- If someone gives you specs and you notice that something is off, what do you do?
- If you have to solve a problem you haven't solved before, how do you approach it?
- What's your take on accessibility on the web?
- What's your process like for deciding that you're at the point in your career where you can mentor others?
- What do you prefer to do when you see someone else getting nit-picked?
- You're just about to finish a feature and have a great idea for improving it. What do you do?
For all of these things, people will likely give different answers but those answers will tell me a lot about whether or not they would end up being really useful for the kinds of teams I build.
I really like the question about specs, and I'll definitely use that in the future when I'm on the interviewer side of the hiring desk. A useful follow up to that would be, "If I gave you a list of features, how would you go about estimating how long it would take to build them all out?" There is no perfect answer to that (as we know from the steady drumbeat of stories decrying the state of software estimation) but hearing how someone would go about solving a problem under conditions of uncertainty would tell give you a lot more useful information, in my opinion, than "What kind of relationship do you want to have with your co-workers?"
I have an itch to answer these for some unknown reason.
- What's your mechanism for bias self-check?
Debate. I like debating, I have to admit. It's a great way to sharpen one's logic. But, one has to careful to not get labeled as "argumentative".
- If someone gives you specs and you notice that something is off, what do you do?
I always have suggestions or questions on any non-trivial spec. I list them up and email them out to the project manager. I do try to be polite in my criticism, though. Example: "I'm concerned that X may confuse users. Here's an alternative to consider."
- If you have to solve a problem you haven't solved before, how do you approach it?
I try to ponder such longer than normal rather than go with the first approach that pops into my head. I may work on something else while the idea dances around in the back of my head. Sometimes I dream up solutions at night. It sounds cliche, but it's true.
- What's your take on accessibility on the web?
Managers and users often like fancy UI's that may run into accessibility problems. It's a tricky thing to balance. Eye-candy does "sell" a UI, and accessibility often hampers that. Sometimes I try to find ways to spruce up a UI that don't harm accessibility, such as improving logos or including interesting "side" graphics that don't interfere with the primary function.
- What's your process like for deciding that you're at the point in your career where you can mentor others?
If I feel I can help somebody without offending them, I will often just jump in and do task-specific mentoring. But I wouldn't want to do such full time.
- What do you prefer to do when you see someone else getting nit-picked?
I will defend them if their ideas or work have merit. If not, there's probably a reason they create team friction, and to be frank, they probably should change careers into something that's a better fit for them. Often times such people are not "bad", rather just in the wrong field.
- You're just about to finish a feature and have a great idea for improving it. What do you do?
I'll check with my supervisor. If I'm enthusiastic about the better variation, he or she will typically allow me to go with the better one once they know me. If time is tight, it may have to wait until the next version. I will work extra hours if I feel it's a compelling feature.
I don't like these questions at all. My initial reaction to these is: Why do you insist the candidate reads your mind? Some of the questions can be useful if rephrased to not require mind-reading the best range of answers.
The purpose of the interview for the interviewer: deciding between "no, don't hire this person", "maybe, we'll decide later with more data or after comparing with another person", and "yes, hire".
The purpose of the interview for the interviewee: deciding "yes/no, I want to continue with this company" and conditionally if yes trying their best to get the interviewer into the "yes, hire" state.
I'm only going to pick on one of these questions, but they all have the same problem in that they're not (to me) very effective means at fulfilling the purpose since they'll select for candidates most capable of reading your mind, not actually really useful candidates. When you ask "what's your take on accessibility on the web?", the candidate is thinking many things at once. Here are some: 1) do I have a take and what is it? 2) what's the answer the interviewer wants to hear? 3) if my answer is wrong does that make it impossible to get into the "no, don't hire" state? 4) will I know once I answer?
Maybe you want a take that says accessibility is important despite the added costs, because humanism or whatever. If they say accessibility isn't important, because the costs don't justify it, you put them in the "no" bucket. Or perhaps it's vice versa, or you analyze the issue through some other framework. Maybe you really just want to see if they can converse about it at all, and will devil's-advocate the opposite of what they say, and only put them in the "no" bucket if they can't converse or start screaming at you.
In any case, I don't think you're being fair to the candidate and you're likely wasting time. If you just want to test ability to converse, and don't actually care what they personally believe, state that in the question and don't ask for their actual belief: "I'd like to have a sort of philosophical discussion with you about accessibility on the web. Let's imagine I ask you ... and you feel ..." If you actually have a specific range of answers in mind that can put someone in the "no" bucket, put that information in the job description requirements. "Expected to design with accessibility in mind." fits the first of my maybes, "Expected to move fast and not spend time on non-MVP work like accessibility." fits the vice-versa. Presto, no mind games, no wasted time for everyone because it wasn't clear until you asked your question that you hold opposite views and thus this is a "no". Maybe you're worried about liars, which you have to be anyway since plenty of people apply to coding positions without being able to code, so you might ask a more specific question (like we do by asking them to code something) around accessibility that makes clear what conclusion you expect (it matches the job description) and that you're looking for some sort of reasoning for why that conclusion is such in their mind.
Maybe since you're mentioning "end up being really useful" (as opposed to just useful) you don't weigh answers to these questions as hard "yes" or "no" filters, but just "maybes" that you can subjectively reflect upon later (e.g. by adding up a bunch of "maybes" you've recast to point-weighted soft yes/nos that can cancel each other). Fine, you can still put "Bonus:" in the job description, rather than "Required:", so that candidates know ahead of time that if they can only get to the "maybe" state the presence/absence of those certain "Bonus" attributes will influence their chances of moving from "maybe" to "yes". If they're already uncertain about "yes", and see a lack of "bonus" attributes on top of that, they're likely to not bother, again saving everyone's time.
It's fine to distinguish between "really useful" and "useful". Questions that can distinguish between degrees of "maybe" between candidates aren't bad, but they should be back-loaded as much as possible, and only used when the front-loaded yes/no questions have been asked and you're still in a state of uncertainty about which candidate would really be better, lamenting that you only have the budget for one of them. How many of those do you get?
Not the OP, but I just wanted to chime in from an interviewer's perspective and describe how candidates should approach these types of questions.
Disclaimer: This is just my personal experience.
For starters, if you're asked a question that is directly relevant to your future work (e.g. "What's your take on accessibility on the web" for a Web developer), you're best served to state your honest opinion.
Do not try to "figure out the right answer." The right answer is the one you believe and you can defend. If that means your answer is "I don't know, I've never had to deal with it, but I know its important," say that and it helps improve the overall signal of the interview.
You might think of this as wasting time, but the interviewer is asking you the same questions that you'll be asked in your new job, but in a simplified form. Just be honest and try to treat the interviewer like a coworker as much as possible.
As I always tell my candidates, "there are no right or wrong answers in this interview."
(Once again, YMMV depending on who is interviewing you or what type of job you want.)
> As I always tell my candidates, "there are no right or wrong answers in this interview."
Yea, I've heard that one before.
At least at large companies, with complex (and sometimes written) culture, there are right answers to cultural fit questions. This is where it helps to know someone inside the company who can coach you on the specifics of the culture and help you to learn the right answers. At different companies, the culturally "fit" answer to "What do you prefer to do when you see someone else getting nit-picked?" can be very different! At one company, the better answer could be "coach the nit-picker on effective feedback" and at another, the better answer might be "help the nit recipient with their coding skills." Figure out the right answer for the company you're interviewing with and how to defend it in a way the interviewer expects, given your knowledge of their cultural norms.
Maybe I'm being overly pragmatic but as a candidate, your goal is to get the offer and if possible get the offer at their competitor, too. You're already facing a massive power imbalance. More offers translates into more choices and leverage as a candidate.
Personally, I do believe that there are no right or wrong answers, just right or wrong reasons. At least for the tech parts of the interview.
I like that you called out that culture fit questions often have right answers. I failed to mention that but it's definitely true. Ironically, the more "cultural" a question is, the more likely it has right and wrong answers.
(As a little background, I'm usually involved in the tech-eval stages of the interview. The "culture fit" is evaluated by other people at our company. So, I don't have a lot of experience with that, unfortunately.)
I think the wrong answer to a culture fit question is the one that doesn't reflect who you are. The answer they are looking for matches their culture. If you are hired because they think you fit the culture, and you don't, everyone loses. You won't keep the job because team friction trumps all other considerations in my opinion, and you'll be miserable. Find a place that where you are a match for their culture, and thrive.
Yes YMMV is my experience too following any of the suggestions. Sometimes I have hired the best and sometimes I have hired real snakes :) using such guidelines
I've been doing more giving than taking of interviews in the last years and think almost all the problems are on the interviewer side, but yeah, it's useful to speak to the candidate faced with this. My own perspective is somewhat different, and is really meant for these context-light scenarios, real scenarios will have a lot more context that will help both sides of the table do better at accomplishing their respective purposes. Anyway given that mind reading is impossible, and that you want the job, what to do? The answer is.. you have to guess based on the context you do have available.
There's not really a good general solution here, and you might guess in a way that really screws you up. It's easy for the interviewer to tell if the candidate is attempting a "just feed me what I want to hear" strategy, if the candidate has guessed wrong about what I actually want to hear, and now the candidate appears deceitful, a double-whammy. If they have guessed right, though, it's much harder for the interviewer to pick up on it -- which is why for hiring programmers at least it's common (even if rife with its own pitfalls) to do more objective things like asking for a demonstration of basic coding capabilities, because sometimes some people who must really want the job and have Masters degrees and can talk somebody's ear off in a confident enough way to get this far still somehow can't seem to program when asked, the primary activity we need them to do.
Life's not about maximizing the chances of getting a particular job, though. I like ethical policies of being maximally honest, even if you shoot yourself in the foot by revealing you're a bit crazy about homoiconicity or whatever... And generally speaking it's not a terrible guess to assume the interviewer just wants an honest answer primarily even if secondarily the content of the answer isn't what they were hoping for. It's also easy to execute on that guess, since it's usually easy to come off as honest if you're being honest. If the interviewer asks a question that does seem job related (like this accessibility example), honesty is also helpful in that even if your honest answer differs from the interviewer's expected answer, and you don't get hired like you wanted, you might have dodged a bullet by at least surfacing that the difference in opinion or expectations was apparently a big deal there before actually taking the job. Wasteful interviews are wasteful, but it's even more wasteful to take a job, start going through onboarding, and only then you and/or the employer beginning to realize things probably won't work out.
Though if the interviewer asks a loaded question, i.e. one which is well known to be a topic of contention in the industry, it's worth re-evaluating your guess and to respond accordingly. I wouldn't suggest ever outright lying, but the honest, direct answer might not be your friend and as with any adversarial conversation (interviews are not casual chats at a meetup with industry peers, even if they can sometimes feel structurally similar) giving too much information can be detrimental.
Example, the interviewer might toss out "So, tabs or spaces?" Maybe you honestly believe spaces, and maybe you also honestly believe this is something worth flaming about and are ready to go at it if the interviewer dares claim for tabs. You might reveal the basic answer of "Spaces", I wouldn't advise revealing the latter information. Here's an opportunity to guess the intent though, maybe the interviewer just wants to see if you'll try to be funny about the answer rather than answer directly. Ideally the interviewer would guide the interview so that whatever their intention is will be clear.
> "there are no right or wrong answers in this interview."
It's good to tell the candidates something about what your expectations are, that's my whole point! Though I might rework this one a bit. Some personalities would be instantly alarmed by such a phrase... For myself, I'd ignore it and proceed as normal, though part of me would want to ask "So you've already decided on yes/no? Want to regain the hour?"
> for hiring programmers at least it's common (even if rife with its own pitfalls) to do more objective things like asking for a demonstration of basic coding capabilities
I'm a developer but was previously a practicing attorney. If you think developer interviews are bad, you should try interviewing for a law firm. Outside of the objective but course metrics like law school rank and class rank, it's almost impossible to tell if a candidate will be a good lawyer or a bad one. Most interviews I was on and administered, we just chatted. The purpose of the interview was to determine if you could hold a normal conversation.
Fun anecdote about this. The morning before a law firm interview I cut myself shaving. It dried and the initial interview went well. But then we went to lunch, and when I wiped my face with a napkin, the cut opened up. I started bleeding all over the place, soaking my napkin in red. The people interviewing me told me to feel free to go to the bathroom and take care of it, but I said "no, I'm fine", and continued to literally make a bloody mess. That was the wrong answer. The right one was to be cool but handle it. I didn't get that job.
Thanks for the feedback! I can see how that phrase might seem alarming because it just explains what not to do, not what you should do.
I try to tell my candidates something like: "During this interview, my main goal is to understand what it's like to work with you as a coworker. We're not looking for specific right or wrong answers, but more to work together as allies to find the best design." (Background: My interviews usually take the form of pair programming or design discussion).
I'd be curious if you have any recommendations for how I could improve that. I definitely don't want to alarm anybody, if anything my goal is that you can relax and try to treat me like a coworker (to the greatest degree possible in an otherwise stressful setting).
edit: Random tip, although you probably know this already: If the interviewer asks "tabs or spaces?" the correct answer is usually "Whatever the existing code/linter uses." That's one of those questions that there is definitely a right and wrong answer for, because it's basically a culture question not a technical question, so it's one of those questions I always avoid asking :)
Another great answer for many things is "It depends". :)
I don't have an issue with your approach (I think interviewers who think about the issue at all and occasionally tweak things are going to do better than those who don't) and the fuller version makes it pretty clear that the goal is to create a feeling of getting along well. For many companies the candidate is also interested in that information, but at other companies it doesn't really matter because if hired the two won't actually work with each other, or it will be brief as the new hire changes teams.
I don't do pairing in my interviews but I've thought about it. Before doing it for real I'd want to pair with a coworker on a problem neither of us have solved before, which will happen naturally if pairing is part of the company culture, then pair with them later on a problem I had previously solved but they had not, and see what differences in my own behavior (if any) appear when I have one of the possible solutions in mind. That's my main concern with doing it with a candidate, that the balance on one side of the pair for driving things is just not natural to the usual setting.
You could eliminate that concern by always using a novel problem to yourself (I've got a handful of problems I know something about but have never tried to solve, I do think it'd be fun to try and solve them with a candidate) but then there's the secondary concern in that by the end of it do you really have anything you can say besides "I do/do not get along with them and think we'd work well together"? I like to be able to say a little bit more than that, and also to create the opportunity to say "I like both of these candidates, can't say which one more, they both passed the threshold of solving the problem's basic case, but this one's code covered an extra edge case without me pointing it out." It happens that sometimes I can't even say that, of course, and multiple candidates are equivalent on the criteria I measured. But sometimes it's fine, you just care about some basic threshold, and you can just extend the offer to the first person that satisfies. I think this is probably the case more than many companies big and small want to admit.
> "Anyway given that mind reading is impossible, and that you want the job, what to do?"
> "Example, the interviewer might toss out "So, tabs or spaces?" ...and maybe you also honestly believe this is something worth flaming about ... I wouldn't advise revealing the latter information. Here's an opportunity to guess the intent though."
To me, this reads as "if you want the job then you [should/are entitled to] misrepresent yourself to bypass the filtering mechanism". If that's the case, then your whole reply reads as a complaint about how hard it is to cheat when anti-cheating tactics are in place.
>> the interviewer might toss out "So, tabs or spaces?" ... maybe you also honestly believe this is something worth flaming about ... I wouldn't advise revealing the latter information.
> this reads as "if you want the job then you [should/are entitled to] misrepresent yourself to bypass the filtering mechanism".
I don't think so... it's more like, if you have a deeply held viewpoint, can you effectively work with others who have different viewpoints? If you can strike a compromise or convince them to change, that's the best. If you can bury your differences, that's not ideal but at least workable.
Given the spaces/tabs example, if you are sincerely passionate about using spaces instead of tabs, and you're able to convince a tab-user to switch to spaces without upsetting them, that's the best, demonstrating leadership. Almost as good, is if you can explain how much you like spaces but have happily worked together with tab users (tabbers?). Finally, if you say you like spaces but you're happy to keep silent about it (or if you don't mention it at all), that's not as good as the others, but probably fine too.
Any company that values innovation should encourage differing viewpoints to be raised, but not to the point that it becomes a distraction and hinders overall productivity.
If one of your strongly held beliefs is "spaces over tabs" and you think that belief is information that has sway in the interview AND you take the advice to not reveal the information, then how are you not misrepresenting yourself?
You're answering like a person who doesn't hold strong beliefs to a question designed to identify strong beliefs, knowing that you are a person who holds those strong beliefs. Is that not misrepresentation to bypass the filtering mechanism?
We might be talking about slightly different things - if you have a strong belief then I agree you should try sell it, and doing so would demonstrate leadership qualities.
> If one of your strongly held beliefs is "spaces over tabs" and you think that belief is information that has sway in the interview AND you take the advice to not reveal the information, then how are you not misrepresenting yourself?
In your example, yes, you would be misrepresenting yourself. But the OP's example is different. Anyone who believes strongly in "spaces over tabs" would/should also know how many silly unproductive flame wars they've started, and also how there may be reasonable arguments on either side. If you do indeed believe strongly in something, then by all means go ahead and say it. But you'd better be able to talk about it intelligently and have considered both sides of the argument. If you're not as educated on the subject, then it's probably not the best idea to wade into the subject during an interview.
That's all this is. Just know your own positions relative to others.
I'm not sure how you're relating anything there to commentary on cheating...
My complaint is with interviewers and their wasteful, unfair hidden criteria. You could phrase it as a complaint that interviewers make use of filtering mechanisms that are impossible to know about without the ability to read minds. There's not necessarily anything wrong with certain filters per se, but it's important the candidate be aware what they are, as early as possible -- if it's in the job description this allows for candidate self-filtering, even.
My advice to interviewees who nevertheless have to deal with such hidden criteria isn't "just always be honest!" but "since you can't mind-read, you have to guess at the hidden criteria, sorry."
I'd suggest being honest as the default, especially if you have no good guess what the real criteria is, or if you're not even presented with anything that gives you a whiff of a hidden criteria being present. But you can be honest without also going into details about grandpa's barn incident. Sometimes you do have a good guess into the interviewer's mind, though, or at least a sense of "reading the atmosphere". (Some interviewers explicitly use hidden criteria but drop more and more hints throughout the interview to eventually reveal it, hoping the candidate notices on their own first.) It might indicate that you should answer the question with a silly meme that came to mind, instead of directly. Or hey, maybe now you realize those details about the barn would be helpful to elaborate on after all. You might also want to adjust your posture if you're getting the sense that they don't appreciate slouchers here, which would be a hidden criteria applied to the interaction itself rather than a particular question.
I wouldn't advocate misrepresenting yourself, but it's standard advice to represent yourself in the best light you can.
"Why do you insist the candidate reads your mind?"
The Guess What I'm Thinking strategy to dating, err, job hunting.
More fun than the brogrammer Mensa puzzle bar-raiser hazing ritual.
But whatcha gonna do? We still have to play the game.
My last crash and burn was in response to "Give us an example of a disagreement and how you handled it." So I did. I'm honest to a fault.
[Non-programming manager specified a buzzword compliant "architecture" that simply didn't work. We tried, but every JMS we tried failed under load testing, and the upstream wouldn't accept our PR. And we had run out of time. So I came up with something super simple which just worked, as-in couldn't fail. And it flew and was easy to debug and turned out great, a major selling point. But I kinda didn't actually tell the manager we didn't use JMS, at the time. Who cares? It's internal (non-customer facing). Further, the manager was an erratic maintenance alcoholic, and I just wasn't up for another food fight.]
These two interviewers lost their minds. Incredulous. Couldn't let this go. Repeatedly hammered me on this point. The shift in mood was dramatic.
Definitely not in the "better to ask for forgiveness" camp.
Weird, for a startup.
So while both party thought the other insane, I think the interview questions worked as needed, preventing us from working together.
> they're not (to me) very effective means at fulfilling the purpose since they'll select for candidates most capable of reading your mind, not actually really useful candidates
This is an important point, and it can be difficult as an interviewer to prevent your own self bias to select candidates that respond how you would personally respond.
That being said, I don't think this criticism applies to all the suggested questions. "If you have to solve a problem you haven't solved before, how do you approach it?" seems like a fairly easy one to identify learning methods and response to new problems. Although, a variation of this question was in the original linked article as well (#3).
As you note it's pretty similar to #3 which is blasted elsewhere in this thread; a sufficient enough argument against it for many companies is that it's of lower value than the technical portion you're forced to give anyway which actually involves the candidate solving a (hopefully novel in some respect) problem.
But as quoted, "If you have to solve a problem you haven't solved before, how do you approach it?" -- my beef with this is it requires mind reading to hit the range of good (to the interviewer) answers. Sure they're asking it to "identify learning methods" or whatever, but that's not a criteria, that's the information they hope to gain, which can have a range of values some good and some bad. What values are good, what values are bad?
At least with technical problem solving challenges, even if the interviewer uses questionable hidden criteria ("ahh, you didn't put the { on the line I wanted you to!"), there's one very visible criteria no one can disagree on, which is whether the problem was solved or not.
If I answer the non-technical version (possibly the same way I might answer the submission's #3, "ok let me tell you about this one problem for which I was initially out of my depth...") but never once mention "ask for help", is that a good sign or a bad sign? I don't know. In some interviewers' eyes, that's an instant-no, for a variety of plausible sounding cultural fit reasons. ("Egotistical", "Not A Team Player", "Hubris.") In others', they might not care if that came up or not. There are lots of alternatives here.
If I say or don't say "Google for how others approached it", good or bad? "I start trying to model it with TLA+..." -- maybe good/bad because of formal methods, maybe good/bad because of unknown (to the interviewer) technology, maybe good/bad because immediately attacking the problem? Reasonable people can believe any of those positions, I don't know without mind reading what the interviewer believes and whether if I believe opposite that's going to scuttle my chances and make everyone regret the sunk time so far. "I grab the nearest whiteboard and start drawing/chatting out the unknowns with another engineer or PM", "I try writing some unit tests"... how big of a problem are we talking about anyway? How unfamiliar is it, anyway? Have I solved something similar even if not exactly the same? What category does the problem naturally fall under? ("I think back through my Polya and try to apply it here..") Maybe the question is really just thrown out to see if I'll answer the question with a question? (Might be good or bad.) Maybe the intent is kind but not executed well, and what I say doesn't matter in the slightest with the question only meant to break the ice, get me talking, and hopefully get past any initial nervousness. (Resume questions are better for that though.)
#3 in the submission is kind enough to point out that companies usually have a hidden criteria for this question:
> The actual problem they describe is unimportant; what matters is how they approached it and how that attitude aligns with your company's values. Some companies stress the importance of teamwork and asking for help, while other companies encourage independent troubleshooting and initiative. Make sure that your candidate can fulfill the job's responsibilities by using the resources available.
Ok, as the candidate, how am I supposed to know without reading the interviewer's mind that the actual problem I bring up is unimportant (some companies actually might want to hear about a cool problem and reject you if you haven't solved anything cool enough -- some hiring processes includes giving a whole presentation on some project you did) and how much it will hurt me if my answer doesn't match their view on the relative value of teamwork vs going it alone? The hint is in the final sentence: make explicit the company's preference, whatever it is, in the "Requirements:" or "Responsibilities:" section of the job posting.
I'm not against culture fit questions in general -- it's important to like the people you work with and reasonable people can very strongly hold that "team player personality" is a hire/no-hire criteria even if I disagree -- I'm against making the criteria of the fit hidden in the interviewer's mind. If there's sufficient context (this paragraph is also acting as a reply to the sibling comment) like the nature of the company¹ or the requirements/expectations laid out in the job posting or relevant "about our company" materials, then even these questions asked as-is can be ok, because the prepared candidate can easily infer what the expected response should be instead of having to read minds. Somewhat fruitless though, since then you're really only testing candidate preparedness; people who would give you "bad" answers would have already filtered themselves out and not had anyone's time wasted. But I would never ask the questions as-is even with the context of a job posting. Were I to ask similar ones, I'd instead rephrase them in a way that the context is explicit in the question, the real criteria and what I'm hoping to hear about is revealed. This also makes it safe in the common case of disconnect between the interviewers and whoever wrote the job posting.
¹Though I have no idea what Bain Capital is about I would not be hasty concluding one way or another about an employee's feelings on web accessibility. I'll note that their home page loads and renders great in Links.
If a candidate says accessibility isn't worth the added costs and they're interviewing at Bain Capital, well they're probably a good culture fit and the answer put them in the yes column. If the candidate said that, I don't know, while applying to a prosthetic design company they probably aren't a good culture fit and go in the no column.
How can you even answer any of these questions except with fluff and bullshit if you want to be hired? Google is supposed to be a data-driven company, but it's impossible to extract any information out of bullshit, bullshit by definition is orthogonal to observable reality, it is neither truth, nor falsehood, it's pure empty words.
I’m interviewing 20+ candidates a month, and I have to say: these questions are really good to understand a person. It’s almost impossible to answer questions like 3 and 4 with fluff or BS, because they are asking for actual cases. This case-based interview technique allows you to go deep into the way people act, how they argue, how they try to influence people, how they view themself.
It’s important to understand that these questions are just the starting point of a conversation to understand how a person thinks and acts. It’s impossible to make things up with a good recruiter because there’s no way you know beforehand how deep and where he will go with his follow-up questions
Actually, I'd argue its very easy to dream up entire situations and completely lie about the kind of experiences these questions are asking about. Not saying I've done it in an interview before, but that's my honest opinion.
I'd rip you to shreds on that one. It's my second favorite question and after an innocent opening of "What project was the most exciting one you recently did?", I'm usually launching a barrage of follow-up questions that zoom in and out all the time, like:
- Why were you selected for the team and who selected you?
- What were the biggest challenges the team faced?
- How did you measure you were doing the right thing and you did good work?
And on and on, always drilling down on their answers. It's close to impossible to come up with BS on the fly at that speed and pressure.
This really splits the wheat from the chaff and pure talkers and "team players" who didn't actually contribute anything to their teams' success stand there naked.
> I'm usually launching a barrage of follow-up questions that zoom in and out all the time
I would probably fold under this style of questioning even when describing a completely true and even interesting project that stands apart from the random grunt work I usually do. When interviewing other people myself, my style is borderline diffident while asking the candidate, to reduce the chance of nervousness/anxiety influencing their answers.
That being said, I love Justwatch, so clearly your techniques are throwing up some good candidates. All the best! :)
(*) I‘d rip you to shreds if you tried to make up a story on the go.
Happened to me about three times during way more than 300 interviews.
About ten times more candidates actually thanked me for the nicest and most informative interview with actionable feedback they ever had with a company. YMMV.
Looks like I was triggered a bit by parent, it‘s always interesting how much more unbalanced any nuance comes across in writing.
Other than that, I stand by my technique, but it‘s mainly a question of tone. The first whole paragraph of my carefully A/B tested script solely concerns itself with making a candidate comfortable, as interviews prefer natural extroverts.
90% of that time, this question actually ends up in a mutuably enjoyable conversation.
>> Happened to me about three times during way more than 300 interviews.
Yeah - because the other people would simply prepare for their interview, be it bullshit or not.
If I were to come to your interview and were to bullshit you - I would have spent enough time in front of the mirror trying various ways of copying the behaviour of people who did all the work for me. It's not that hard to build up a story once you know where to start from.
>> Other than that, I stand by my technique, but it‘s mainly a question of tone. The first whole paragraph of my carefully A/B tested script solely concerns itself with making a candidate comfortable, as interviews prefer natural extroverts.
I don't know. There are loads of issues I had to deal with and I don't remember how I did that any more. There are even more issues which I would completely agree were "dumb decisions" but be absolutely logical if I looked back and realised were political decisions. Now, if you allowed me to look back at my IM history/code comments and see why I did what I did.
>> 90% of that time, this question actually ends up in a mutuably enjoyable conversation.
So basically what you're testing your interviewees for is how much they have prepared for interviewing with you (they're happy because they were preparing for your questioning/you're happy because they made the right answers). The question is whether their ability at being interviewed correlates with their ability to excuse themselves from doing the job.
> So basically what you're testing your interviewees for is how much they have prepared for interviewing with you (they're happy because they were preparing for your questioning/you're happy because they made the right answers). The question is whether their ability at being interviewed correlates with their ability to excuse themselves from doing the job.
No. All I'm asking them is to come up with a single interesting project within the last three years that they did, be it professional or even a fun one and have some conversation over it. If they didn't do any remotely interesting work or can't talk about it at a high level, how could I possibly expect them to come up with own ideas or communicate about them in the future?
Other than that, you'd be extremely surprised at how little candidates actually prepare on average, even if I tell them in advance exactly what happens in the interview and what I'll be looking for (which I do).
So I do respect your points, but I don't really get them. You may be right. I'm getting the results I want and my teams are happy and productive.
Here's a mail from an interviewee last week:
> Thank you so much for the response! I would have loved to work with you guys, but I do understand. The experience was very helpful to me anyways, [...] Thanks again, and maybe we will work together in the future!
That's fair. I'd just assume that even the good, honest candidates will eventually feel like an interview like that is more of an interrogation, and decide not to come back because their manager doesn't trust them.
Please note I'm not trying to make a personal attack here, my interview style has pretty much always been to keep things simple, straight, and to-the-point. Additionally, most of my interviews are technical, so sorting out behaviors is usually secondary, and the technicality is usually enough information to select candidates on.
I also think pressing in this manner is likely to select less for the honest and more for people able to bullshit their way through better than the interviewer can keep up. Even if the interviewer has a high opinion of their ability.
>- Why were you selected for the team and who selected you? - What were the biggest challenges the team faced? - How did you measure you were doing the right thing and you did good work?
This is again pretty easy to BS. Most people aren't going to completely make something up. Rather, they'll tell a 10% lie where they make up the most critical bits, then fill the rest with "truthful" content based on how things actually work on their company.
Let me turn the tables:
- What's your hit rate? (Detected an actual bullshitter)
- What's your false alarm rate? (Labelled someone a bullshitter who wasn't)
- How did you arrive at these numbers?
- What's your hit rate? (Detected an actual bullshitter)
All of them, I definitely had a few bad hires, but never due to underestimating capability, also most of them were from the early days.
- What's your false alarm rate? (Labelled someone a bullshitter who wasn't)
I see no way to come up with any good number for that, but I think at ~10% hiring rate from the interview I'd call myself pretty average from a perspective of selectiveness at that part in the funnel.
> This is again pretty easy to BS.
This is not the point of the question, I could care less whether 10% are slightly beautified. My focus with this questions and the follow ups are whether candidates can reproduce insights, learnings, hacks and fulfillment of business objectives in a logical and coherent way. If the story is fabricated, it usually falls apart when I ask "why" and "how did you actually do it?"
It's hard to fake expert knowledge about the stability of current sources when I drill down on the details of a candidates' recent Arduino project.
That's not fair or accurate. They said they had a basis for concluding they didn't fail to catch BSers - experience with hires afterwards. They also said they could only guess at the number of false positives.
That means they supported their conclusion where they made one, and refrained from a definite conclusion where they couldn't make one.
>"This really splits the wheat from the chaff and pure talkers and "team players" who didn't actually contribute anything to their teams' success stand there naked."
I would argue that your style and attitude would make quality candidates question why they would want to work for someone who views interviews as a full contact sport. Is "ripping people to shreds" part of the culture at Justwatch(your profile states your CEO and Cofounder) then?
Yes, getting edgy over a generic culture fit question struck me as cultish as well. Word goes around, people talk to each other and some candidates will stay away.
Not really. It is usually based in some level of truth, but a good story teller can always work their way around it. The person isn't coming up with BS, but is converting "this is what we would have done" to "this is what we did".
The ability to answer such questions often comes down to how good of a storyteller someone is, rather than the actual value of their experiences. One of my close friends hate BS answers, and will never use tangential experiences to structure an appropriate answer to such questions.
I do not know the degree to which you go in depth with, but a couple of follow up questions is no biggie.
> - Why were you selected for the team and who selected you? - What were the biggest challenges the team faced? - How did you measure you were doing the right thing and you did good work?
So much opportunity for confabulation here. It is ENTIRELY possible to have the brain come up with faux-rationalisations and half-truths. We're literally wired for it. You'll end up biasing towards people who can accurately discern what you're optimising for and mould their words to suit.
Whenever I am asked that in an interview, I am usually puzzled if their workplace is some sort of magic kingdom where great tasks are falling from the sky or I am missing some kind of skill to navigate my previous jobs and make my menial tasks more interesting.
Question 3 is my least favorite because I feel compelled not to lie. If I decided to lie, I'm sure I could concoct a story to sound really impressive.
Most of the problems I solve are along the lines of 'some edge condition that wasn't accounted for in the code, often by someone else, and I spent a day figuring it out and fixing it' and there's not generally a lot of complexity or depth to it. I'm from a systems engineering background, so most of what I do is preventing large headaches in the first place. I've worked for large companies, so we hit stupid platform bugs, you won't believe this: we actually had dev and stage environments where we caught most things. Most of the problems were 'developers new application version is crap, please fix what we broke' type of stuff.
The other limiting factor to working on large orgs is you generally have actual support contracts with vendors. Oh, my packets are leaving the interface but not arriving at the destination? Well, network team looks into that, cause you know, there's an actual network team. And then when they determine everything is setup right, they forward to the vendor. And then Cisco is like 'looks like these network cards are crap, buffer overflow, new firmware' and then it's problem fixed.
Anyway, writing all this has motivated me to construct something fancy about metrics and latency.
As I see it, you're assuming that the person doesn't know their own flaws and isn't capable of observing others in detail. I know which things to redact from my stories because they'd make me look worse. I also know which pieces to fill in from how others have behaved in similar situations or from reading about how others have behaved.
The last time I got asked a question like that at an interview I blanked out. I was trying to think of one that I thought would sound positive to the interviewer.
Probably next time I am going to interviews I'll grab a few lists like this of questions and prepare answers. Not lies but some cues and reminders that I don't have to search for under stress.
Unless you spend a lot of time with these candidates after interview, enough to really know them as persons and see whether you was right or wrong, you don't know whether these questions allows you to understand them.
Of course not. But the interview is all we got. You’ll make many mistakes. On both sides, hiring the wrong people and not hiring the right ones. But in my experience case based interviews reduce that number heavily.
>How can you even answer any of these questions except with fluff and bullshit...
That's so funny, I read these question's and though I could consolidate them into a single question:
"How well can you bullshit and talk about things entirely immaterial to work?"
Seems a lot of people are chiming in to say how great question #3 is (how do/did you solve a problem at work)...I've gotten this in interviews and told them the Mad Men/Don Draper story of needing a new ad for my client "Lucky Strike" because the attorney General was going to prohibit our existing ads, complete with the pitch how I convinced the client its the greatest opportunity in marketing, asked them how they make their product....stopped them in their tracks, said that's it: "Its Toasted". Interviewers seem to love that story, and if they have seen Mad Men they seem to love it even more. Other times I told them about selling Mangos when I was a child...they love that one too, nothing more bullshitters love than other bullshitters.
These are generally interview wildcards. It can be used against you regardless of how you answer (assuming you didn't show an obvious red flag like call your former manager a fuckhead) or used for your benefit if someone needs a bit more leverage to get you on the team.
My take is that you need to project the image of a professional, match your resume experience, don't be combative and basically show that you can be a valuable drone. Even the fact that you can bullshit this with a straight face and not go candid on the interviewer is a positive data point, as that's basically 80% of working in a corporation. But again, the hiring manager can cherry pick positives/negatives based on what he actually wants to do.
Except that these questions are asked by SWEs who don't like these questions and don't support this idea in general. So there is a interview where one SWE asks another SWE a bunch of behavioral questions, takes notes, then goes back to his desk and writes an full interview feedback with ratings. Then a hiring manager can look at these ratings and make a decision. There is no recording of the interview. In general, SWEs just evaluate the candidate on basis "can we get along? Do I want to want with him?" and if that's the case, the interviewer gives outstanding ratings and completes the interviee's answer to match them with definitions for those ratings.
Even better, yes. The hiring manager often reads a bunch of notes and creates a narrative to support his already made decision.
For example, a SWE will write this type of blurb:
"I asked the candidate to tell me about a time when he dealt with an unresponsive or slow responsive co-worker. He told me he leveraged the project tracking tools to assign bugs/tasks with ETA deadlines after following up offline and explaining the dependency and urgency, then set up meetings and when he was ignored and everything failed, escalated to management and used plan B to work around the dependency"
I want to hire the guy: "He definitely has bias for action, removing obstacles and using all tools at his disposal. He seems to have a no-nonsense approach to getting stuff done"
I don't want to hire the guy: "Seems like a yellow flag, doesn't demonstrate influencing skills which are critical for a senior engineer. I don't believe he works well with others"
etc..
It's the same with the Amazon leadership principles. They are often used as a tool for fucking someone over in office politics warfare.
Keep in mind that this is a marketing blog post for a fairly simple hiring platform.
The target audience for this is small to medium businesses, not corporations or competitive startups, who would be potential customers. It's more of a starting place for people who do not think about this much.
My guess is that HN is not the target audience for this blog post, so take what the simplicity of what is said with a huge grain of salt.
SMBs hire at lower frequencies, have less standard practices, and more often than not have people interviewing who are not trained or prepared to do so. Larger businesses or competitive startups also have on staff or outsource to professional recruiters.
> How can you even answer any of these questions except with fluff and bullshit if you want to be hired? Google is supposed to be a data-driven company, but it's impossible to extract any information out of bullshit, bullshit by definition is orthogonal to observable reality, it is neither truth, nor falsehood, it's pure empty words.
Noise might not contain information but the presence or absence of noise does.
I always think of it as -
What a sentence denotes is rarely reliable information;
but the fact that the sentence was stated means something, with the right context, including a model of the speaker/writer.
Someone says "X" and it doesn't tell you a thing about whether "X" is the case, but it always tells you they wanted to tell you "X" for some reason.
It's asking you to deconstruct yourself before you even begin work. You are not allowed to come into a new group of people working with your preconceived notions on how to work effectively or work well with other people, you must be asked questions that kick your brain out of work mode and start making you work on your own character instead. You are to be hazed and integrated, a threshold guardian needs to be passed.
People with a reputation for getting results get to skip this step, the bottom line matters more than your character. But any company will hold up a boundary at the door to make sure you fit the mould, or at least don't sink the ship.
The fundamental problem of bringing the unknown into the known has to have some boundary, what that is that makes sense usually just rides a trend wave. Character and behavioural stuff is all the rage right now. It'll pass onto other things soon enough.
To be fair, these days I'm not interviewing for Google, but for another large tech company. I'm not asking obscure "gotcha" questions. I'm softening them up and digging under the superficial to get unguarded answers to my questions.
>Rather than downvote, instead reflect on the fact that if you interview, you'll often be on the receiving end of this. And think about how to prepare.
Eh - none of my good jobs had this style of interviewing. I'm not sure I'm missing out on anything.
I am gauging the interviewer from a human perspective, and you're exhibiting behavior that I cannot respect. In general, I advise people not to work in teams if they don't respect their coworkers, and never if they don't respect their manager.
I like discussing these topics in interviews, as long as it's not a one way discussion. For the last job I interviewed, I got loads of interrogation style behavioral questions from all the interviewers (you can likely guess which company). Yet none of my interviewers could answer a simple question adequately:
"What are the reasons people leave the team/company?"
Very tempted to have acted like you did when they gave lame answers.
Edit: I think my comment doesn't convey my thoughts well, so I'll give another stab at it.
In general, if you want people to be open with you, there needs to be some kind of reciprocity. Playing psychological games causes people to raise their guards, and the natural response is not to give you what you want or be evasive. In an interview setting, that doesn't look good - so the next natural response is deception. Your style of questioning (I'm guessing here as you didn't give details) does a good job of eliciting the behavior you are trying to weed out. And then as a result, you get confirmation because you think you've caught out a guy trying to deceive you. Yet your behavior is likely a serious contributing factor.
As someone who ALSO does these interviews, it sounds like you're doing more harm than good. Interviews are never the place for adversarial questioning or psychological games. If you wouldn't feel comfortable writing your questions and their answers verbatim in your interview feedback, you shouldn't ask them.
Getting a useful signal is as much about the interaction as the questions, and if you're acting like a jerk then the most appropriate response for a strong culture fit is for the candidate to not want to work with you. Which is probably not something you're capturing very well.
I don't think I'm acting like a jerk. One benchmark I use when extracting "ground truth" from otherwise highly guarded candidates is whether they realize at all what techniques I've used to draw it out from them.
Not going to comment on the downvote, but based on the responses, it's likely that people don't just disagree with your approach here, but also think you're wrong and that it's ineffective. Let me go into detail regarding that:
> It also helps that I have absolutely nothing to lose and can walk into the room refreshed and cool as a cucumber, while the candidate has a job on the line and has already been hit with at least a couple of really tough and nerve-wracking technical questions. This stacks the deck massively in my favor.
You don't know this. Your candidate doesn't necessarily have a job on the line. They may have several offers in hand, and they may only be screening to get more offers into the mix. They may know that it's a candidate's market right now, but it doesn't mean they don't have good alternatives, and it doesn't mean that you aren't permanently leaving a bad impression on the candidate you're interviewing, one that will follow you even if you don't remain at the company you're at. You're slowly poisoning the pool of candidates in your extended network, and while it may not bite you immediately, there's a fair chance that by the time you see the ramifications of your actions, it will be too late.
In particular, you treating this like a "game" or a "playing field" to be outmaneuvered speaks volumes to the low level of professionalism you place on the interviewing process, and it makes you a real liability to the company. This is the cultural brand that you're communicating to folks being introduced to your company, and it's not a competitive one. In a large company, the relative effect may end up being significantly small and diluted, so much that while negative, it never ends up being a problem for your direct manager. On the other hand, if some kind of feedback loop ever emerges that connects this kind of pattern of behavior to you that your hiring manager looks at, I wouldn't be surprised if you receive a stern conversation and expectation for change. Of the engineers I've managed over the years, this sort of behavior is a huge red flag. It's an unforced error and a huge liability, and this sort of behavior when you think there are no repercussions tells you a lot about someone. This kind of personality is usually the first to go or that I manage out, because it's not great raw material for building the culture and collaboration I want to see.
I do appreciate your very well-thought-out feedback. For the record, I don't think anyone here can diagnose my effectiveness and contribution to my company from a few dozen words in a HN post.
As I recall Joseph Campbell once highlighted, the Japanese have a have a distinct tense in describing what they do as roughly equivalent to the English phrase "to play at." The idea isn't to make what you do overly templatized or rigid. When I talk about approaching an interaction as a "game," what I mean is that I try to stay fluid and engage in a non-formulaic manner.
Like it or not, candidates will almost always try to present a perfect image of themselves. However there's a "real story" under every veneer, and it's always a challenge to figure out what that real story is. I know plenty of interviewers who complain about never getting any real signal from their culture fit interviews, and when I dig deeper on why, it's because they came in with a set of questions, asked those questions verbatim, and wrote down the responses verbatim (as another reply to my comment suggested is the "right" approach). Most of the time, the candidate gave a guarded and carefully filtered narrative to all the questions. Nothing genuine makes it onto the table.
My argument is that the less effective results tend to come from a failure to "play at" interviewing! And it can be done completely respectfully and tactfully, leaving the candidate with a sense of having really connected with the interviewer.
>For the record, I don't think anyone here can diagnose my effectiveness and contribution to my company from a few dozen words in a HN post.
> It also helps that I have absolutely nothing to lose and can walk into the room refreshed and cool as a cucumber, while the candidate has a job on the line and has already been hit with at least a couple of really tough and nerve-wracking technical questions"
Yes, I do think I can diagnose your effectiveness and contribution at least when it pertains to hiring in so far as this attitude is 99.9% of the time an extreme liability. If you work at big tech companies, it won't matter because you've never had to own the results of that mistake, but if you ever run your own company, you'll learn this lesson the hard way really quickly.
What you don't seem to understand is that interviewing is just as much a sales process as it is a measurement. Your argument that candidates try to present a perfect image of themselves is just that, an argument. Have you ever interviewed a candidate that candidly admitted their unvarnished struggles because they know that showing the strength and fortitude to admit that indicates a level of maturity and security that they want to communicate? Would it surprise you if I told you that these candidates tend to be the ones that have multiple offers?
It's around the same time that you realize how much expanding the team by a single engineer can add to the bottom line of the company (and conversely what the lost opportunity cost is) that you stop thinking like this. Frankly, I don't mind if you do this because very selfishly, as a hiring manager, your loss is my gain. If all of my competition wizened up over night and stopped making unforced errors like this, it would make it slightly harder for me to hire. But given that this is HN, in good faith, I do feel like it's worth giving you the warning here -- what you're doing is not a great strategy.
Why are you approaching this as a competition or a battle? You clearly haven't been doing management for more than a few years if this is your perspective.
>"It also helps that I have absolutely nothing to lose and can walk into the room refreshed and cool as a cucumber, while the candidate has a job on the line and has already been hit with at least a couple of really tough and nerve-wracking technical questions"
And yet I'm guessing you don't own the company where you are exhibiting this sociopathic behavior. If so why do you feel it's acceptable to represent someones else's company like this? You sound like the person whose been at the same place for too long but rather than searching out new challenges elsewhere just stays put and creates toxicity.
They've been at Google for a while now and it's gone to their head. The funny thing is that the most talented, most intelligent people I know that work in tech are some of the most extremely humble and kind as well. They command far more respect with their quiet strength than he/she does with their bullying nature.
as a serial victim to sets of questions exactly like this earlier in my life, i've come to realize that 'Culture-fit' is really just a coded honesty test -- and the most deceptive thing about it is that straight honesty is one of the quickest ways to do poorly at it.
in other words, answering '1. Why do you want to work for our company?' with "Because I want a salary and I need to avoid destitution.' is a wholly appropriate answer, but it's wrong.
They actually just want you to evangelize the company for a few minutes and lay on how envious you are of those that have 'the opportunity' to 'be a part of the revolution at X-Co'.
Who would want to hire a candidate who cannot get through an interview without delving into their personal issues and giving sardonic, jaded answers? Hacker news is big on edgy developers who insist that they can work hard, solve problems and get along with everyone. But if you ask them to explain how they do that they cry oppression.
That's pretty much how you get hired in Europe as nobody does leetcode and rarely you get whiteboard or take home problems.
If you have enough experience at some prestigious company, the job is already yours, the on site interview is pretty much a formality to discuss salary expectations and screen for red flags.
I am from Europe and I had a bit of everything. But generally I agree, even when I was conducting the interviews, it was mostly to verify that what was written on the CV was reflected in reality.
A huge part of CVs are full of straight up lies. When I was interviewing there was practically no good value in a CV outside of initial screening and ideas for talking points.
I actively confront people about their lies, and they are blacklisted from being hired therefter. Do not lie on your CV no matter how common your idiot friends say it is. We can and will check if we care to, and a compny that doesnt care to verify your integrity, likely has little itself.
That’s a great way to hire someone. Have they produced quality product? Hire. Culture games like this speak more about the toxicity of the employer than anything about the employee. Do you really think subjective questions like this as interpreted by hr or a random manager say anything? It’s purely a power play against the prospective employee.
Good managers can manage all kinds of people. Culture fit is just looking for koolaide drinkers.
Part of the whole diversity thing is to also hire people who do not have programming in their list of hobbies. When I was at uni it was more common than not that people did not have any personal projects.
I haven't had good experiences hiring people who don't have personal projects. It's a strong signal that the person is self driven, can do requirements gathering and knows how to ship.
Well, people can have other hobbies outside of programming though. Be it sports or something creative. I agree that, in general, people with personal programming projects fare better, but it is not a hard rule for me.
The relevant bit in "Why do you want to work for our company" is the unstated "...as oppose to another." Ideally the answer is some property of the company that aligns well with the candidates ideals. But it presupposes that the candidate knows of some attribute that fits this frame.
A better question might be to make the company attribute hypothetical. Something like: "if you could propose a rule for all employees at the company where you want to work, what would it be." You'd definitely need follow-up questions and promoting, but it could be way more insightful.
The question "Why do you want to work for our company" can always be answered with "I want to work with great coworkers and I've heard you have really great people here" no matter what company it is.
I could nave a few in SV where this would undoubtably raise suspicion. Many of the hottest companies are well known for being successful dispite (because of?) their challanging working environments.
At first you would wonder why anyone would bother when the pay is often similar, but talented people seek a challenge. Many of the most tempermental composers always had a line of the best musicians waiting to suffer near-abuse just to have a crack at attempting something amazingly difficult that they respect.
To be fair, most Software Engineers are able to secure multiple offers and even more interviews. Or at least that’s my impression which may be the result of survivorship bias.
And it only gets easier after your first gig.
In that instance, where an engineer can easily leave your company, it makes sense to want to ensure they really want the position since interviewing and onboarding are very expensive for a company as well as having someone leave with a bunch of institutional knowledge built up over the years.
It’s also probably the easiest question in the world to totally bullshit with just a vague grasp of what the company does.
“One of the things that really excited me about <company X> is the problems you must face dealing with <such large amounts of data, securing your system, supporting N users on the app at once, syncing data across data zones>” etc etc. or “I think it’d be really neat to work at a company in the <healthcare, finance, whatever> industry because I’ve always wanted to <improve lives, learn about high frequency trading>”
And even if it’s an easy enough thing to BS it should also be genuinely easy to find an exciting reason to want to work somewhere in our field.
It depends heavily on your area and the current economy.
For example, almost nobody was hiring for software in my area during the Great Recession and I was laid off from the job I did have. Ended up having to relocate so I didn't starve.
Nowadays there's plenty of people hiring but companies around here tend to underpay.
No, I live in the NE USA, but outside of any big cities but definitely not in a rural area. My country has a population of ~300,000.
Nowadays I'd probably be paid more if I still lived in my hometown that I had to leave (ironically).
Job hopping definitely isn't a big thing around here like in tech hubs - new hires don't get huge salaries starting out no matter how much experience you have.
> In that instance, where an engineer can easily leave your company, it makes sense to want to ensure they really want the position since interviewing and onboarding are very expensive for a company as well as having someone leave with a bunch of institutional knowledge built up over the years.
I think that's the main thing we worry about when hiring. We do have HR do initial screenings, but we have our engineers do the rest of the interviews, so it's very costly for us. We've been bitten a few times because people wanted to use us as a strong stone. We aren't as big as a FAANG, but there are a lot of people who leave our company and go to one. If we spend months finding a person and they leave in 6mo to a year, it's very costly for us.
With all due respect, your entire reply here reads to me as someone that I would not want to work with.
My group at work is largely full of people who believe in what we do, enjoy the work we do, and feel an obligation to our users.
For many groups, the only thing more important than getting the right people in, is keeping the wrong people out. Your talented employees can probably quite easily find a lateral move. Hiring the wrong person can lose you several of your most talented team members.
A lot of people are jumping on #3 (Tell me about a time you solved a problem at work). While I agree that #3 deserves criticism, I feel like #6 (Tell me about your preferred workday) and #8 (Describe your preferred relationship with coworkers) are even more problematic. As an introvert, as someone who likes quiet, my ideal workday consists of me getting into work at ~7:30am, working until ~4:30pm with about an hour off for lunch. I accept that meetings are a necessary evil, but I maintain that their necessity does not diminish their evil. I especially despise the "daily standup", which is a completely pointless 15-20 minute interruption right during my peak concentration hours. And yet, if I actually gave that response to question #6, the best I could hope for is a sympathetic nod from my interviewer, and a mention about how they attempt to have a single day without meetings. Instead, I feel like I'm supposed to lie about how I like "collaboration" (code for meetings).
#8 (Describe your preferred relationship with coworkers) is, if anything, even worse. As someone who doesn't like parties, and who doesn't drink, I find it really awkward and draining to go out with coworkers. No offense, but if I'm with the same people for 40 hours a week, the last thing I want to do is spend more time with them (especially on a Friday afternoon or evening, which is when most after-work outings tend to occur). And yet, I feel like if I actually gave that answer at a lot of companies, I'd be immediately dismissed as "not a culture fit", even though my skills are a very good match for the position.
We got rid of standups on my current team and it’s definitely very nice.
I think you could probably massage that answer though “well standups aren’t my favorite thing really, it’s sort of a lot of context switching and a lot of times the conversation isn’t relevant to me. But I understand it’s generally more for the managers than it is for me.”
And for the latter one
“I like a very professional, cordial, and relaxed relationship with my coworkers. I tend to do my own things on weekends which leaves me refreshed and happy to see everyone on Monday.”
It’s just a bit smoother than “the last thing I’m going to want to do is spend _more_ time with you”.
Instead of emphasizing the drain it’d be to spend more time with your coworkers, emphasize the benefits of coming back refreshed on Monday :-). They’re the same answer but one’s more positive.
On the coworker relationship question, why can't you just answer something like: "Anywhere from cordial professionalism to best friends who do everything together, it depends on who I 'click' with." I mean people are people, I'm happy spending free time with some coworkers, others I'm just ambivalent to, just like in all other parts of life.
This points out how bad that question really is, the interviewer wants you to mind-read how he/she sees wants the relationships at the company to be and answer accordingly.
In practice, the purpose of the question is to weed out people who don't display a particular level of commitment to the organization. Allow the company to take over your social life makes it harder for you to leave the organization. I've definitely had experiences where I've stayed in bad jobs longer than I should have (at a cost to my health and sanity) because I liked my co-workers.
The mistake in your reasoning is that the employer would be looking for the most skilled candidate only. Personal traits are as important or more important. Being an introvert is a personal trait like any other and it can be a strength or weakness depending on the team and position. It’s not somehow irrelevant to the ability to perform a job in a team.
The most generic and obvious set of questions ever.
Every single interview I’ve participated in (on both sides) has included some or all of these questions. There isn’t really anything new or interesting here.
That's question one from the article: Based on nothing but what you've learned about this company from the outside, please tell me why we're great and you're great and we will be great together?
Many of those questions are iffy, a potential minefield or uninteresting, but this one (#3) is key and we use it a lot:
"Tell me about a time you solved a problem at work. What was the issue, and how did you approach it?"
What I like about it is that it isn't a trick question. Also, knowing beforehand you're going to be asked this won't help you to bullshit your way through -- either you did stuff and can answer questions about it or you don't. This question lets the interviewee discuss something they did and that they feel comfortable talking about, how they approached it, what their problem-solving approach was, etc. It also lets the interviewer ask follow-up questions about whatever sounds interesting to discuss in more detail.
For a lot of the work I do, this is heavily grounded in context and therefore useless to the interviewer.
“I undid some hacks that Dave who left two years ago had put in the test suite because he just really liked stacking Python decorators, and they were getting too complex to figure out when some test broke. I updated some documentation that hadn't been touched in 5 years and was terrifyingly out of date. And then I sat in for two useless meetings because leadership really likes holding them.” is not likely to communicate any positive messages, but it is the reality of what a lot of us do at our jobs instead of solving complex race conditions in elegantly designed distributed systems.
Not saying that that might not contribute some kind of signal to a potential interview, but it's very likely to be one that labels me as incompetent :)
You're right, that's a terrible answer. But not because the content is bad, but because you threw a coworker under the bus and because you didn't mention the impact that any of these changes had.
"We had a large module that we were making lots of changes to that used Python decorators to add behavior. This pattern ended up growing to be really difficult to debug as we were changing the code, and when tests would break it would take hours of tracing through the code to figure out the reason. I (rewrote each method to not use decorators | inlined the decorators manually | whatever) to clean up the code. One of the other reasons working with this module was difficult was because the documentation was terrifyingly out of date, so as I was cleaning up the decorators I also updated the documentation."
If you can say anything about the quantifiable impact, then do it, but I don't think this example necessarily requires it. The meetings had nothing to do with your problem.
Hey, thanks! That's a good, positive way of restating the issue that I had completely missed. I'll try to think of things more in this way in the future, and state them that way in potential interviews.
“When I was working at X on Y, we had a test suite that had become difficult to maintain. Some of this was due to particularly non-idiomatic code using stacked decorators, so I replaced that with more understandable setup and teardown functions. It really improved our ability to keep the tests up to date and to quickly resolve issues, and I’m glad I went out of my way to get it done. I also updated related documentation that hadn’t been touched in a long time to make it easier for people on the team to ramp up on the package.”
You had a good interview story on your hands there! Give the interviewer the context of what the situation was, what you did, and why that mattered. But maybe leave our your leadership team’s penchant for never ending meetings. :P
You can always talk about a hobby project of yours if your day job is uninteresting or not readily marketable.
It's true that for some job interviews, an answer like in your example will make you lose points. However, for other jobs being able to fix and refactor legacy Python code may be just what they are looking after. Your interviewer might ask follow-up questions about code quality and cleanliness, how you made sure your refactor didn't break anything, etc.
After significant experience on both sides of the table I am completely lost.
As interviewer I feel the best I can do in the short time I have is to weed out those so incompetent and badly fitting where I wonder why they even applied for the job. E.g.Java developer position and they can't do a simple stream.filter.map.collect task.
As interviewee I rarely even get the slightest interest of actually taking the job if they want me.
I usually don't feel any enthusiasm on the other side and I have a hard time appearing to be enthusiastic myself. Candidates interests usually boil down to "I want more money", "I want a less outdated tech stack", "I want better management" and "I am depressed and want change for change's sake".
In the end, most software development jobs suck and employers are just looking for code monkeys, hoping they will find some that will stay for more than a year or two. Applicants are fed up with pretending they have any personal interest in software development beyond the wages they get for it.
So, I've been self-employed for 20 years, doing custom software development at home and short-term (typically <2weeks) on-site consulting).
I've been thinking about going back to work for a company full-time, as I'm getting tired of dealing with sales and marketing. I do it poorly.
I don't know how to answer these questions, by which I infer that long-term self-employed people are rarely hired at Google.
#2: the last company I worked at was in 1999. I don't remember enough about the culture to give a coherent answer. The on-site work I did for clients wasn't long enough for me to understand their culture.
#3: "independent troubleshooting and initiative" is all that can apply for someone who's self-employed.
#4: "a team project you did at work". The best I can do is describe how I work for other companies in my development work.
#5: I ... don't know how I would like to be managed. I guess, work with a manager who can help me figure out how I can be managed in a large corporate environment.
"Follow-up questions: Tell me about a disagreement you had with your last manager." ... Again, 1999.
I got my first full-time job at age 41 after being a homemaker for two decades. I basically had nothing on my resume but education and volunteer work. I started at better than minimum wage at a Fortune 500 company in a job that some of my co-workers spent years trying to qualify for.
If you have hobbies, volunteer work or other experiences that are more recent, I would not hesitate to say something like "Because I've been self-employed for two decades, the last time I had a disagreement with a manager was 1999. But last month at (local non-profit/recent group project in a class I took/whatever), I disagreed with how the people in charge were handling X and..."
They probably really don't care if you talk about work experiences per se. They want to know things like how you handle interpersonal friction.
Can you play well with others at all? Or have you been self-employed for two decades precisely because no one in their right mind would want to put up with you for more than two weeks?
So try to think about some recent experiences that would provide some kind of evidence supporting the idea that, yes, you can get along with other people and they won't regret inviting you into their social group known as X Department at Google.
I will add that they probably frame it as work related because they don't want to hear about your spat with your wife or teenaged son. So don't pull out personal anecdotes of that sort. The social setting needs to be comparable to a work relationship.
Thank you for your comments and for sharing a bit of your history.
I think I didn't describe my situation well enough. I have 25 years of professional software development experience, so I do have a lot on my resume. I meant instead to point out that the questions suggest that Google doesn't often interview people who have been long-time self-employed.
Which, to be fair, isn't a common case.
I'm also unlikely to work at Google. I'm much more likely to work in my field, where I have enough of a name that I'm not going to be asked these sorts of questions in the first place.
I don't know what Google is expecting, but if I were interviewing you those sort of answers would satisfy me, if you explained your situaiton and made a decent attempt to provide some useful answer.
e.g. for #2 they're not actually doing due diligence on your current employer, they want to know about the sort of environment you thrive in, so talk about what you're looking for in a company's culture.
As you said, #3 is a chance to give lots of real world examples and play to your strengths.
For #4 they don't need to actually know about that specific project, they just want to know how you handle projects, so if there's a way you can answer that from your own experiences then that's fine.
I'd say your #5 is fair enough too. At that point that's probably the sort of thing you'd want to turn around. e.g. ask if they have hired people who have come from self-employed backgrounds, and if so how did they handle it.
Useless "world-as-you-want-it-to-be" rather than "world-as-it-actually-is" questions. These questions simply encourage the interviewee to guess expected answers and provide them with a smile. They mean nothing.
Until and unless companies learn that "Honesty" and "Trust"(from both sides) are the only things which matter when it comes to measuring intangible character traits these sorts of questionnaires are bunkum.
I must be lucky because I'm at the point in my career where I give these kind of questions direct but nuanced answers and let the chips fall where they may.
I'm definitely not everyone's "cultural fit" (a dog whistle term for legitimizing discrimination imo), but for companies that appreciate what I bring to the table, it's all the better.
Honesty and trust are definitely top values for me, and people who can't handle respectful and frank discussion can't handle me, so better to find out immediately, as early in the process as possible.
Does anyone have good ways to determine if a company is a good culture fit for you, as an interviewee? I had an in-person this week where I tried the reverse of some of these - "Can you tell me about a typical workday?" "How is the work-life balance here?" and I just got BS fluff answers like "Well there's a variety of technical problems to solve here".
As an interviewer, I like these kinds of questions as it shows interest from the candidate. The worst is no questions from the candidate. If a candidate has no decent questions for me, I'll usually and enthusiastically suggest some, starting with "what is most enjoyable and what is the worst thing about this role/department/company?"
I am so, so bad at this at this point I should be able to provide some pointers! But I can't. Interviewers lie. When I am the interviewer, I know I do. Or at least enhance the truth.
>How would you describe the culture at previous companies you’ve worked at?
Somehow this one sounds like, "tell me what you hated most about your last boss," insofar as it's a bit of a minefield to answer in a professional way.
I like to ask "what is/was your favorite and least favorite part of [Company's] [Department's] culture, that way there's a rough range that's specific to the department rather than ambiguous cultural perks.
You would have to take the answer in context, ie does it align with their reason for leaving. Shit talking would be a red flag but everyone's got unique cultural preferences. Someone's favorite part might be someone's least favorite part from that same company.
I never ask that question about the candidate's current or most recent previous employer. Any answers will be guarded or clouded.
Instead I ask what coworkers they still remember from their earlier jobs, and why. This has the double benefit of putting enough emotional distance between now the time they will be talking about, and it highlights the traits the candidate considers important in others. It doesn't even matter if they point out the negative memories over positive ones.
There is one intensely high-signal question but I can only ask that with other Finns. Namely: "What university courses did you cheat on?"
I don't feel comfortable asking this question. Many of the people I interview are "headhunted" into an interview by an talent acquisition team. Are they even looking for a new job?
> My honest answer to "why do you want to work here?"
I want to chill and pace myself here. I'm looking to do 30+ hours of work per week on my projects outside of this dayjob, so it's important for you not bother me too much during my 40 hours here.
My only goal is to build a company on the side. I've turned down better jobs just so I work in an environment and with coworkers that I fucking hate, so that I am extremely motivated to do whatever it takes to have my own business. Overall this job is just a paycheck - a necessary distraction to maintain a reasonable standard of living, and completely irrelevant to any of my goals in life. If contract work didn't cause too much stress/friction for me, I would be doing that for money. I hope you understand that I want to see you fail, this company fail, and any project I'm on to fail miserably. I will do the work you assign me according to spec, but please remember to leave me the fuck alone.
It's a weird question because one of the reasons I'm interviewing is to decide if I wanna work at your company or not. It's like if the candidate asked the interviewer "why do you want to hire me?"
fwiw, I've answered these in the past with "I'm not sure, I'm evaluating if I want to". I've had interesting conversations based on that. And, as far as I can tell, it didn't affect the outcome negatively.
For you as the interviewer, an answer like that is a great hook to ask "well, what does matter to you? What would convince you to work here?" It'll tell you a lot about fit or not :)
We have such silly silver-bullet-like talking points at my company. I don't follow them. It is to me too easy to make up/twist past experience to match what the interview wants to hear. Oh yeah I hit that wall and used that clever way to ship in time... Oh yeah I learnt from such and such mistake... not a fan.
Instead, prior to the ITW I define clearly (with myself or an other interviewer) the information I want to hear or the parts of the intellect/emotions I want to feel.
Example: wanna check if the candidate is autonomous? Instead of asking him if he prefers working in a big or small (or no) team and get a generic/boring answer, I will ask the candidate how they prioritize tasks when no workflow can help them. Do they rely on gut feeling? perceived ROI? ask the manager? the client? In this mindset I know directly if there's a clear match, and if not it is easy to dig in their way of thinking with a follow-up question (why/how?).
Takes a bit of improvisation/reactivity but at least I feel like I keep things interesting for everyone in the room when doing so.
Classic HN, assuming these questions are only for technical roles.
If the only true signal in an interview is weeding out completely unacceptable candidates, these are great questions because the only goal should be staying in your lane with two hands on the wheel.
Also, reversing the questions can be insightful as a candidate.
Personally I think the biggest disconnect comes in the job descriptions and postings: a lot of these preferences companies have about their candidates could just be openly posted and the candidates could self select themselves for fit.
These questions are good and seem standard to me. Whenever interview questions come up on HN there are always many comments refuting them. Any behavioral/culture/softskill questions will be bullshitted by sociopaths and liars. Any technical questions will be biased toward competitive coders and leetcode cramers, and they aren't relevant for position X anyway. IQ tests and brain teasers are less relevant for the job and in some cases potentially illegal. Take home tests take up too might time that you don't get compensated for. Contract to hire takes even more time and doesn't work for candidates that already have full time work. Not everyone has side projects that can be evaluated or contributes to open source, and even if they do it's impossible to tell if the candidate did th actual work. Every way of evaluating programmers sucks unless I'm missing a magic bullet?
My question is at what point does a candidate show such skill at gaming interview system(s) that it doesn't matter if they are bullshitting or had to study for your interview? If they apply the same skills to the job they're likely to be successful in most tech roles, and given corporate or start up structures and politics these candidates might be significantly better than more "genuine" candidates. The only places I think standard tech interview variants might break down is hiring for creativity and for ethical behavior (ethical behavior and rule following being different things). I'm not sure if either of those are important in most tech roles and they might actually be determintal.
Ask developers about projects they’ve worked on and have the technical skills to evaluate the depth of their answers. It works every time for me, it’s fair and even fun for the interviewee and it’s really fast. I’m often to a hire/no hire decision in 30 mins.
No culture questions (I’m happy to manage all kinds of people). No technical challenges. The more you do this, the better you get at it.
I'm not saying I agree with this, but I think their implication is that the candidate will have prepared a generic answer that isn't necessarily honest or useful. If it's a question they haven't prepped for, they are more likely to give an honest answer rather than one they read on a blog post by a hiring platform company.
These questions assume the person has significant prior experience, which makes them unusable for a decent amount of hiring.
At my previous job, we got a set of generic questions like this on our hiring forms from HR. I don't think anyone in my group ever asked them. It's impractical to ask a bunch of open ended questions like this, and also engineering questions, in a 45 or 60 minute time slot.
> At my previous job, we got a set of generic questions like this on our hiring forms from HR. I don't think anyone in my group ever asked them.
I would love to be wrong, but interviewing still seems more magic than science. I've interviewed for positions and think I did great, and did not get a job, and for others, did poorly and did get an offer. On the other side, I've hired promising candidates that turned out terrible, and questionable candidates that turned out great.
There are some things you can do to filter out the worst of folks (e.g., a fiz-buz test or evaluating basic communication skills), but these generally just filter out the bottom 20%. It's maddeningly difficult to differentiate between the middle 50% and the top 20%.
When you occasionally find a rock-star, they generally know they're a rock-star and demand rock-star pay. The top 5% of candidates is rarely 2X more productive than the top 10%, but they can demand much higher salaries because they are easier to identify.
> “What most people mean by culture fit is hiring people they’d like to have a beer with,” says Patty McCord, a human-resources consultant and former chief talent officer at Netflix.
From Google's article:
> However, culture fit evaluations can invite bias into your process if interviewers see it as simply a way to assess a candidate’s likeability, rather than how they align with your company’s core values. Assessing culture fit is about much more than whether or not you’d like to hang out with someone at a company happy hour.
Disclaimer: I work at Google; opinions are my own.
"...how they align with your company’s core values"
This phrase seems kind of common, but it seems a little odd in that it sort of implies different companies have significantly different "core values". Like, Google's core value is of course, "don't be evil". So, they get all the non-evil candidates, and someone else gets the spawn of Satan?
I honestly don't even know what I would answer for #2. It really sounds like one of those terminology questions to get people who think in the exact terms you use.
One downside of the interview process is that candidates hardly get told _why_ they were rejected.
It is unlikely that your phone cost you the job but Apple as a company does seem to live in a bubble of "Apple is best. Apple for everything " so there's always the slim chance that you got an interviewer who lives by that and decided to not like you much. Pretty unlikely though but it shall remain one of those great mysteries of life
- What's your mechanism for bias self-check?
- If someone gives you specs and you notice that something is off, what do you do?
- If you have to solve a problem you haven't solved before, how do you approach it?
- What's your take on accessibility on the web?
- What's your process like for deciding that you're at the point in your career where you can mentor others?
- What do you prefer to do when you see someone else getting nit-picked?
- You're just about to finish a feature and have a great idea for improving it. What do you do?
For all of these things, people will likely give different answers but those answers will tell me a lot about whether or not they would end up being really useful for the kinds of teams I build.