> Formulate high-signal questions (to get interviewers thinking). Interviews are often won or lost by the questions you ask the interviewer at the end. Half of the battle is preparing well and showing up to answer the interviewer’s questions; the other half is asking them questions that get them thinking (and make you stand out).
I've performed hundreds of FAANG interviews, and I categorize this firmly in the "interview astrology" side. In my company we don't use questions asked by the candidate to determine the outcome (at least not for software engineers), and often we don't even record them. It sounds good to "impress your interviewer with your questions" but we are mindful about biases that might favour some candidates e.g. those with particularly good storytelling skills.
My advice would be to not overthink it. Just ask the questions that are genuinely important to you, and don't try to focus on impressing your interviewer.
On the other hand, at small companies, this can be a big deal. FAANG companies pretty much know how interested you are in working there, based on the fact that you’re the type of person who thinks they want to work at a FAANG company. And since the scope of these companies is so large, there are all sorts of ways to fit your interests into work at such a company over the mid-to-long-term.
But early-stage companies are looking for folks who have an interest and understanding in the task at hand. For many hiring managers at these companies, expertise – or at least interest – in the problem space is noteworthy. On the hard-skill side, it can suggest that you may be able to help see around corners with your product team, identifying and solving issues during planning or on the fly. On the soft-skill side, it can suggest that you’re bringing positive energy and motivation to the still-nascent team.
In the end, it’s still a matter of knowing your audience and reading the room. It may be a waste of time in some places, and may be the difference-maker in others.
Folks at 200+ and especially FAANG companies are mostly interchangeable. The interviewer is mostly derisking chance of a dud and comparing a 86%er vs 87%er. A few exceptions like at the rarer million dollar comp level. For everyone else, especially non-insiders... Cookie cutter comparisons it is, and whatever edge.
Startups are very much making a more existential bet. For our openings, I'm equally looking for ownership, interest in our customers/mission/long-term, and other bits that have little to with a whiteboard. On a HN Hiring thread from yesterday, you'd be surprised how many emails I got that were 'here is my stale CV from 5-10 years ago' and little about why they're excited to do hard things with us. Likewise, if someone is on a second round with us and hasn't bothered to use our free tier, that also tells us a lot about their (dis)interest in doing for what is, for everyone else on our team, career-defining creations.
Frankly most startups aren't very interesting. The ones who want you to be super interested are often the most boring ideas "were passionate about sox compliance", and if they are interesting they won't tell you shit about the company due to secret sauce or just moving so fast nothing is documented. It's hard as a candidate to get excited about every idea. And many people purposefully don't as they don't want to get shot down later by a job they were excited about. Finally if I'm actively looking I have 10 leads I'm following and I'm practicing for interviews. Signing up for every beta tryout eats into that time. I'll take a look when ivw got an offer.
I took a career pivot from web forms /rails to AAA playstation games. I played the game after they flew me to Seattle and gave me an offer. It involved buying a PlayStation 3 and their previous game. And that's an obviously cool job. Bought it right after I landed home and played it the next morning. Accepted the offer a few hours later.
Yea, I've had a similar issue happen to me. Was interviewing at a small-mid company that I was increasingly interested in and passionate about, and had really delved into with various interviewers to learn about their business and what made them a good product and good place to work.
Ultimately, they went with someone else. I'm not upset about it, but it stung more than getting another form letter from some large company. It feels almost cruel as an interviewer/hiring manager to expect every viable candidate to get really invested in you and your company when you know you're going to reject some high percentage of them just because you can't hire more than a few people.
Yes, generally I assume each candidate is having serious conversations with 2-5 others, and non-serious with more. We do the same. There are exceptions, like folks not actively interviewing, but that's the typical case.
It is big stakes for all involved, so someone not treating it seriously is a big warning flag. That is fine for later stage companies where individuals mostly need to not screw up and add reliable incremental value, and the resume screens and interview processes people are complaining about here reflect that need. Different job, different interview..
I certainly understand the stakes for you in making the right hire, but you're fundamentally much less invested in the candidate than you seem to be asking them to be in you. At the end of the day, you can reject them and pick someone else, or wait for someone better, while it seems like you have some expectation that they should be upset and disappointed if they don't make the cut with you.
Ultimately, if I'm really passionate, but don't have all the skills you want, or want more money than you can provide, than you'll pass on me and move on to the next candidate. That's fine, but if we've spent the time making sure I feel like I could really create something good with you and your team, and that I'd be a good part of it, that's just setting up 3-5 of your candidates to have a really strong letdown, even beyond what's already a difficult thing to hear.
I'm not sure where I say we "have some expectation that they [candidates] should be upset and disappointed if they don't make the cut". I would assume they'd be disappointed they didn't get an offer, wasted application time, and didn't get an impactful role... for easily avoidable reasons.
Agreed that people not a match for a job shouldn't get the job offer nor should they take if the offerer have messed up. This is all match making... Which is two-sided.
I'm lucky enough to have reached a point personally & professionally where I can highly value where each hour goes & doesn't go. A lot of time goes into a job, so the idea of applying for a bunch of 2-5yr (or longer) journey candidates, and the possibility to do the best professional work of my life to date.. and not doing my homework on the options just doesn't make sense. For some people it does and for many legit reasons, and for them, a leetcode interview for a FAANG style job probably makes more sense. Just that kind of approach is a harder sell for making a good match at a startup at the more formative years.
I'm implying it somewhat, since if you're "looking for ownership, interest in our customers/mission/long-term" and getting involved in what you see as "career-defining creations", then that's a relationship with a job that requires a candidate to buy into what you're doing to the point where they'd be upset to be rejected from the opportunity. I'm not trying to say you're deluding them or anything, but that the level of commitment you're asking for out of candidates before they've even started with you is such where it's a harder rejection than just "it's on to another job."
What I'm trying to say is that expecting the candidates to do the work to sell themselves on your vision and importance and viability feels like both a large burden on them and something that's setting even those dedicated enough to do it up for likely heartbreak.
Like you say, this is two-sided. Loading up the free version of your offering is more work than most interviewers are putting into a candidate. I could see it being very fair and very interesting to have a section of an interview where I sat with one of the company's developers or product folks and played around with the product to learn and talk about it - that seems like it would be a good signal both ways.
Otherwise, it just feels like you're asking candidates to put in far more time and personal effort deciding to care about them than you're likely putting in to learn and care about them outside of the interviews. That's always the case with interviews, but this additional layer just feels like an unnecessarily interviewee-unfriendly level on top. If it's working for you, then that's good for you, but consider the sorts of candidates that could be a good fit but don't have the time after work to spend even more time becoming invested in your company and a vision.
For us, folks using our tech and then realizing what it's for is the beginning of much more interesting technical & mission conversations than programming language, monetization model, or RSU vs ISO. I rather talk about where data analysis is going for tough problem XYZ, and what we - and their area of ownership - needs to do to help get our users and the tech community there.
Both sides needs to be ready for that conversation though, and those are the candidates that stick out. And yeah, if the company is say streamlining parking, or the candidate just wants a 9-5 -- both of which are fine -- it'll be a different kind of interview.
As others have said better, you are essentially asking the candidate to put in more time applying for opportunity than you are for them as a candidate to the filtering process. Eg they've got email exchanges, resume, interviews, and researching your company and doing the free trial. You have filter the resume, do the screen, write up decision.
I think you're missing that there's a power imbalance between you as the comfortable person offering a job (who is employed), and a person who may be currently looking and has mouths to feed and no income. I think you're making some assumptions here that might rule out excellent candidates in many scenarios and filter in for ingenuine yes people.
Also I did look, you seem to be a CEO on a graph visualization 3d acceleration system. I'm not sure that wows me instantly. I did sign up for a free trial, but I don't have an example data set to upload, and you don't seem to have one (I tried no-code visualizations). The main stuff I'd upload is something from work, but I generally don't need graph visualizations there either. I'm not going to upload proprietary info to a trial account. So as a enterprise customer I'm kinda at a crossroads for trying your system out. I'd have to go to Security and Legal and get approval, or I could just use tables or d3js, graphviz, or any of the solutions I'm currently not using. It's also unclear what of my data hits your servers.
As a candidate I imagine I'm at 45 minutes in before I actually get to kick the tires. You're not really making it easy for me to love your pitch.
At a minimum it'd be great if you could just have a notebook or collab or whatever people could just spin up instantly or use via browser. All I see are images, which while pretty seem to show the same issues I have with every other graph visualization program, they're incredibly cluttered.
Again you're not Games and you're not Space... I'm not sure why people would be passionate about your product in under 45 minutes or could afford to spend more than that to do so. I'd ask you to really consider if anyone can be as passionate about your idea as you are.
No 3d/vr/etc unfortunately, we never saw commercial demand in our segments, just looking at bigger datasets and increasingly 'wide' / high-dimensional/scattered/heterogeneous data using accelerated viz & AI, and now text2code
And yes, we currently get used by data scientists and devs on problems like supply chain analysis, misinformation, cybersecurity, human trafficking. Seeing 100x+ more data than d3 and having a full env there makes analyst investigations easier. Our original GPU client <> GPU cloud tech helped lead to what is now Apache Arrow (we contributed the JS tier as part of the GPU Open Analytics Initiative) and Nvidia RAPIDS (we wrote the precursor in nodejs/opencl, and worked with Nvidia to restart for pydata), and are now focusing on the Nvidia Morpheus & graph AI sides for end-to-end GPU pipelines with our bigger customers (cyber, ...).
More recently, to make this kind of tech easier for analysts who are traditionally stuck with Splunk/Kibana/etc style UIs for investigations, we have been launching louie.ai (genAI-first notebooks) with various customers
Hopefully now it makes sense why we don't go far with candidates who can't have conversations on these things, such as how they are built, how they get used, and where they are going . It is ok-but-not-great on conv 1, but weird by conv 2. And as a CEO, far from what I look for in someone in a senior/leader role who is supposed to be looking ahead.
> if someone is on a second round with us and hasn't bothered to use our free tier, that also tells us a lot about their (dis)interest in doing for what is, for everyone else on our team, career-defining creations.
This is on a completely different planet from my experience as a candidate and as an interviewer.
It looks like you're doing interesting work, and it might be great to work for you. But that's true of a lot of other companies. You're asking for a level of interest and dedication to your company that is completely unwarranted at this stage. For all I know you're about to ghost me. I suspect a major effect of your approach is that you select people who are better BS artists and have fewer employment options.
Yes, we are looking for folks to work with us, not for us. Different mindset & process. We try not to hire ex-FAANG (but occasionally do) in part because of this kind of difference.
It's fascinating to see so much resistance to this kind of thinking for a forum that is nominally about startups. In a sense that's good - some people are well-suited for the needs of scaleups and post-scale, vs startups (0-1, 1-10), and recognizing that is healthy. What you do & learn in a big company or a already-figured-it-out late-stage & highly funded VC co is different from the wild west stage of startups.
I will work for you, not with you, as the loyalty of your company is non existent. I worked for many start ups, and enjoyed working on that type of challenges, but I am always aware loyalty is non existent. It is a red flag if company talks about "we are a family" or "work with us".
I always liked the Netflix reframing of 'professional sports team's vs 'family' because of that reason. At the same time.. I'm sorry you've had a professional career with so many folks lacking loyalty. I've been lucky enough to work with a variety of 'recognized' great people, and with them, loyalty is so common that it has been the folks who lacked loyalty (and often in politicized bigcos that seems to encourage that) who stand out as the exceptions.
Fwiw, I'm using 'work with us' in the sense of taking ownership over a problem and ability & interest to work through many unknowns, vs preferring a weekly jira with big decisions made by the time they reach you.
The analogy of 'mercenary' specialist may align with your world view. Sometimes that type of person can be worth their weight in gold. We like that for short temp consultations for example, and in big enterprise engagements, I often like when a mix of them + lifers are involved..
If you miss revenue targets, you will have to lay off staff. Maybe it is too early yet for your company, but as you go to different funding rounds this will happen. A spreadsheet will decide if you retain me or lay me off.
It really doesn't take long to try out a free tier of a product and it's a great way to get a feel for what the company is building, how far along they are, how much you like or dislike the direction they've taken.
I even like to briefly try the free tier of a product (if available) ahead of warm lead sales calls. It always pays off to have a rough understanding of what a product does and how it fits into an overall ecosystem.
I haven't been ghosted "so much." I've worked at a cool startup and two FAANGs. But there's no guarantee the interview process will go your way no matter how good you are; there's a lot of luck and interpretation involved.
> if someone is on a second round with us and hasn't bothered to use our free tier, that also tells us
Now that you've said it on HN... soon, most of the applicants you get using your free tier by second round will be doing so because that'll be added as a standard part of the generic tech jobs interviewing ritual for people who just go through the motions (along with memorizing Leetcode, and practicing good-sounding lies to behavioral questions).
A friend told me that Bumble require you sign up to apply for a job. And now my pet theory about why guys get so few swipes back is that they're all swiping away on leagues of job applicants.
I can't fathom having a serious discussion about a 2-5 year career bet, and hopefully even more impacting, and not having a serious look at the actual work or at least the highly related technologies. Some of our best hires have been from our userbase and the OSS communities we helped start, and some of our misses have been from those who couldn't get on board with those.
(We don't do leetcode etc, though for junior roles we do ask for a Jupyter notebook, and for senior, might do a contracting period if mutually agreeable.)
Having a contracting period for senior engineers sounds like you must not get many of them. Most people I know at that level are swimming in offers when they go looking for work, so a contract period is just incredibly unattractive.
Yes it varies. Some prefer it before jumping in, eg, super senior who mostly do advisory and light consulting. We are a small team so by definition each person gets more ownership than at your average bigco or megaround VC co.
> On a HN Hiring thread from yesterday, you'd be surprised how many emails I got that were 'here is my stale CV from 5-10 years ago' and little about why they're excited to do hard things with us.
I was about to write a moderately snarky comment and went to your profile to check which Java banking middleware or Rails-based Uber-for-dogs your startup is building for applicants to be excited about... but looking at the description your company seems quite interesting! Sorry to hear that you've got flooded with generic low-effort application from disinterested people. I guess in current job market some people just desperately knocking on all doors hoping to get any job at all.
A lot of people here would argue it’s just a numbers game. I’ve been lucky over the past 25 years to hit 2 or 3 targeted possibilities with a single email to someone I knew. But I realize that’s probably not typical.
I think that's more true than people, especially pure engineers, would like to think
Ultimately companies are made out of individuals going through their own lives and making decisions as they go. Raising capital, selling software, and getting a job offer are all very much sales processes. That means very real human + numbers components.
Agreed on the numbers side too on the long-view.. join a company, vest + 1yr, and either stay if it's growing or on to the next one. At least a couple times, stay longer - ideally at the growers - so you can go up in learned seniority too vs just in title. An equally important numbers game.
I just feel bad that folks are pretty much disqualifying themselves needlessly. It's a tough job market, and if folks are flubbing it with us that needlessly, I can only imagine what they are going through with their other applications. A bit of effort here can go a long way, hence my advocacy...
> Likewise, if someone is on a second round with us and hasn't bothered to use
> our free tier, that also tells us a lot about their (dis)interest in doing for
> what is, for everyone else on our team, career-defining creations.
This makes sense. After a first round, if I'm still interested in a company, I want to dig in and find out everything I can to see if they're a likely fit and signing up for a free tier (if there is one) is absolutely a no brainer. And it's usually is a great way to form some meaningful questions to ask in the next round of interviews if I AM interested.
As an interviewer, the only signal I ever take away from interviewee questions is if they manage to come across like a complete asshole. And this isn't common because most people aren't complete assholes, and those who are usually have displayed their colors earlier on in the interview.
As an interviewee, I refuse to put any effort into gaming the system and hoping to come across as a better candidate. I treat these sessions as me interviewing them. And yes, this means that a lot of times my questions will come across as banal. But you can get some decent signal on red flags by asking several potential peers to describe their day, challenges that they're facing, and that sort of thing.
On few occasions the questions interviewees asked at the end did help me form a better picture of them as candidates; example, someone asked what Java version we run predominantly and, and this is the important bit, didn't balk when the answer was some ancient LTS version but instead a nervous laugh of commiseration followed by war story time. This told me a lot both about the candidate's maturity and experience.
That's a good heuristic. Someone just starting doesn't know what "best practices" are. Someone early into their career demands strict adherence to the best practices. Someone later into their career knows what rules can be bent, and knows a good reason for doing it.
> As an interviewee, I refuse to put any effort into gaming the system and hoping to come across as a better candidate.
That reminds me of this part of the article: "You can use mirroring in your interview process. How? Use their language when describing your experiences."
I consider mirroring to be a form of gaming the system, or at least something that can backfire. Having heard many interviewees parrot back terminology they didn't really understand, I'm sensitive to when somebody is trying to dazzle me with BS. I'd much rather hear an interviewee use much simpler, even non-technical verbiage, when describing things than try to use the words they think I want to hear.
>As an interviewee, I refuse to put any effort into gaming the system and hoping to come across as a better candidate.
This is something missing from all the "interview coaching" advise and very few people seem to understand.
Suppose there is an actual technique that allows you to get a job you otherwise would not get. Say, hypothetically, you used it to become an astronaut. Do you think you perform well as an astronaut even though the selection process would have culled you? I'd imagine you get kicked out anyways so all you gained is a line in a resume. The same advise also insists that having a whole bunch of 0.5-1 year "gigs" in your work history is normal, but is it really? Do people really believe hiring managers don't see the pattern? Does anyone really think that people go: "Oh, we should hire this person, he worked in all of FAANG, one year in each, must be very good!"?
The biggest companies and the FAANGs don't care. It's a numbers game for them. They know interviewing isn't a science but there's very little incentive for them to improve the process because they get so many applicants.
It depends on the company, I guess. The first-round interviews, which are the subject of this topic, that I have seen, were all Fizz Buzz level to cull the obviously incompetent.
> Do you think you perform well as an astronaut even though the selection process would have culled you?
Yes, and it's not even remotely close. It shouldn't really be surprising, "code up an algorithm that some genius needed half a lifetime to develop, but from scratch, in 45 minutes, on a whiteboard, while being watched, with the job on the line" has nothing whatsoever to do with what you'd do at the actual job. So why would the interview be a predictor of job performance?
>So why would the interview be a predictor of job performance?
Because most companies want to hire people who perform well and not hire people who don't perform well. They have variable success at that but even some fly-by-night startup will try to adjust interviews when they find that a significant number of people they hired needs to be sacked.
Well, yes, interview preparation is a bet on the incapacity of the interviewer to determine a candidate's capacity.
Anyway, neither of those things is binary, if you ask me, I would really advise into getting some amount of preparation; but if it too useful, it's actually a red flag.
Indeed, it's a bet that you, an outsider, know better than the interviewers that you will not be fired after the first performance review (note that it says nothing about your general competency, just the performance metrics of this particular company). If you had not been personally involved, which side of such a bet you would have taken?
I would be on the interviewer having a lot of issues undermining his evaluation; and I would be on the performance review having them too. Those are very hard tasks, nobody gets them perfectly right.
It's not the absolute evaluation of the candidate as a human being. It's an evaluation of fitness for the particular job by someone who has some insight into the company requirements vs. evaluation of the same requirements by someone outside. It is not binary indeed but, statistically, the outsider will be wrong more often than the insider unless insider's evaluation has no or a negative correlation with the performance metrics.
This. I might call out a particularly good question in the debrief but only as an aside.
I don’t think I ever made a decision where the questions factored in at all; most of the time there’s more than enough material in the actual interview to cover a decision being made.
I think the questions that matter are clarifying questions in e.g. architecture rounds.
E.g. design a document storage system
Asking about requirements can help provide evidence you're aware of tradeoffs, various concepts, etc. and separate yourself from other candidates. Not surface level "what QPS do we need to support?" type questions, but beyond that.
Otherwise, yes, I agree, questions are not recorded and don't matter (unless there's a serious red flag like someone asking if they can avoid working with $GROUP_THEY_DONT_LIKE which raises HR type concerns)
It's weird that you dont judge potential hires on the quality of their questions, the most important parts of most creative jobs are being able to ask the right questions.
The questions a candidate asks during that part of the interview have almost no overlap to the questions they would ask as part of a real job.
And no, not really. My job is to assess their technical skills, not how well they ask me about my work life balance while in a relatively high stress environment.
> “The questions a candidate asks during that part of the interview have almost no overlap to the questions they would ask as part of a real job.”
An apt symmetry, as typically the questions a candidate gets asked during an interview also have no overlap to the questions they would get asked as part of the real job.
I'm not talking about inane questions like your work life balance. I am talking about questions about your product, your design decisions, etc.
If I am interviewing at a company I certainly want to know that I am not going to be working at a dumpster fire. I want to know how you internally resolve conflicts relating to code reviews for example, so I know that you uphold standards and dont just allow things to get progressively worse as time goes on due to systematic indifference. Now you could be lying to me but that's why I ask more than one question. Certainly to me it feels like if a candidate is asking these kinds of questions during an interview process then that candidate also cares about those things, which depending on whether you are running a java sweatshop or an organized and productive development company seems like it would have some importance.
Maybe the candidate don't feel they need to ask such questions because they have 5 friends who work for the company and know the answer already. From an interviewer perspective, you get more signal from the candidate by asking them such questions in a behavior interview in a more standardized way.
> I want to know how you internally resolve conflicts relating to code reviews for example
I call this process fit. It's important to some candidates, and some employers. It's clearly important to you, and you should ask those questions; interviewing is a two-way street.
But if I'm an employer that makes process a big deal, I'm not giving you points for those questions, because I'm going to be sussing out your process fit earlier anyway. If I'm not an employer that makes process a big deal, I'm probably not giving you points for those questions, because it's not a big deal to me (this could be a red flag for you, depending on the answers you get from your probing questions)
When I'm asking an interviewer questions, I'm trying to get a read on what it's like to work there. Are there any red flags that'd turn me off? Is this a place I'll enjoy working? Do my potential coworkers seem like decent people? Does the work/life balance match what I want to see?
When I'm actually working at a place, I don't need to ask those questions. I already know the answer.
These questions are important but they are not the types of questions I am asking about. Part of determining if you want to work somewhere is figuring out how mature the team is when it comes to design decisions and the development process, to accurately ascertain this, you have to ask technical questions, the act of asking these questions is itself an indicator that you yourself are thinking about these important things and as such value them and should, to a well functioning development team with a working product, indicate that you would at least contribute to keeping things working optimally and contribute positively.
I would be worried if someone nevet asked about the thing they were going to be working on, asked why certain design decisions were made, or asked how it gets developed.
Sure, I agree. That's part of me finding out if I want to work there.
The unfortunate reality is usually you're given 5-10 mins at the end in a hasty "what would you like to ask me?" so I tend to stick to the more basic type questions. Repeating across interviewers to see what patterns pop up.
That said I'm not shy about pushing back with questions during an interview session itself, and that's where things like you're talking about can get worked in. Of course if they insist on "solve this problem" type sessions, there's less of that. But it's also less likely I want to work there. So it works out for me.
the quality of questions is important during the technical segment, almost as much as getting the correct (or at least reasonable) answer/solution. charging into a solution without picking up on the ambiguities is one of the classic ways a leetcode legend fails a technical interview.
after all that, I feel the candidate deserves at least 5-10 minutes at the end to ask their own honest questions without having to worry about what they're signaling.
Counterpoint: I've performed hundreds of interviews at early-stage startups, and this is spot-on, fantastic advice. If you can ask questions about things that I have spent time thinking about, that's a really good sign to me that you were able to look at the company from the outside and apply your knowledge to understand what's important. If you can ask questions about things I haven't been thinking about but that subsequently get me thinking, even better.
Questions really distinguish you from other candidates more than answers because the fact that they're unprompted means they tell me more about where you focus your attention than do the answers to my questions.
> My advice would be to not overthink it. Just ask the questions that are genuinely important to you, and don't try to focus on impressing your interviewer.
With all of that said, I still 100% agree with this. The ideal result is that you ask me questions about things that are important to you and that I find those questions compelling - then we've probably got a good match.
But do make sure you have some thoughtful, researched questions. Those are always better than "what's the best thing about working here?" regardless of topic.
The only universal truth when it comes to interviews is that there are no universal truths.
As an interviewee there is nothing you can do that will universally be read as a positive across all interviewers. There are so many contradictory rules among interviewers that you might as well not bother gaming the system and do what you want to do. Let the chips fall as they may.
As an interviewer, no filter you put in place will give you a perfect read on what it's intended to test. For instance I know I have my quirks in terms of things that'll turn me off of a candidate based on resume alone. But I also recognize that many candidates are coached to do it this way in the first place. So I need to be conscious of this and try to not interpret these things as "shitty candidate"
>The only universal truth when it comes to interviews is that there are no universal truths.
100%. This is what makes me roll my eyes in all of these threads. Do enough interviews and you'll see people regularly dismissed for the most pretty and inane reasons. Hell, just the other day in one of these threads you had someone saying that they rejected a candidate because they said "bro" too much. No amount of interview prep, "They Hate This One Weird Trick" blogs, or hiring astrology will beat the fact that there are humans sitting on the other side of the table. And humans are weird and finicky
I do think I'd mark it against someone if I reserved 10-15 minutes at the end of an interview and they didn't have anything at all they wanted to know about the job or the company. I'm not expecting them to have a laundry list, but still. Or if you're not going to ask something, then have something to say at least. I'd rather you just go "No questions, since I assume this job pays me in money I can use to buy things?".
Getting a new job is a big deal - either you're about to quit somewhere and presumably you're looking because you care about finding a new employer that's better on some axis than your current job, or you're out of work and desperate to take anything, which is fine as well, but if you don't want to just admit that, you should probably have some idea of what to say otherwise.
Companies don't conduct interviews, people do. You need to be able to ask questions in an inoffensive way, and you might get some meaningful signal back. If you conclude you can't ask hard questions and instead go to Glassdoor then you're biasing yourself to demonstrative cheerleaders or people with an axe to grind, neither of which will really tell you anything about what's actually going on within the ranks of power on the inside of a company.
It depends on the questions - I don't feel like I've often gotten bad answers when I've asked and I know I try my hardest to be as honest as possible when candidates ask me hard questions about my position.
If I get red flagged for asking about their on-call policies or office-work plans or how they're handling the position/responsibilities that I would be taking on, then that seems like a bullet dodged? It's not like I'm expecting people to ask "So tell me about why you hate your manager" or "When was the last time you fired someone". You can ask probing but polite questions that give you information without having people tell you the sort of angry gossip you get on Glassdoor.
Obviously, tailor this to how desperate you are. If you want absolutely zero chance anyone will reject you for any reason, then you should be asking the most fluffy questions you can. I certainly don't reject people for asking those questions. I just find it a weird signal when someone seemingly doesn't even want to pretend to care about content, structure, and culture of the job they're interviewing for.
Interviewing candidates in a startup context I try to answer questions as openly and honestly as possible–I want both parties in the conversation to be on the same page and know what they're getting into. I don't think anyone benefits when people dance around topics that will materially impact success and satisfaction at work on a daily basis.
I'm struggling to think of legitimate questions which would get someone red flagged. Asking about oncall, team dynamics, inter-team dynamics, culture, why people want to work there, etc. all feel like they're important for the candidate to get to know if they'd want to work there.
> and they didn't have anything at all they wanted to know about the job or the company.
I assume that does not include scenarios where the large company interview claims they can't answer questions about a specific job until much later after a "team matching" step.
Sure. Obviously there's exceptions, and I mostly haven't worked anywhere where that's been an issue, but you also know what you're in for if you're interviewing somewhere that size. It's a very different process.
That said, I've regularly done interviews from both sides where I wasn't talking with someone who would be anywhere close to my role/team, and there's still plenty to ask there. At worst, you'll learn some about a different part of the organization, and maybe get some interesting contrast to other people you talk to later.
Even finding out what things are and aren't the same across the whole company can be interesting. Does vacation policy vary by team? Their use of various tools? Their work/ticket management process?
> My advice would be to not overthink it. Just ask the questions that are genuinely important to you, and don't try to focus on impressing your interviewer.
I agree with this, except in one sense that I think lends to the point of the blog post.
The questions you ask can drive perception of how you might act as an employee. On more than one occasion I have asked a question about X at an interview and then had a subsequent conversation with a recruiter where they ask "is [something related to X] a concern for you?"
I've not ever had one discontinue me due to it but it shows what's coming up in conversation at the interview debriefs.
Exactly, same thing in my company, at least for technical interviews. I always tell interviewees that questions are off the record, and if they don't have any questions, it's totally fine.
I have failed several interviews by knowing too much about the employer, or in cases, even the interviewer --- where I felt I didnt have any pertinent questions to ask at the end of the interview...
If I already know the answer I have to consciously remember to still ask questions at the end....
No worse interview feeling of suddenly thinking of all the questions you _should_ have asked after youve left the meeting...
In the past, I've dealt with that by saying something like "I would ask you X, but I saw from [place] that the answer is Y. Can you confirm that this is correct / confirm that this still true / tell me more?"
I put my cards on the table to show that I've done my homework and establish what I know already, then elicit more information. If there's nothing more to be said, then fine, but at least an interviewer who cares what I ask will know what I'm curious about even if I already happen to have an answer. And if I'm wrong, then it gives them an opportunity to correct the record. Or it gives them an opening to provide additional nuance.
So that's at least 200. Assuming you interview for the 5 FAANG in parallel, and you have, let's say 5 rounds per application (and you do reach the 5th). You would have done the whole process 8 times. Assuming they let you apply only once per year, that means you have interviewed at the very least every year for the last 8y. okay.
I've performed hundreds of FAANG interviews, and I categorize this firmly in the "interview astrology" side. In my company we don't use questions asked by the candidate to determine the outcome (at least not for software engineers), and often we don't even record them. It sounds good to "impress your interviewer with your questions" but we are mindful about biases that might favour some candidates e.g. those with particularly good storytelling skills.
My advice would be to not overthink it. Just ask the questions that are genuinely important to you, and don't try to focus on impressing your interviewer.