> Even asking "what did you have for lunch" is better than asking nothing; the interviewer might start talking about whether the company pays for lunch, whether it's any good.<p>No, it's not. I'm pretty sure anyone who asked that in an interview would be bottom of the list, regardless of how I felt about their interview otherwise. It's flippant and shows a lack of care about what's going on.<p>Iv'e never been upset with someone for not asking questions. Interviews are tense and we <i>do</i> try to answer the most common questions before they are asked. If they have no questions, we extend and offer to email us later and we'll answer any questions they come up with later.<p>Stupid question affect the interview. Lack of questions doesn't.
When I’m in an interview I always end up turning the interview around and interview the the interviewer.<p>Interviews are a two way street. They want to make sure you suite a role but you also need to make sure the role is suitable for you, you are going to enjoy it and get something from it. I go in with the mental view they need to sell the job to me.<p>Doing consultancy I’ve been at many companies, some great some bad. I go straight to the questions trying to dig up as many warts as possible to figure out what I’m letting myself in for as I’ve seen how much different companies can differ.<p>What are you working on this week?<p>What’s a typical day?<p>What’s the current tough problems you have?<p>Do you do much out of hours work?<p>Why do you use the tech stack / tools you do?<p>How do you manage work, do you do scrum/Kanban/x/y/z. How’s your backlog? What are the upcoming releases, are they on schedule? Who manages features, who and how is the product owner?<p>How’s the team?<p>What’s been your favourite part of your job so far?<p>How’s the business make money? How much funding do they have and what happens when that runs out? How’s the current projections will my job be here in 12 months?<p>Why are you recruiting for this role? How is staff turnover?<p>Any bad things I should know?<p>Etc etc
This reads as an extended justification for how the author could possibly have failed. He writes as though it <i>must</i> be as simple as 'just should have asked a question'. It's an odd conclusion which communicates its own set of assumptions. It reminds me of people who claim, in all seriousness, that they can always spot X intangible characteristic — without any justification for how they determine their false positive/negative rate in that judgment. This undoubtedly reflects my bias, but I find many (bordering or even definitely including most) 'humble' blog posts to do this; and that is perhaps a further riff on the kind of canned advice we see here. They tend to read, to me, like answers to the interview questions, "Tell me about a time you failed," or, "What is your greatest weakness?" In this case, all the author really reports is that he did extremely poorly relative to his expectations — but he manages to spin it into a maxim. If even someone as qualified as he could be unseated by this tactical error, it surely bears memorializing as advice worth living by.
The "what did you have for lunch" question strikes me as a <i>bad idea</i>.<p>If I am interviewing someone and that is their only question, it is an immediate "weirdo-flag" if it gets to the stage where we are making our minds up and aren't sure - I can imagine the feedback now: "asked a weird, pointless and irrelevant question during an important situation" is a <i>negative</i> thing and could be a decider. Would this person do something equally odd and inappropriate in an important client meeting for example?<p>If you've had a really fun, jovial and friendly conversation with the interviewer then 100% sure go for it, but I find most interviews are a bit from stilted and fraught and it does not feel that this sort of thing would be appropriate.<p>My favourite sort of question for this when you have no other questions is something like "What is a typically day like for you?" or "What is a day-in-the-life of this role like?" It is useful for understanding if the role really is what you think it is, and from there you can branch out to get a bit more into the details ("ah - what SCM do you use?" "oh right - how are code reviews done?" "interesting - how do you track work to be done?" "I see - is there dedicated UX people?" etc etc)<p>Won't always work since the person interviewing you might not be in the team/role you are applying for, but I think it shows interest in what you will actually be doing if you got the role, re-inforces that you have relevant experience (if you ask appropriate follow-up questions), and that you are curious.
Here's the thing: interviews are stressful and unnatural and they provoke anxiety and a fight-or-flight response in a lot of people. That fight-or-flight response shuts down parts of the brain that evolution considers unnecessary in an emergency situation, including the pre-frontal cortex - the part of the brain that you need to perform reasoning and to think of questions that you might want to ask. A good interviewer will know this.<p>I've interviewed a lot of people who were obviously nervous and who didn't have any questions to ask me at the end but whom we hired and who ended up doing really well in the job.<p>That said, if you do want to have something to ask the interviewer and you're worried that your mind will go blank, write down some questions ahead of time in a notebook that you take to the interview and refer to it if necessary. An added bonus is that you can ask about things that you actually care about, rather than just asking asking the first thing that comes into your head.
When I'm interviewing people, I usually don't consider the questions they ask (or don't) as part of the evaluation, and if they are nervous, I tell them so.<p>If you evaluate their questions, then they might not ask what they actually want to know, for fear they'll be judged for it. That helps no one.
When I interview someone, I personally am interested in a "conversation" with the candidate and not just where I ask questions, they provide an answer. So by the time we are done, the candidate should already have asked a few things since I run the interview as a conversation where they talk to me, ask questions as part of the discussions we are having and of course, answer specific questions that I ask.<p>At the end, I always ask: do you have any other questions for me. I don't care if they ask me a question for the heck of it but I do care overall whether they were engaged with me through the interview or not. This specially matters as you interview more senior candidates than entry level or junior even though I welcome anyone to ask me anything.<p>So I would say that go to an interview where you should not have to necessarily ask questions at the end but it should ideally be more of a conversation throughout. It also depends on how much information is revealed by the interviewer upfront. I always talk about the company, the team structure and the specific role before I start getting into details. That gives them an opportunity to later on ask for more clarification etc.
Since the comments have shifted focus to hiring/interviewing:<p>Make sure that your company's interview process leaves enough time at the end of each interview to allow the candidate to ask questions. Don't assume the candidate is OK with emailing questions later because you only left the candidate 3 minutes to talk. The candidate pledged a day of their life to interview as they are interested in your company. If they leave your company at the end of the day without being able to ask all the questions they have, there's a chance they will never bring them up later.
My interviewee style is to ask questions during the interview. I feel like it makes it more conversational and pleasant.<p>I ask so many questions/clarifications during an interview that even if I have a big list going into it, by the time the interviewer asks if I have any questions, I pause, and then most of the time I'll respond something like: "I think we've covered everything I was curious about" and then do a quick recap of my understanding to clarify and uncover any bad assumptions.<p>My interview to next stage/offer rate is quite high, so I think my interviewee style is reasonably good.
It's always really obvious when someone asks a question just to hear themself speak or to feel like they made a mark on the meeting or whatnot. To me it comes off as mildly irritating and a waste of everyone's time. I personally won't be taking this advice, sorry.
I agree with this, I can pinpoint the one question I didn’t answer correctly in one interview once. I was doing well and passed through everything until it came to hr asking about a 5 month break and why I left a company without another job. The hr lady prompted me with what to say “was it so you could do some travelling?” And I replied that I just needed a break and took some time off. She prompted that I must have done some studying, again I just said no and that was it.<p>My answer didn’t fit the social norms so I was canned.
I think if y'all are trying to apply this to tech interviews at big companies you will be sadly disappointed. I did interviews for a company that has interviewers write feedback for a hiring committee, and I never included anything about the questions the candidate had. 100% of my feedback was about the interview questions that I asked and the candidate's answers to them. The people making the hiring decision has no way of knowing that you wore a suit, or asked me what I had for lunch, or anything like that. The information is simply not available to them. (We even tried to write feedback like "the candidate did X" so that there was no "he" or "she" to bias things.)
I've never cared when a candidate doesn't have questions questions for me. I've done ~100-200 interviews at FAANG companies and never heard a single complaint in the debriefing about "The candidate didn't have any questions for me."<p>I feel like once you've done a few interviews you realize that "What's a typical day like?" Isn't really a signal of a candidate's genuine interest, it's the obvious reply to your "Any questions for me?" gambit.<p>Personally, I wouldn't even ask for questions from the candidate if I didn't know some rare people do genuinely want to ask questions.
While one should always prepare a question in such situation, the proposed standby questions are definitely worse than not asking a question. "What did you have for lunch" or "what did you do yesterday" are highly personal, and irrelevant to the interview.<p>It is a worse way of saying "I don't have a real question for you".<p>Work environment, atmosphere, infrastructures... There are endless relevant topics that an interviewee could ask about. Anything would be better than "what did you do yesterday".
While the "what did you have for lunch" question may do a bit to surprise the interviewer, there is probably a more valuable go-to question that can be fairly generic in any sort of interview type experience.<p>"If you were me, what would you improve on (work on, learn next, etc etc)?"<p>This is beneficial both for the interviewer and you as an interviewee. It lets the interviewer consider you specifically in the context of "are you missing something", and gives them a good opportunity of letting you know where they see your holes/flaws. It also let's them know that you are willing to learn, and trying to understand how to grow and change.<p>The interviewer will be asking themselves these sorts of questions after the interview anyway, so why not try to get their feedback right then and there, with a potential opportunity for you to correct them, if they think you are missing something that you actually have.
This also helps in projecting an image that you have options and you're not desperate. And even if you are desperate, it's good to ask questions so you don't land in a bad situation. I think about some jobs I quit, and in retrospect I could have saved everyone some time if I had thought of certain things that were important to me and asked questions ahead of time.
> Finally, "person fails interview because interviewer expects to see cultural signal and interviewee does not broadcast cultural signal" is a common failure mode. Think about someone who wears a suit to a tech interview.<p>Honest curious question: Is it really considered that much of a faux-pas to wear a suit to a tech interview nowadays?
This advice might apply to written applications too. In college I was applying for a scholarship, in its first year, in which they picked one recipient from each state. It was a long application. The very last page was the question, "Is there any other information about you or your family you would like to share?". I thought this was an odd question. Maybe they wanted some information about special hardships or something. I instead wrote a table that had the height and weight of every member of my family.<p>I told my parents about the application and my mother was so mad at me. She told me I threw away my chance at the scholarship. It turns out however that I got the scholarship. Not only that, some of the recipients were invited to the capitol building in DC if they lived relatively close. A senator came up to me at the luncheon and told me she loved my answer. It also turned out that they gave some extra scholarships beyond one per state. It turns out my state got one of those extra scholarships. I suspect maybe I got the scholarship only because of my smart ass answer at the end.
> they asked "do you have any questions for us?" By this point I'd done so much preparation that I couldn't think of anything, and said "No."<p>I'd argue his preparation was inadequate. Part of my interview preparation process is to come up with a list of questions to ask based on the research I've done about the company and position.
I was going through the new-student induction at UTIAS and one researcher asked if we had any questions. Everyone else was silent, and I got the feeling the guy was feeling bad about it so I asked a question about his research.<p>I fumbled the question, he made me look like an idiot.<p>One anecdote isn’t everything, but “just force a question” is not a foolproof strategy.
"What did you do yesterday", from the article, is a great open-ended question that tells you a lot about someone.<p>I've always enjoyed a diff-question, like, what do you wish people knew about xyz, or what surprised you about xyz. Those answers are usually very information dense
I interviewed a lot of candidates (technical interviews for software engineers) and in my experience great candidates ask great questions. Don't ask any question, ask interesting questions. There are 2 reasons why this is important:<p>- Asking good questions is part of the job IMO, I'm not sure why we wouldn't test it, so it absolutely makes sense to ask candidates to ask questions.<p>- Even if you really prepared well and know everything there is to know about the team and the company you are applying, there has to be something an insider can tell you that would be interesting for you if you really want to join this company/ this team. So it clearly shows lake of interest / motivation if you ask no question
> Fast forward a week and I got an email that I was not going to be offered a scholarship. Only two other students out of 25 were rejected. I was dumbfounded.<p>High stakes selection often comes down to random chance. It's entirely possible the author could have asked the perfect question and still missed out, because from the selection committee's perspective all candidates appear equally strong. It's a good position to be in as a hiring manager, but as a candidate it can be difficult to refrain from overfitting the situation.<p>Probably the best advice, in any situation, is to seek out more options. Apply to more jobs, more scholarships, and more fellowships. Write down more ideas, todo items and bugs.
Right, asking the question is another stress issue with interviews, during the interview you are essentially hunting around for questions to ask this representative of a company that is pretty much like every other company in the tech space for all they like to pretend that they are not. Because at the end of the interview they are going to ask if you have any questions for them, and despite everything being pretty clear cut and boring you should try to find some question that makes you sound insightful and makes an impression but at the same time is not aggressive.
The author ASSUMES that not asking questions was the reason he got rejected. That may not be true and it is likely the rejection had much more profound reasons. Yet he proceeds to write a blog post about that.
“ While apes can learn sign language and communicate using it, they have never attempted to learn new knowledge by asking humans or other apes. They don't seem to realize that other entities can know things they don't. It's a concept that separates mankind from apes”<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate_cognition#Asking_questions_and_giving_negative_answers" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primate_cognition#Asking_que...</a>
Maybe it's the wrong approach, but I treat an entire interview as back-and-forth conversation… especially for a specific position.<p>Questions demonstrate curiosity in the role you're being hired for and give you an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge about and empathy for your ultimate end-users… not to mention allowing you to get a feel for the culture of the team and company you're about to spend a large amount of your time working at.
In my opinion you learn a ton about candidate in this stage. Firs and foremost, are the curious. Generic questions are fine, but specific questions that respond to the discussion show you’ve both been paying attention and are actually thinking about the job.<p>It may be a personal pet peeve, but I sometimes get ‘I asked all my questions in the other interviews’. So what, ask them again! The question will be the same, the answer will be different.
If I’m going into an interview, I’ll usually prepare some questions in advance.<p>But I’m terrible at coming up with questions during dynamic meetings. I find that I need time to reflect on topics before I can form a clear idea of what I need to ask.<p>This has backfired several times, usually in meetings with sharp businesspeople (who are <i>so</i> good at asking pointed questions!). Does anyone have tips on how to get better at this?
> But if your goal is to cast a wide net [...], maybe make a list of every reason you've used to reject a nontraditional candidate in the past and then email that to the candidate in advance of the interview<p>Such a list would be a huge legal burden and no sane corporation would send it.
This is life 101 advice for everyone, I think. I've turned down plenty of people on interviews because of this. The tests I create always contain one or two questions I doubt anyone would ever answer. And that's the reason I always put them there - give them a simple opportunity to ask a question. When I ask someone if they have questions and they reply with "no", then it's clear they are not suitable for a position where they would have to ask a lot of questions. I've had experience with several such developers, who never asked questions. What I've learned is that those can only create a universe of anti patterns and code which is just as hard to maintain as cracking rsa 4096 without a key.
I can't agree with author's point. I'm doing lots of job interviews as employer and also taking some interviews as an employee once a year to remember how it feels on the other side. It is plain difficult to switch context from answering someone's hard and potentially life-changing questions to asking my own. When candidate hears "do you have any questions?” their first reaction is "Wow, I've made it, it's over!". So I'm giving my candidates extra minutes to relax and remember what is it that they want to know about company and working conditions.<p>Good tactic is to have a prepared list with you, but it is a knowledge acquired with tens of interviews, not something any high-schooler doing every day.
> what did you have for lunch?
> what did you do yesterday?<p>please don't ask made up questions. or else we complete the whole cycle. ask when you really want to know something. else it's just stupid.
A personal favorite response of mine if I don't have any questions left is "no, I think I injected most questions I had as we went along. I was going to ask <thing>, but I think we covered that well already."<p>This is helpful if you're like me and turn interviews into discussions instead of Q&A sessions. It shows you've considered you might not have the full context just from prior correspondence, while resurfacing a discussion topic for them to expand on if they wish.
Is this an example of "cultural bias"? That would mean the behavior doesn't predict job performance, but is used to filter out candidates from different cultures.
This essay leaves me confused and unable to follow the train of logic from an already unclear correlation/observation to lesson learned (?).<p>How did it leap from, ask a question if you have the opportunity because I think I was denied a scholarship because I didn't, to "show your commitment to diversity and non-traditional backgrounds, by emailing a list of every cultural-related reason you've used to reject people"?
It's quite simple: any conversation is a two-way street. Teacher and pupil, interviewer and job seeker, parent and child -- every conversational partner should be curious and thoughtful about the other person.<p>Just extrapolate the above advice to a first date. Should you ask your date questions? Obviously you should! So why not your interviewer?<p>Tennis isn't exciting when one player plays against a wall, conversation is a collaboration.
I always go into interviews with a prepared list of thoughtful and insightful questions to ask for this moment. Not because I care about the answers but because it’s part of the script.<p>In real life, if I have questions I’ll ask them and if I don’t I won’t. Making the fact of asking of questions relevant for important decisions is a preposterous charade, one that I am used to playing along with by now.
As my parting question I like to ask if there’s any reason they wouldn’t recommend me for the job.<p>I’ve found this question tends to stun the interviewer, puts them back on their heels to think a bit.<p>Then, they either tell me about any lingering concern (giving me a chance to address it while still in the room) OR they tell me that the interview went well / what they appreciated from the discussion.
If u have questions, ask them. If you dont have questions, you cannot ask them by definition.<p>People reading anymore into this are not the kind of people you want to have to work with.