Questions to ask at the end of a technical interview (2017)

There&#x27;s one important question I haven&#x27;t seen on here that&#x27;s saved me on more than one occasion.<p>&quot;Are there any concerns you may have that I can address that may lead you to believe I&#x27;m not the right candidate?&quot;<p>I&#x27;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.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

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

A question I like to ask is: &quot;You&#x27;ve seen my resume&#x27;, what new things do you think I can learn here?&quot;<p>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&#x27;re not chasing them, they&#x27;re chasing you.

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.<p>Some questions I ask the interviewer: &quot;What is currently your greatest challenge here at work?&quot; &quot;How long have you been working here?&quot; &quot;What do you like about this job?&quot; &quot;Is there a programming language&#x2F;technology you enjoy working with and why?&quot;<p>Some interviewers really like these questions and I think it&#x27;s a nice way of learning stuff along the way even if you don&#x27;t get the job. The &quot;favorite programming language&quot; questions gave me some pretty cool insights.<p>Also, I think it&#x27;s better to ask specific questions. Rather than asking &quot;how&#x27;s your tipical day?&quot;, ask &quot;how was yesterday at the office?&quot; 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&#x27;s internal processes and communication: &quot;It depends&quot;. They had no clue what they were doing.

&quot;What would a typical day for me in my role look like from a high-level overview?&quot;<p>Hopefully it&#x27;s not &quot;well there&#x27;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&quot;

When interviewed for engineering position at Google 6-7 years ago I asked:<p>&quot;How is the weather at OfficeWhereIAppliedTo?&quot;<p>It was a really honest question because sunny weather is something that I really care for as I am from mediterian.<p>The reaction was really positive - everyone was laughing and interview ended in a very positive and relaxed tone.<p>At the end I didn&#x27;t get the offer - but that&#x27;s because I was too slow at solving algorithmic problems.

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.

“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.

Three questions I like to ask:<p>1. What&#x27;s your favorite part of working here?<p>2. What&#x27;s your least favorite part of working here?<p>3. What question did I not ask that I should have?

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 <i>ever</i> seen anyone recommend some of the questions I came up with:<p>- What is [your parent company] and&#x2F;or [you, the subsidiary] doing to fight the climate crisis?<p>- 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?<p>(Of course, replace &quot;European&quot; with the region where most privileged people are typically from in your area.)<p>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, &quot;from a business perspective, why should we even try if it makes no financial sense?&quot;).

One thing I haven’t seen listed yet that is important to personal happiness:<p>“What does your change process look like?”<p>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 &#x2F; boards, etc.<p>Tells you a lot about the company both in terms of maturity but also in terms of culture.

After series of interviews I compiled questions to employer, maybe that would help others: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WojciechMula&#x2F;interview-questions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;WojciechMula&#x2F;interview-questions</a>

These questions do matter, but the answers are not as important as &quot;Why?&quot; 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.<p>Those answers will be far more insightful into who you are working with, and whether you want to work in their environment.

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.<p>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&#x27;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.

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.

Related: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2000&#x2F;08&#x2F;09&#x2F;the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2000&#x2F;08&#x2F;09&#x2F;the-joel-test-12-s...</a>

Discussed at the time: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14037313" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14037313</a>

Another really good thing to ask is about culture. And not in the blunt &quot;what is your culture like?&quot;, but rather frame it as dichotomies.<p>Do you default to action, or default to inaction?<p>How do you value quality of code vs. speed of delivery?<p>Do you prefer your engineer to do pure engineering, or prefer to get involved with the business side?<p>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?<p>Questions like this that don&#x27;t have an obvious, universal answer (IMHO) are a really good way to get a glimpse into the culture.

how come you have to ask this stuff at the end? wouldn&#x27;t it make more sense for this information to be provided up front? what does it matter if i&#x27;m technically qualified for your job if your team size, structure, tech stack, required availability, etc. isn&#x27;t a fit? why would you wait until after a tech screen for this? seems like a waste of everyone&#x27;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.