There's one important question I haven't seen on here that's saved me on more than one occasion.
"Are there any concerns you may have that I can address that may lead you to believe I'm not the right candidate?"
I've been able to address: lack of previous experience, lack of a degree, time in between jobs, time spent at the last job, all thanks to this question.
Personally I agree with the other reply that advises against asking this.
Everything in a job interview should be to frame you in a positive light.
I see way too many candidates try and play the humble route, and all it does is sell them short. There’s a fine line between too humble and too full of yourself , and neither side is good to find yourself on. This particular question seems to me to be too humble.
Questions like this may seem like it makes the candidate seem humble and open to feedback, but in actuality whenever someone has asked something like this it has made them appear insecure and planted more seeds of doubt in the interviewers mind since they now have to think about their shortcomings.
Maybe phrasing it a better way would help:
“What qualities are you looking for, for this role?”
“Are there things you think i should brush up on , assuming I get this role?”
“Where do you see me best being able to contribute in this role?”
Those questions give you the same data points, leaving you to infer where you may be lacking. It leaves the interviewer with a sense of your confidence without seeming too full of yourself, and generally the wording makes them consider you as if you’re in the role, versus not in it.
Again, a job interview is a sales pitch. People should be honest while balancing keeping the tone positive.
You wouldn’t sell a car by pointing out its flaws. Don’t sell yourself the same way.
I don't agree that asking this question is taking the humble route. Asking if they have any concerns doesn't mean you think that they should. In fact there's an obvious subtext that if they do have concerns then you can address them, so they're not really valid. That's almost the opposite of being humble!
Personally I don't think it sounds either arrogant or humble overall, plus it shows a willingness to discuss difficult things in a polite manner (at least the question as stated above was polite) which is also a plus for a candidate.
Agreed. It's also engaging well with the meta game.
Related - Once viewing a house to buy I asked the seller, is there anything you think I should know about this house that I haven't asked about. Their reply turned out to be a deal breaker (at the time - maybe it would have been fine but the point is we got a lot more information! )
The best sales technique for a candidate is for the candidate to do research and/or ask enough questions to find out what the problems the company is having. Then the candidate explains how he's going to fix those problems.
This works because that's the reason why the company is interviewing people - they have a problem they need to solve. Be that solution.
Good point. I'm not applying to work at a car dealership. When I'm on the other side of the table, I'm deliberately trying to avoid hiring a car salesmen. As a hiring manager, I may give a bit of a canned response to the question. But I'm not going to hold it against a candidate.
If this question turns a company off, both the company and candidate have obtained a critical piece of information.
Yeah but I do point out a car's flaws when I sell it. I don't want anyone being annoyed thinking they've been ripped off and I definitely don't want a guilty conscience if anything safety critical goes wrong.
The fact that anyone would be surprised by that is a sad indictment on our culture.
It’s not about penalizing humility. I think you missed the point I’m making. It’s that there's a human factor to interviews, and part of that is presenting yourself in the best light.
It’s a subconscious thing, but you really don’t want people to start thinking negatively about you, because it can cause that negativity to linger and affect your assessment. You especially don’t want someone to end an interview on the negative note. Do it in the middle if you have to but make sure you start and end positively
Again, there’s a fine line between too much humility and too much hubris. Humility is fine in moderation , but you have to keep from being excessive or you do a disservice to yourself as much as overselling yourself.
Ok actually I do like your second rephrasing of that question, but if that's your point I think you are overstating it with the car analogy. I did recently miss a job I thought I wanted, possibly by being too honest - who knows but if that was indeed the reason maybe I dodged a bullet there.
Also though I agree with quietbritishjim's take, from the other side of the table I would actually read the question as confident. I'm British as well. Cultural thing maybe.
Oh no, I get it: you want me to fool you, and once I see how you work, I'm more than happy to do so, or, more likely, work for someone with more realistic expectations.
I have a slightly different motivation for asking that question. It's not (false) humility. Instead, I want to avoid a situation where the interviewer thinks "Obviously, he wouldn't know about that" and either doesn't ask at all or the conversation moves along before we talk much about it.
For example, I talked to someone on Friday about a bioinformatics job. In passing, the manager remarked, "So you probably don't have any experience analyzing gene networks...." While that's true, I have done other graph theory/network analysis work that uses the same mathematical tools, so we talked about that for a bit. Without that offhand comment, though, I'm not sure how I would have gone about making my case.
Always being positive or never showing a negative seems to make people seem shifty, overly political and sometimes just dishonest. Interviews are as much about buying as selling - you are picking your next employer as much as they are picking you. Most bad hires I've made have been people who oversold themselves in the interview.
However, I'd carve out an exception. In an interview where you have, without a doubt, not done well and there's greater than a 80% chance that you feel you won't proceed, this question may potentially be a good hail mary, for salvaging the interview.
But, I've never used the technique before. And unless you have alot of interview experience, it will also be difficult to make judgement calls on how well or bad an interview has gone.
You close sales pitches. Asking if there's any way you haven't shown you meet the criteria either leads in to the close or allows you to address an unstated objection.
Any sales person that does their pitch then just goes "welp, see ya later" at the end has no business being in sales.
I guess this is very subjective but personally I wouldn't ask this question, especially in a technical interview. First, it may embarrass the interviewer. They may not be willing to answer this question. Second, after you know the answer, you won't be able to fix anything. You don't want to start arguing that lacking a degree is not a big deal.
It's akin to asking someone in a date "any reason why you wouldn't like me?". It feels like lacking confidence and anticipating rejection.
This question could make sense if you don't get an offer. If you get a chance to talk to the recruiter, you can ask them if there are particular things you could try to improve if you were to interview again at their company.
> You don't want to start arguing that lacking a degree is not a big deal.
If 'having a degree' is a 'big deal' for the company, it's probably not the best place to work anyway.
But what that question might uncover is that the interviewer is concerned that because you lack a degree, you might lack some CS background. That's a valid concern that you could refute by talking about how you've learned a lot on your own.
I was watching "Roadkill" the other day. On the show a couple of mechanics try to pass themselves off as bumpkin mechanics muddling through fixing cars. But every once in a while they'll slip up. For example, one of them said the engine was behaving in an adiabatic way. This is a term one only learns taking a college level thermodynamics course.
It's hard to fake having an engineering education, and if you have one it should show in an interview whether or not you have the degree.
I watch hot rod shows and read hot rod magazines and books. (What can I say, I'm a motorhead.) Not once before have I ever seen any reference to thermodynamic jargon, which is why that word jumped out at me.
Out of curiosity, do you recall any more context around referring to an engine (combustion engine?) in terms of adiabatic process? I'm just a bit puzzled how this might come up in relation to a car.
It was in the context of the radiator being clogged and unable to dump the heat.
"An adiabatic process occurs without transferring heat or mass between a thermodynamic system and its surroundings. Unlike an isothermal process, an adiabatic process transfers energy to the surroundings only as work."
Wasn't looking for the definition, having studied thermodynamics as an undergrad, just surprised that a nonfunctional cooling system might be cast in such terms. Like, you don't start by noticing the engine's increased thermal efficiency as a stepping stone to realizing the radiator isn't getting hot or the water pump is failing to pump.
> You don't want to start arguing that lacking a degree is not a big deal.
True. What I usually do is point out the amount of hours it would take to get a PhD on average, and compare it to the number of hours I've spent furthering my education and honing my craft. It is in fact more time spent than it would take to obtain a PhD.
Most of the time, if the interviewer formed these concerns, you’re just opening yourself up to give them space for confirmation bias to take over. What might have been one bad interview session out of six, which might not rule you out, now becomes a crater of destruction that will absolutely be a big talking point in the debrief and feedback.
Additionally it comes off as insecure. Like you can’t tolerate the idea that you might actually have made mistakes or lacked skills or fluffed your resume or communicated badly, and you deserve a chance to debate your way out of it.
Finally it also seems like fishing for negative feedback you can disagree with later. You likely won’t get significant feedback after the interviews are over since companies don’t reveal it for legal reasons, so you’re trying to get interviewers off-guard to get that feedback and later act like it’s unfair.
As an interviewer I would strictly reply that I need to write down my notes from the interview, review and analyze them, and compare notes in the debrief session before I will develop any type of feedback, positive or negative. The interview itself is a place for information exchange, and trying to form opinions about positives / negatives on the spot amplifies the likelihood of bias or lack of context.
It sounds like you are hiring for a bureaucratic corporate borg and parent poster wants to work for a human team striving to achieve something. Different strokes.
I’m not saying anything about how I prefer to hire, apart from the fact I refuse to formulate concrete opinions inside an interview session and must take time after to ruminate on it and analyze details.
The rest of it is just simply the facts of interviewing pretty much anywhere. I’ve seen it happen much more strongly in young startups than big corporations, but it’s extremely common everywhere.
Small startups usually have fewer formalized practices in recruiting and less standardized HR practices, which leads to more bias and unfair judgment calls in recruiting compared with larger companies, not less.
> As an interviewer I would strictly reply that I need to write down my notes from the interview, review and analyze them, and compare notes in the debrief session before I will develop any type of feedback, positive or negative.
And everybody will know that you either seriously lack substance or that you are clearly lying.
Nobody except bitter / insecure people would think that. Everybody knows this is just how the hiring world works and random individual interviewers are not free to choose moralistic ideals about feedback.
That’s not being unmoralistic. That’s severely lacking social skills.
You can say whatever you want to the interviewee because if that goes to court it’s their word against yours. That works both ways of course, but at least allows people to say whatever they really mean rather than keeping someone in ignorant bliss.
That being said it only applies to countries where recording someone against their will is illegal.
This will put the interviewer in a very awkward position. Imagine the interviewer thinks you have a problem in area X, and they spell it out right there, "I think your expertise in X might be lacking," and then for all they know, they're walking into a discussion on whether X should be considered necessary for the job, with the very person they need to assess - a potential minefield.
Sure, you may be a reasonable person and have a reasonable answer for their concern, but they don't know it.
Surely it is the person/company doing the hiring who has the say in what is and isn't required for the position? Assuming the interviewer isn't doing something that's blatantly illegal ("Do you plan on having children in the next x years?", "I think you're too old for this position" etc.) I don,t think an interviewee is really in a position to argue this as surely they'd almost always have very limited knowledge of what the position actually entails compared to the person doing the hiring.
Exactly, no interviewer would want to have such a discussion with the interviewee. So their best course of action would be to smile and say "I don't have any concerns, thanks for asking."
As an interviewer at a FAANG, this gets an immediate "I may not answer that" and a little disappointment in my mind. We do not assess resumes, only performance at the interviews. Resumes are only for screening. But this may be a good question at small companies that don't have a streamlined process. Take into account who you're talking to.
"Resumes are only for screening" -- yeah FAANGs suck at looking at you as a person, at every point in the interview process you end up having to repeat yourself and almost no interviewer ever looks at your resume. it's as if your entire history of being alive and working doesn't matter, only that you can operate as a DS&A robot that doesn't ask too many questions. "I may not answer that" - Borg
> yeah FAANGs suck at looking at you as a person […] almost no interviewer ever looks at your resume
I feel like I’m missing your point here... you are correct - when I’m doing a coding interview, I don’t care if you’re black or white, male or female, university educated or self-taught, the only thing I care about is whether or not you can code[1]. You seem to be suggesting that that’s a bad thing?
[1] Of course any major red flags like muttering racist curses when you get frustrated would also be noted; it’s not like I ignore the human side of things, I’m just not actively looking for that~
What interviewer isn't going to dig into their concerns anyway? I mean, if you can read the person and they seem like they'd be down for "let's get down to brass tacks" kinda talk, go for it. Maybe it makes you seem like a serious person to certain kinds of people.
It might be a little uncomfortable for someone like me. I'd rather you ask, "what are your favorite qualities in your best employees" and then respond to that.
Maybe it's just my area of work but I can't imagine caring about previous experience, degree, or anything. I mean, the candidate has gotten past the resume screen already so you're just living up to that impression and other candidates at that point.
If anyone is interested in doing a mock technical interview, please reach out, email in profile. I have interviewed developers since 2015. I’m currently a software development manager for an enterprise with a team of 4 that I personally hired, and 4 more contractors that I also interviewed and validated.
I really enjoy the process of interviewing, especially junior candidates, but companies understandably limit the feedback that is able to be provided to candidates after the fact. With a mock interview, I can go through an interview much the way I would conduct it for a real business, but I can provide as detailed of feedback as you would like and we can have a conversation after the fact about how the interview went, strengths, weaknesses, etc.
I will provide this service in 2 different ways - if you would like to keep it private, we can do it on a paid basis. If you are willing to share it with everyone else, it is completely free to you and it will be posted online. I’m hoping most people take the second approach as I feel that this could be a valuable contribution to the community. I’ll provide more details on either option if you’re interested.
Disclaimer: this is offered by me on a personal basis, and does not reflect the opinions, thoughts, beliefs, or anything else from any employer I currently work for or have in the past. This is offered purely for educational purposes with a fictitious base company, and there is no job or result from this interview other than some additional experience and knowledge.
Around 2008 the company I worked for was bought by a huge company so it worked out, but if it hadn’t we fully had a plan to get a group together to review resumes and give mock interviews. Every blip since I’ve threatened to do so and never have.
That was also the first company I ever gave interviews for, and we grew a lot so I did quite a few. To this day, one of the most surprising things I’ve learned about interviewing on either side was how terrifying being the responsible party for a hiring decision was.
I was confident about digging myself out of any technical problem I got myself into (or at least, I knew my strength, and to refuse situations I couldn’t clever my way out of). But somehow the spectre of being the person who said we should hire the new terrible coworker was daunting.
Fixing a crashing bug? No problem. Fixing someone who writes crashing bugs? Oh boy.
For quite a few years I recalled that feeling when I interviewed and it kept me relaxed. I suspect it worked better than the advice to picture the audience naked.
I have been exclusively in leadership positions since about 2005. I usually ask potential peers and ICs interviewing me: "if I were to get this job, what is the first thing you would ask me to do to help you."
This question often helps uncover aspects of the real (vs. stated) culture, helps me build a view of the problems and opportunities facing the organization, and gives me a good chance to position myself as the kind of person who can help them with their specific problems.
This is one of the things that really turned me off about interviewing at Google. When I asked a question like that, they basically said, "Oh you won't be working with me." To which I asked, "What team will I be working on?" Their reply was, "Nobody knows. Once you're hired, you can figure out what team you want to work on and what you want to do."
So, uh, what are you interviewing for, then? How do I know the team I want to work on will accept me? Or if they even have openings? Can I speak with anyone I'd be working with? I just gave up asking questions at that point because I knew I would never be able to work in an environment like that.
Google tries to "remove bias" by not having you interview with anyone you might work with or even people in your area. During my onsites for a VR role none of my interviewers were VR people. It's "in case you want to switch teams". Right, because I'll suddenly decide my passion isn't the interactive stuff that I have the terminal degree in my field in, I'm going to want to do backend Go stuff all of a sudden /s
Spoke with a recruiter a month or two ago about a Developer Relations role and when I asked about the total length of process (because previous Google interviews were 6 months), I was told that they actually don't even have any of the Developer Relations roles that I was interviewing for available. If you do get through the interviews, you just sit in stasis until they get a 'quota' of more jobs to fill. There's no such thing as "figure out what team you're going to work on". Talk about making you feel like a cog.
FB recruiter on the other hand recently said they interview and hire you, then you'd have a rotational program for a while and you pick which team. Seems more reasonable. But who knows what the truth of it is.
(Full disclosure: FB Engineer, not in HR) - last I checked the standard thing for engineers was to be hired for a very generic role (eg “software engineer”); being interviewed by people with the same role. No aiming for (or trying to avoid) any specific team (of the ~20 people who I’ve interviewed who ended up getting hired, I think 3 of them ended up choosing to join my team?)
Once hired, there’s 6 weeks of training on all the internal tools / architecture / how things fit together. During the final two weeks of training (and a week after if you’re still trying to decide), you’d pick a few teams who look like they match your interests and skills, spend a few days with each, then decide which to join.
> Right, because I'll suddenly decide my passion isn't the interactive stuff that I have the terminal degree in my field in, I'm going to want to do backend Go stuff all of a sudden /s
I mean, that can (and does) happen… I’ve had teammates decide they’d had enough of fighting buggy closed-source BIOS firmware so they go spend a year working on live video streaming, then get into AI to learn something completely new. I’ve no idea what percentage of people make large switches like that, but it’s common enough that the process is well known and supported.
That was my experience as well. "You can figure out what team you want to work on and what you want to do" implies the candidate has much more freedom in the process than is actually extended.
Likewise. I would have rejected any Google job offer after the interview experience. I need some certainty that I'm going to be working on projects which actually benefit me in terms of interests, experience and career development. I would not have been willing to make such a huge gamble, and when none of the people have a clue what or where you might be working, that was a huge red flag for me.
You never get this with smaller companies. You're being hired for a specific reason, and the interview process is as much them selling themselves to you as it is you to them. In all these cases, I've been confident to accept or reject because the interview process gave me sufficient insight into the company and the projects they wanted me to work on that I could make a decision with confidence.
Once or twice I’ve asked variations on what they were looking for. A few took it the way you mean here, a few thought I was dense or mental. And since that’s what they’re all afraid of you’ve just confirmed their fears.
Sometimes it’s good to go into specifics about how you think you can help them, and starting with what they hope for can help. The req is often written by others or by committee.
I think "what are you looking for?" and "what will I be working on what I start?" are different questions. One will (hopefully) have been answered with the job spec, the other is a more detailed question which gives some ideas what the current priorities of the project/company are.
It's a typical failure of software developers to assume that if something is in writing (even if that writing is code) that it has been explained.
So the fact that there is a req open means that 'what they are looking for' has been explained, and thus if you have to ask it must be because you didn't even bother to remember what job you applied for.
If you were in the right frame of mind you might find this funny. Especially since that same person will happily commiserate with you later about the XY problem with management or customers. As if developers don't also suffer from the XY Problem in spades, just with slightly different symptoms.
I know what you asked for, now well me what you want.
A question I like to ask is: "You've seen my resume', what new things do you think I can learn here?"
I genuinely want to know this but I discovered a side benefit: the interviewer often starts trying to sell you on the company, flipping the dynamic i.e. you're not chasing them, they're chasing you.
I kinda miss the Wild West days, when nobody had much idea how to interview and we were all winging it. I got to interview myself a few times. People like it when they get to talk about themselves, but you also get to run through your values in question form and the clever will pick up on this. Oh this guy cares about <practice that is interesting but not ubiquitous>.
The reverse does not work out. Just because they ask you a bunch of questions about a topic doesn’t mean they are good at caring about that topic. Found that out with testing a couple times, and I one memorable case not until well after I accepted.
I usually let myself ask whatever I genuinely want to know about the company, without sounding tacky. Some general quetions I ask is team structure, how many team members will I work with, what will be my job in particular etc.
Some questions I ask the interviewer:
"What is currently your greatest challenge here at work?"
"How long have you been working here?"
"What do you like about this job?"
"Is there a programming language/technology you enjoy working with and why?"
Some interviewers really like these questions and I think it's a nice way of learning stuff along the way even if you don't get the job. The "favorite programming language" questions gave me some pretty cool insights.
Also, I think it's better to ask specific questions. Rather than asking "how's your tipical day?", ask "how was yesterday at the office?" People tend to approximate, forget or just skip the details when answering generic questions. Of course, they can always lie, but a specific question might just be a better shot at getting the information you want. Also, questions about product development workflow can say a lot about the company. I once got the same answer to every single question about the company's internal processes and communication: "It depends". They had no clue what they were doing.
"What would a typical day for me in my role look like from a high-level overview?"
Hopefully it's not "well there's morning standup then another 3 meetings and then another meeting and then you have 2 hours in the afternoon to do pair programming in a lively open office environment"
If I was interviewing someone and they asked what the weather was like at the office, I would just think they'd wasted a question on something they could easily Google.
Do you get so much time to ask these questions during an interview ? The standard white board kind of interview goes on for an hour and you are supposed to finish the coding questions in 45-50 minutes. That hardly leaves any time for counter questions.
I have vowed to someone I get advice from that the next interview cycle I will force the issue. We even worked out that I might interview a few “practice” places to get my patter down.
Thing is, I’m tired of talking myself into being excited about a vague opportunity. It doesn’t matter if they love me if I know nothing about them. And honestly, I’ve seen myself sabotage an interview that was making me uncomfortable because I don’t want to be someone’s anecdote about the guy who walked out mid interview.
So you might learn something more about me that changes your mind in the next ten minutes but if I don’t know more about you then it’s all for nothing.
The thing nobody wants to talk about is that psychologically, you already made up your mind 20 minutes in, now you’re just trying to justify your decision. I’ve seen people flunk a candidate for answering a question correctly and recommend another for getting the same question wrong.
Whenever I get interviewed, we spend about 60% of the time on my questions and 40% on theirs. There's a lot to learn about a company before you join, and the interview is the right place to ask.
When scheduling an interview, you can state that you also have some questions you want to ask, and politely ask for time to be included in the schedule.
If they refuse, that also tells you something about the company.
At least in the interviews I've participated in (both as applicant and as host) it's always been a mutual affair, both parties trying to figure out if there is good fit.
“How many people have quit your team in the last 6 month? Last year?” Turnover is a major red flag. Every hiring manager thinks their team is great, so asking subjective questions like “how’s the on-call?” Probably won’t yield useful answers.
That's something I always (have to) ask because otherwise nobody will tell you. At my current job it was particularly interesting because they started explaining me why they were looking for someone ("had to" fire the difficult person before) and why they were kind of afraid of getting someone as difficult as the person before.
I recently had a phone interview and while trying to figure out what I would want from an ideal job, I was surprised to discover I had not ever seen anyone recommend some of the questions I came up with:
- What is [your parent company] and/or [you, the subsidiary] doing to fight the climate crisis?
- What about diversity, how is your male-to-female ratio and are there many colleagues of non-European heritage? Potential follow-up: Are there any efforts to improve that?
(Of course, replace "European" with the region where most privileged people are typically from in your area.)
There were obviously more things I cared about, but I realized that this is one of the things I would want and should be looking for. I hope it may inspire others to do the same, as it has come up in my current company that nobody noticed that candidates are even looking for this sort of thing (and so, "from a business perspective, why should we even try if it makes no financial sense?").
One thing I haven’t seen listed yet that is important to personal happiness:
“What does your change process look like?”
Do they have boards and paperwork? Pull requests and code? Engineer just executes? Do they make technical decisions at the team level or require further meetings / boards, etc.
Tells you a lot about the company both in terms of maturity but also in terms of culture.
These questions do matter, but the answers are not as important as "Why?" Answers to such question will change as a product and company evolves. But how did they get to those answers? What strategy drives their decisions? In short, why do they use what they use, and do what they do. You should ask how they evolved to this point, what struggles they are having, and where they may be headed in the future.
Those answers will be far more insightful into who you are working with, and whether you want to work in their environment.
As a candidate, be very careful asking interviewers ‘why’ the company does something in a particular way.
‘Why?’ Is an aggressive question.
When you hit your interviewer with a ‘why?’ Question, you put them on the defensive. They have to justify that their company isn’t dumb, that there are good reasons for doing it that way, that there even is a rational reason why - when they may not know the reasons, they personally might even disagree, and the fact is there may not be a good reason.
And while you might think ‘I really want to know that sort of thing if I’m going to be working there’, the downside is that to get that answer, you have leave your interviewer with a bad taste in their mouth - ‘that candidate seemed to be judging us for how we picked our front-end stack, and I felt slightly embarrassed defending that we still use angular even though I personally have been fighting a running battle to move to a new stack for a year now’
And honestly, those are definitely not red flags right there. If your requirements for joining a tech org are that you expect them to have made all the same decisions you would have made if you were in their shoes, without error, then a) your bar might be a little high and b) what the hell do they need you for, they’ve already got a team that can do everything you could bring to the table.
I hear your concerns - and you are correct that phrasing of such questions can set the tone of the conversation. But I don't want to work in an organization that cannot have hard conversations about how they got to their status quo. If probing into their history is painful enough to them that it turns me off as a candidate, I'm fine with that. The best teams I've worked with had zero problems answering "Why", no matter if the answers were great or, "Yeah, that choice didn't turn out so well, and we need to improve." The worst teams I've been on were ones with defensive leadership.
I do agree with you 100% that answers that don't match personal preferences aren't red flags - everyone can learn from each other and expand their perspectives by working on new things with new people.
Even so, a tech leader who freaks out over being questioned is a red flag.
I didn’t say asking a ‘why’ question will freak people out. I’m just saying it is a suboptimal way of getting the information you want because it will affect the person you ask in an emotional way.
Totally agree. The author did not even approach the possibility that their questions would count against them in an interview. You have to tread very carefully with these kinds of questions. It can be a great opportunity to share mutual pain point experiences with the interviewer which enhances your perceived experience. You don’t want to come off as the guy whose going to rock the boat never having been in it in the first place. At most, I want to gauge the potential for change rather than the tech stack status quo.
If that interviewer really is fighting to move away from a bad technology choice, your question should have positioned you as a potential ally in that fight. If asking reasonable questions (while showing understanding) makes people defensive and leaves a bad taste then that's definitely a red flag.
Why questions are great because they show you think about things beyond just the surface code typist level.
You can go one step further and engage in proper discussion and offer suggestions and things they can try to improve whatever situation they’re in that leads you to ask a Why question. Show that you bring solutions to the table, not just a pair of hands.
And if you fear why is too aggressive, use “how come” instead.
Always try to leave your interviewer feeling “Wow I really want that guy to come solve my problems” and “Fuck that was a good suggestion I wanna try that”
> As a candidate, be very careful asking interviewers ‘why’ the company does something in a particular way.
> ‘Why?’ Is an aggressive question.
I agree that "why" can be interpreted negatively but there are definitely more disarming ways to probe. I personally would say (and have asked) something like, "Can you tell me more about the process or framework used to aid in decision making about technologies introduced in the organization and how it played out in your decision to use X?"
> what the hell do they need you for, they’ve already got a team that can do everything you could bring to the table.
If that's the case, then why are they conducting an interview in the first place?
I guess an argument can be made that it's counterproductive to ask "aggressive" questions if you want to be hired. But then again, candidates will likely be asked "why" they did something dozens of times in a whiteboard interview. If someone can't take 10% of the pressure they expose their candidates to, maybe they shouldn't be doing interviews in the first place.
As far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to answer any "why" question that I'm in a position to answer, and I always have, whenever a candidate has asked me one. I'm wary about taking the mere act of asking a question as a good sign (or a bad one) in the age of "Cracking to Coding Interview" and whatnot but it's the kind of question that leads to useful discussion.
Sure, we weren't right about a lot of choices we made, and sometimes, in hindsight, they were flat out indefensible, and we had to deal with the consequences. That's part of software development everywhere.
If they ask that because their bar is too high and they don't want to join a team that makes more than N wrong choices a year, fine, it's their bar, they get to set it wherever they like.
If they ask that just because they think questioning accepted practice is a good idea, that's actually great. Lots of companies end up making one bad mistake after another just because no one stops to ask why. And lots of narcissistic team leads and managers don't want that kind of attitude on their teams -- if that leads to not being hired, that's a bullet dodged, not a wasted opportunity.
On the other hand a question like this is a great opportunity to show them that we're good at both leveraging our assets and at owning up to our mistakes. That's definitely a quality I'd be looking for in a prospective team.
Edit: oh yeah, maybe some more general context is appropriate here.
One thing that took me a while to learn is that not every interview you don't ace is a failure. I don't mean that in some personal development hoodoo way, like the way to success is riddled with failures or whatever. I mean, literally, that there are interviews which you don't ace, and that's a good thing, because if you'd aced it, you would have hated working there, or it would have been really bad for your career, or both.
It's one thing if you don't get hired because you lack the knowledge and skills -- okay, you can work on that and try again later. But if you get passed because you asked the wrong question (and that question wasn't offensive or anything, obviously), or because you did not know that specific thing that a lead dev is really proud about knowing, that's a blessing in disguise.
Oh, to be clear asking ‘why’ questions of candidates is also an interviewing mistake. Adversarial questions are not good for communication in general.
I am literally saying that the mistake here is asking questions that use the word ‘why?’ (Or, yes, weasel-wordy synonyms like ‘how come’ or ‘what’s the thinking behind’ or ‘help me understand what led to..’)
These are all fundamentally cross-examination type questions, that ask someone to justify their judgement. Most people believe they have good judgement. When you question it, they close up. Or they second guess themselves, which means you’ve undermined them and that changes the dynamic between you.
To learn something from an person the shortest path is not always to just come right out and ask them about it.
So someone tells you they chose to use redux to solve a problem. Your first thought might be ‘aha! I could learn a lot about what they value and prioritize if I knew why they chose redux!’ And that’s a reasonable thing to want to know. But if you ask ‘why did you pick redux?’ you throw down a gauntlet that might stop you from really finding out. Instead, try coming in from the other side: ‘tell me more about the context for that project. What constraints were you under, in terms of time, preexisting code, dependencies, team size? What did you know about the problem space going in? Was this when you were learning react or already familiar?’ And take the conversation from there.
Nine times out of ten, when someone asks "why did you pick redux?" they really do mean some, or all of those things. Sure, they could phrase it better, but their immediate professional future is literally being decided right then and there, can you blame them for blurting out something silly, or misjudging how much professional terseness is appropriate?
They don't necessarily do it out of terseness, either. Practically every prospective intern out there has asked my "why" something (why Yocto? Why C? Why no C++? Why Python? Why CherryPy? Why shudders ClearCase?). These are people who've never worked in a company before, expecting them to ask me what contraints we were under, in terms of time, preexisting code, dependencies and team size would be completely unrealistic.
Plus there's an endless list of reasons for any of these questions. Without an open-ended question you can dance around the real reason for a particular decision for way more than it's appropriate in an interview.
People aren't machines. Just because a (pop?) psychology book out there says "why" is a cross-examining question doesn't mean everyone who asks you that is subconsciously playing cop games or being a jerk. Accidentally adversarial, or poorly-phrased questions, or questions that sound good in one's head and then come off as rude as soon as they utter them are a reality of everyday communication. Being able to deal with them is something that ought to be expected (from both parties, of course).
Sure, sometimes people will ask "why" in an adversarial manner but it's not the "why" that gives it away -- it's usually the arrogance, the condescension, the adversarial conversation that follows and so on.
Right. People are bad as communicating. Stipulated. But this entire thread is in the context of ‘here are some smart questions to ask at the end of an interview’. And I am saying that adding ‘why?’ questions to that list as follow ups is not good advice. The fact that people ask ‘why?’ questions when they don’t know better is not a good argument for telling people that ‘why?’ questions are good questions to ask.
You can get to that information by expressing empathy and curiosity and without challenging anyone’s judgement.
Why would it be challenging anyone's judgement? Just because it includes the word "why"?
If the mere fact of asking an open-ended question, in an interview setting, offends the interviewer, or makes them uncomfortable, to the point that they don't want to hire you, I think that's a good outcome.
Yes, sure, unless your objective is to be hired at absolutely all cost, anywhere, no matter how terrible. I know how that feels and I've been through that. But if that's the case, and you really don't care where you work, there are companies out there that will hire anyone who's even been in the same room with a computer for more than five minutes. You don't need to ask clever questions in those interviews.
And if, thank God, you're not in that situation, do you really want to work in a place where people make hiring decisions over things like these? Suppose they hire you -- sooner or later you're going to let a "why?" slip. If it's okay to do that when you're colleagues, why wouldn't it be okay to do it in an interview?
I definitely don't disagree that you should be able to come up with something more specific than "why", if only because it's likely to be more useful. But being empathetic towards someone who will otherwise feel they're being challenged because you asked them "Why are you using Yocto?" instead of "What are the constraints that made you choose Yocto, and in what context?" is unlikely to be useful IMHO.
At most companies, technical interviewers are conducting an interview because they've been told to. I try my hardest not to let it affect my attitude, but the bottom line is, I wouldn't conduct any interviews if it weren't expected of me.
No no, I mean, if they’ve already got a team that can do everything you could bring to the table, why have an opening in the first place? Why try to hire someone? (and, therefore, why is someone sitting in a room being interviewed in the first place :-) ?)
The fact that there's a job ad out there means there's a legitimate need for somebody on that team. It's a candidate's responsibility to show they're the right person just as much as it's the company's responsibility to show that being on that team is worth putting effort into.
> If your requirements for joining a tech org are that you expect them to have made all the same decisions you would have made if you were in their shoes, without error, then a) your bar might be a little high and b) what the hell do they need you for, they’ve already got a team that can do everything you could bring to the table.
Maybe they have a team that can do that, maybe they don't. Figuring that out is (allegedly :-) ) why the interview is being conducted, and it's definitely not something that can be gauged based on nothing but whether you ask a "why" question or not.
I can agree that most, if not all, questions in the linked blog post are good questions to ask any interviewer. I also feel that simply asking questions, no matter what they are, is good as that shows interest and curiosity.
On the occasions where I have interviewed people that have applied for mid to senior level positions I expect at least a handful of questions from the candidate. Someone interviewing for a senior position but not asking any questions comes off as a bit odd.
It's important to ask any questions at all, because sometimes it can be revealing. In the last place I worked in, when I asked the second question the boss told me we can talk on the way to the elevator because he had another canditate soon. I took it at a face value, and it was a mistake. There were no crowds applying for the company, later he even offered us a monetary bonus for bringing a new employee. He was highly manipulative in various ways.
> he even offered us a monetary bonus for bringing a new employee
As far as I know, that is very common, at least in the places I worked. If someone mentions in the interview that you tipped them about this company and they are hired, a bonus of 500-1000 for each of you is what I would typically expect the policy to be in medium to large companies. Their thinking is probably that talent is hard enough to come by already and that recruiters are way more expensive than that. (One company I interned at, I remember the boss complaining how big a cut external recruiters get, though I don't know the actual percentage it sounded like in the order of 10% of a year's wages just for getting you in touch.)
I like to ask questions that reveal behavioral and personality traits, and by analyzing them can indicate competency as a coworker and cultural fit. I find the attributes of my peers within the company to make a much larger impact on my happiness than the attributes of management or the organization.
Another really good thing to ask is about culture. And not in the blunt "what is your culture like?", but rather frame it as dichotomies.
Do you default to action, or default to inaction?
How do you value quality of code vs. speed of delivery?
Do you prefer your engineer to do pure engineering, or prefer to get involved with the business side?
If you had a short production outage, and a root cause cannot be found easily, how much time would the team spend searching for it (before giving up)? Would that change if the same error occurred twice? Three times?
Questions like this that don't have an obvious, universal answer (IMHO) are a really good way to get a glimpse into the culture.
I beg to differ. Startups tend to default to action. Lots of big / conservative companies default to inaction. When you cannot judge from the outside, you could get interesting results.
how come you have to ask this stuff at the end? wouldn't it make more sense for this information to be provided up front? what does it matter if i'm technically qualified for your job if your team size, structure, tech stack, required availability, etc. isn't a fit? why would you wait until after a tech screen for this? seems like a waste of everyone's time.
I know one question to ask at the beginning of a technical interview: what is the point? Tech interview gives no information about a candidate, his knowledge or skills. Its a horrible horrible idea to do it.
"Are there any concerns you may have that I can address that may lead you to believe I'm not the right candidate?"
I've been able to address: lack of previous experience, lack of a degree, time in between jobs, time spent at the last job, all thanks to this question.