team level or require
further meetings / boards, etc.

Tells you a lot about the company both in terms of maturity but also in terms
of culture.

------
wmu
After series of interviews I compiled questions to employer, maybe that would
help others: [https://github.com/WojciechMula/interview-
questions](https://github.com/WojciechMula/interview-questions)

------
codingdave
These questions do matter, but the answers are not as important as "Why?"
Answers to such question will change as a product and company evolves. But how
did they get to those answers? What strategy drives their decisions? In short,
why do they use what they use, and do what they do. You should ask how they
evolved to this point, what struggles they are having, and where they may be
headed in the future.

Those answers will be far more insightful into who you are working with, and
whether you want to work in their environment.

~~~
jameshart
As a candidate, be very careful asking interviewers ‘why’ the company does
something in a particular way.

‘Why?’ Is an aggressive question.

When you hit your interviewer with a ‘why?’ Question, you put them on the
defensive. They have to justify that their company isn’t dumb, that there are
good reasons for doing it that way, that there even is a rational reason why -
when they may not know the reasons, they personally might even disagree, and
the fact is _there may not be_ a good reason.

And while you might think ‘I really want to know that sort of thing if I’m
going to be working there’, the downside is that to get that answer, you have
leave your interviewer with a bad taste in their mouth - ‘that candidate
seemed to be judging us for how we picked our front-end stack, and I felt
slightly embarrassed defending that we still use angular even though I
personally have been fighting a running battle to move to a new stack for a
year now’

And honestly, those are definitely not red flags right there. If your
requirements for joining a tech org are that you expect them to have made all
the same decisions you would have made if you were in their shoes, without
error, then a) your bar might be a _little_ high and b) what the hell do they
need you for, they’ve already got a team that can do everything you could
bring to the table.

~~~
alxlaz
> what the hell do they need you for, they’ve already got a team that can do
> everything you could bring to the table.

If that's the case, then why are they conducting an interview in the first
place?

I guess an argument can be made that it's counterproductive to ask
"aggressive" questions if you want to be hired. But then again, candidates
will likely be asked "why" they did something dozens of times in a whiteboard
interview. If someone can't take 10% of the pressure they expose their
candidates to, maybe they shouldn't be doing interviews in the first place.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to answer any "why" question that I'm in a
position to answer, and I always have, whenever a candidate has asked me one.
I'm wary about taking the mere act of asking a question as a good sign (or a
bad one) in the age of "Cracking to Coding Interview" and whatnot but it's the
kind of question that leads to useful discussion.

Sure, we weren't right about a lot of choices we made, and sometimes, in
hindsight, they were flat out indefensible, and we had to deal with the
consequences. That's part of software development everywhere.

If they ask that because their bar is too high and they don't want to join a
team that makes more than N wrong choices a year, fine, it's _their_ bar, they
get to set it wherever they like.

If they ask that just because they think questioning accepted practice is a
good idea, that's actually great. Lots of companies end up making one bad
mistake after another just because no one stops to ask why. And lots of
narcissistic team leads and managers don't want that kind of _attitude_ on
their teams -- if that leads to not being hired, that's a bullet dodged, not a
wasted opportunity.

On the other hand a question like this is a great opportunity to show them
that we're good at both leveraging our assets _and_ at owning up to our
mistakes. That's definitely a quality I'd be looking for in a prospective
team.

Edit: oh yeah, maybe some more general context is appropriate here.

One thing that took me a while to learn is that not every interview you don't
ace is a failure. I don't mean that in some personal development hoodoo way,
like the way to success is riddled with failures or whatever. I mean,
literally, that there are interviews which you don't ace, and that's a good
thing, because if you'd aced it, you would have hated working there, or it
would have been really bad for your career, or both.

It's one thing if you don't get hired because you lack the knowledge and
skills -- okay, you can work on that and try again later. But if you get
passed because you asked the wrong question (and that question wasn't
offensive or anything, _obviously_ ), or because you did not know that
_specific_ thing that a lead dev is _really_ proud about knowing, that's a
blessing in disguise.

~~~
jameshart
Oh, to be clear asking ‘why’ questions of candidates is also an interviewing
mistake. Adversarial questions are not good for communication in general.

I am literally saying that the mistake here is asking questions that use the
word ‘why?’ (Or, yes, weasel-wordy synonyms like ‘how come’ or ‘what’s the
thinking behind’ or ‘help me understand what led to..’)

These are all fundamentally cross-examination type questions, that ask someone
to justify their judgement. Most people believe they have good judgement. When
you question it, they close up. Or they second guess themselves, which means
you’ve undermined them and that changes the dynamic between you.

To learn something from an person the shortest path is not always to just come
right out and ask them about it.

So someone tells you they chose to use redux to solve a problem. Your first
thought might be ‘aha! I could learn a lot about what they value and
prioritize if I knew why they chose redux!’ And that’s a reasonable thing to
want to know. But if you ask ‘why did you pick redux?’ you throw down a
gauntlet that might stop you from really finding out. Instead, try coming in
from the other side: ‘tell me more about the context for that project. What
constraints were you under, in terms of time, preexisting code, dependencies,
team size? What did you know about the problem space going in? Was this when
you were learning react or already familiar?’ And take the conversation from
_there_.

~~~
alxlaz
Nine times out of ten, when someone asks "why did you pick redux?" they really
do mean some, or all of those things. Sure, they could phrase it better, but
their immediate professional future is literally being decided right then and
there, can you blame them for blurting out something silly, or misjudging how
much professional terseness is appropriate?

They don't necessarily do it out of terseness, either. Practically every
prospective intern out there has asked my "why" something (why Yocto? Why C?
Why no C++? Why Python? Why CherryPy? Why _shudders_ ClearCase?). These are
people who've never worked in a company before, expecting them to ask me what
contraints we were under, in terms of time, preexisting code, dependencies and
team size would be completely unrealistic.

Plus there's an endless list of reasons for any of these questions. Without an
open-ended question you can dance around the real reason for a particular
decision for way more than it's appropriate in an interview.

People aren't machines. Just because a (pop?) psychology book out there says
"why" is a cross-examining question doesn't mean everyone who asks you that is
subconsciously playing cop games or being a jerk. Accidentally adversarial, or
poorly-phrased questions, or questions that sound good in one's head and then
come off as rude as soon as they utter them are a reality of everyday
communication. Being able to deal with them is something that ought to be
expected (from both parties, of course).

Sure, sometimes people will ask "why" in an adversarial manner but it's not
the "why" that gives it away -- it's usually the arrogance, the condescension,
the adversarial conversation that _follows_ and so on.

~~~
jameshart
Right. People are bad as communicating. Stipulated. But this entire thread is
in the context of ‘here are some smart questions to ask at the end of an
interview’. And I am saying that adding ‘why?’ questions to that list as
follow ups is _not good advice_. The fact that people ask ‘why?’ questions
when they don’t know better is not a good argument for telling people that
‘why?’ questions are good questions to ask.

You can get to that information by expressing empathy and curiosity and
without challenging anyone’s judgement.

~~~
alxlaz
Why would it be challenging anyone's judgement? Just because it includes the
word "why"?

If the mere fact of asking an open-ended question, in an interview setting,
offends the interviewer, or makes them uncomfortable, to the point that they
don't want to hire you, I think that's a good outcome.

Yes, sure, unless your objective is to be hired at absolutely all cost,
anywhere, no matter how terrible. I know how that feels and I've been through
that. But if that's the case, and you really don't care where you work, there
are companies out there that will hire anyone who's even been in the same room
with a computer for more than five minutes. You don't need to ask clever
questions in those interviews.

And if, thank God, you're not in that situation, do you really want to work in
a place where people make hiring decisions over things like these? Suppose
they hire you -- sooner or later you're going to let a "why?" slip. If it's
okay to do that when you're colleagues, why wouldn't it be okay to do it in an
interview?

I definitely don't disagree that you _should_ be able to come up with
something more specific than "why", if only because it's likely to be more
useful. But being empathetic towards someone who will otherwise feel they're
being challenged because you asked them "Why are you using Yocto?" instead of
"What are the constraints that made you choose Yocto, and in what context?" is
unlikely to be useful IMHO.

------
vrutberg
I can agree that most, if not all, questions in the linked blog post are good
questions to ask any interviewer. I also feel that simply asking questions, no
matter what they are, is good as that shows interest and curiosity.

On the occasions where I have interviewed people that have applied for mid to
senior level positions I expect at least a handful of questions from the
candidate. Someone interviewing for a senior position but not asking any
questions comes off as a bit odd.

~~~
wongarsu
Asking questions also signals "I can afford to walk away", which is a
desirable quality (if somebody else would hire them, they can't be terrible).

------
b0rsuk
It's important to ask any questions at all, because sometimes it can be
revealing. In the last place I worked in, when I asked the second question the
boss told me we can talk on the way to the elevator because he had another
canditate soon. I took it at a face value, and it was a mistake. There were no
crowds applying for the company, later he even offered us a monetary bonus for
bringing a new employee. He was highly manipulative in various ways.

~~~
lucb1e
> he even offered us a monetary bonus for bringing a new employee

As far as I know, that is very common, at least in the places I worked. If
someone mentions in the interview that you tipped them about this company and
they are hired, a bonus of 500-1000 for each of you is what I would typically
expect the policy to be in medium to large companies. Their thinking is
probably that talent is hard enough to come by already and that recruiters are
way more expensive than that. (One company I interned at, I remember the boss
complaining how big a cut external recruiters get, though I don't know the
actual percentage it sounded like in the order of 10% of a year's wages just
for getting you in touch.)

------
phendrenad2
I like to ask questions that reveal behavioral and personality traits, and by
analyzing them can indicate competency as a coworker and cultural fit. I find
the attributes of my peers within the company to make a much larger impact on
my happiness than the attributes of management or the organization.

------
sneak
Related: [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-
test-12-s...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-
test-12-steps-to-better-code/)

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14037313](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14037313)

------
perlgeek
Another really good thing to ask is about culture. And not in the blunt "what
is your culture like?", but rather frame it as dichotomies.

Do you default to action, or default to inaction?

How do you value quality of code vs. speed of delivery?

Do you prefer your engineer to do pure engineering, or prefer to get involved
with the business side?

If you had a short production outage, and a root cause cannot be found easily,
how much time would the team spend searching for it (before giving up)? Would
that change if the same error occurred twice? Three times?

Questions like this that don't have an obvious, universal answer (IMHO) are a
really good way to get a glimpse into the culture.

~~~
skrebbel
> Do you default to action, or default to inaction?

This is the reverse "Where do you see yourself in 5 years". Don't ask
ridiculous questions like that, you know what answer you're gonna get.

~~~
perlgeek
I beg to differ. Startups tend to default to action. Lots of big /
conservative companies default to inaction. When you cannot judge from the
outside, you could get interesting results.

~~~
thefreeman
Is anyone really going to admit that they default to inaction though?

------
jamespollack
how come you have to ask this stuff at the end? wouldn't it make more sense
for this information to be provided up front? what does it matter if i'm
technically qualified for your job if your team size, structure, tech stack,
required availability, etc. isn't a fit? why would you wait until after a tech
screen for this? seems like a waste of everyone's time.

------
tomaszs
I know one question to ask at the beginning of a technical interview: what is
the point? Tech interview gives no information about a candidate, his
knowledge or skills. Its a horrible horrible idea to do it.

