Interview questions to ask your interviewer

333 点作者 skellertor超过 3 年前

46 条评论

mabbo超过 3 年前

I recently did a round of interviews with a few companies, and I came up with a list of fun questions for the interviewer, mostly based on my own gripes with my then-employer or things other companies were doing that I didn't like. I caught everyone I asked these to off-guard.> "Every company gets criticized. What's a piece of criticism your company has received that you felt wasn't really accurate? What about the opposite- any criticism that you agreed with?"> "Does your company have any policy that enforces a specific minimum number of people let go per time period? IE: Stack ranking, 'Unregretted rate of attrition (URA)', etc"> "What are the company's non-compete rules? If I wanted to make and sell an app in my spare time, is that allowed? What isn't allowed?"> "How does promotion and career growth work? If hired, what steps would I need to take to get my next promotion? What holds people back in those situations?"I got great answers though. I learned a lot about the companies because I asked these to a number of people at each company. Those answers lead me to pick a company that was offering less money, but was a better place for me to be.

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dec0dedab0de超过 3 年前

I would addAm I allowed to have side projects that I own?Am I allowed to contribute to open source from work? ie bugfixes for libraries we use.How many meetings are there in an average month?Does your insurance cover my preferred doctors? (obviously more of an email question)How strict are the requirements in whatever tracking software we use (jira,rally, etc)How many required programs are there? Outlook? Slack? Teams? Jira? Timesheets? Confluence? sharepoint? skype? etcHow locked down are the computers/network?Am I able to use whatever development tools I choose without asking permission?Why did the person before me leave?

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fzzt超过 3 年前

A lot of these questions touch on important topics, but I think there are too many of them and they are far too specific - to the point where you might be inadvertently signaling some kind of unreasonable inflexibility ("you better be using a particular bug tracking system or else I'm out!"). I'd suggest generalizing and combining many of these. Asking the interviewer to walk you through the development process can be more revealing and is less adversarial than a rapid-fire of 30 questions.Also, the likelihood that a candidate will be informed of any non-public plans to sell the company are slim...

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autarch超过 3 年前

I've been maintaining my own list of questions for quite a few years. I added some based on this post and the discussion here on HN.Here's the full list - <a href="https://gist.github.com/autarch/6e7e25e85db62a359f91aa0900334b6e" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/autarch/6e7e25e85db62a359f91aa090033...</a>There's a few that are very specific to my future travel plans and my height, but the vast majority are potentially useful for everyone.Note that my goal is to _get answers to these questions during the interview process_. I do not expect to sit there and ask _all of them_ in a single interview. In my experience, quite a bit of this comes about naturally. For example, I'll often find out about their dev process, tech stack, tools, and so on from the technical questions they ask me, and the conversations those questions lead to.But my goal would be to have satisfying answers to all of these by the time I'm making my decisions about whether to accept an offer.

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karaterobot超过 3 年前

For this job, I asked all my interviewers (from my immediate manager to the CEO) what direction the company would be taking in the next few years: what are they focusing on at a high level, and what's the roadmap?Very informative. A lot of people did not have pat answers, and had to search their souls a little bit. I got different answers from everybody, but the same broad themes, and I interpreted that as meaning everybody was on board for the vision, but that there wasn't much top-down direction on how to get there. To me that was a plus, and it turned out to be the case.It also gave me an idea of what I'd be hired to work on, and what I'd be working on after that. I recommend this question!

insickness超过 3 年前

Don't wait until the end to ask questions, ask them throughout the interview. When the interviewer asks, are you familiar with X, respond and then ask if that's something you'll be using on the job. If you're familiar with X, ask more about their implementation of X. By asking questions, it seems like you've got a lot of options and are looking for work that interests you, not just trying to qualify yourself to the interviewer.It also makes them feel like they are already working with you because that's what a good employee does when a manager gives him work: he asks questions about it throughout the process. He doesn't wait until the end when the manager says, do you have any questions?

pmulard超过 3 年前

I've been keeping a list of interview questions in my personal docs, but just uploaded them to a repo once I saw this post.Feel free to check them out. They also include questions to ask the recruiter. I hope they can be of use.<a href="https://github.com/pmulard/interview_questions" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/pmulard/interview_questions</a>

c7DJTLrn超过 3 年前

I did some interviewing recently and took a bit of a different approach. I remember reading somewhere about the idea of taking interviews as a casual conversation to establish wants/needs instead of taking turns to interrogate. I just spoke with the people interviewing me like colleagues, talked about technology frankly, asked questions when they popped into my head, and it turned out pretty well. It wasn't calculated but rather the opposite - I just behaved like my normal self and ended up with an offer.

twayt超过 3 年前

A lot of these questions don’t really matter and are a waste of time.The only real questions to ask imo are:1. How is performance/promos determined?2. How are peoples interpersonal skills in other teams?In the first question, look out for cues regarding inefficiencies or resentment about the performance process.In the second one, the interviewer can discuss whether people are cooperative or assholes without being too specific about their own team dynamics.That’s pretty much all you can expect a random employee in a company to be able to provide accurate information about.The questions about wfh policy and org structure are best left to the recruiter.The other questions about learning opportunities, flexibility of roles, working hours and how people get along are just going to be met with drivel about how the company is the best place to work at on all these categories.

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time_to_smile超过 3 年前

One general rule I've come up with is when your interviewer mentions values of the company, ask for examples.For example, it's common for a senior manager to say something like:"We value input from all of our employees, ideas can come from anyplace"For this just follow up with a sincere:"That's something I really value too, can you give me an example of when someone who was not in a leadership role proposed a solution that influenced a major decision?"I've found this surprisingly effective at finding out which values are real and which are bullshit. When it's real, you'll get answers like "certainly, why just last quarter Jen in customer support noticed..." and when it's BS you can immediately tell because the interviewer will freeze completely.

lhorie超过 3 年前

As an interviewer, I've been on the receiving end of most of those questions (or some variation of them). It's a pretty reasonable list.One thing though is that most interviewers don't leave a whole lot of room for a barrage of questions so you really need to pick the two or three that you really want the answers to. For example, you probably don't want to waste time asking explicitly about version control at a company that you know does open source on github. Open ended questions about engineering culture will give you a much better picture (e.g. what's the story w/ tests or deployments or design autonomy or whatever).Or, what you can do in addition is ask the recruiter (or whoever the first point of contact is) if you could spend 30 mins to talk to someone on the team, outside of the interview window, just to have a casual chat. Some companies have this arrangement setup as an official transparency program, others are more than happy to arrange it informally.

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emaginniss超过 3 年前

On a scale of "Bob Saget on Full House" to "Bob Saget not on Full House" what level of jokes can I get away with?

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jaaron超过 3 年前

Great list of information anyone should know before accepting an offer.As a hiring manager, I'm usually one of the first people new candidates speak with (perhaps right after briefly talking to a recruiter). Generally, I want to make sure candidates have all this information within the first interview or two. These days, I tend to open my interview with an opportunity for the candidate to ask any questions about the role and company that weren't answered by the recruiter.I also try to leave time at the end, but I find that there's often so little time at the end, that it's better to start with any questions.

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daniel_iversen超过 3 年前

Important is to curate your own list based on the company and role. In the posted article there wasn't many cultural questions and I'd certainly add those (why do people typically enjoy working here? examples of tough situations the team or company has been through? What are the company values (does the interviewer even know?) and how are they important or not day to day, etc...) also probe on your managers management style (or you might end up hating the job) as well as ask to speak with future colleagues (in everyone's interest). Be prepared to be quizzed on why you're asking your questions (after all there has to be thought behind it). And for interviewers - many time the free dialog and understanding what's top of mind for your candidate is as important than the scripted questions. In fact I start off interviews saying we both need to get to know eachother in this session, and if there are any burning questions or things they'd like to know already? (that way I can see how much they've thought about the role and what's in their mind before they've had a chance to analyse the company or myself too much and maybe get a better picture of the candidate).. oh and my favorite question to the interviewer (even if it's me) is "If you had a magic wand and could improve one thing about the company what would it be?" - hard not to get some interesting insight into the company with that one.

Hippocrates超过 3 年前

These examples are weak! They're common questions asked over and over... Things you can just look up if you use blind, levels.fyi, glassdoor. "What's the size of the company?" Come on...Don't burn your time with filler. Instead, make yourself stand out in the last moments:The questions should be softball, but detailed and enjoyable for the interviewer to answer. Allow them to paint the role and company positively. i.e. don't dig into Google's stance on user privacy.Use questions to show your enthusiasm-- that you're here for this job and not a job.You should do research on the company and interviewer before the session. What they are involved in? (languages, concepts, methodologies). Usually blogposts, GitHub and LinkedIn content is useful.Try to impress the interviewer with your knowledge about said role, company, or relevant topic. Mention a change or new beta product you've been testing. Ask for their thoughts on something you know they like to talk about.Examples:Does google have plans to expand the usage of Go in their cloud stack?What benefits were there after switching from Borg to Kubernetes?How do people get new ideas get onto the Pub/Sub team's radar when they are busy shipping features at breakneck speed?How did the team architect the new protobuf API while maintaining compatibility with the old one?

jll29超过 3 年前

Two questions to ask your interviewer:1. What - from all the things you have accomplished while working here so far - are you most proud of?2. What did they do for the last social outing?(Look for their face reaction as they answer the two questions. If they look surprised, or don't have a good answer, you may want to look elsewhere.)And, if not already covered in the interview (which they really should):- How technical is the CTO? Can/does s/he program? Ph.D. Degree?- Who (name and function) does the group (my boss' boss) report to?- What does the company do for training its people? Is there an annual budget?- What is the attrition rate in the team?- What is the career path anticipated for the role under discussion?

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yanowitz超过 3 年前

I've found this repo <a href="https://gitlab.com/doctorj/interview-questions" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/doctorj/interview-questions</a> to be useful as well.

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avl999超过 3 年前

During my last batch of interviews, I was salty when one of the companies I interviewed with asked me the "Super Egg Drop" question, I actually don't mind LeetCode type questions in interviews but that super egg drop question is so ridiculous that as soon as I heard the question I knew they didn't wanna hire me. So at the end of the interview I asked my interviewer to solve a LeetCode hard (Alien Dictionary) as a laugh. The interviewer did not see the humor in the situation.

nlowell超过 3 年前

I like these and find them wise. Here are some additional fun questions:1. How has the company changed in the past five years? How do you think it will change in the next five?2. What was the biggest surprise about working here?I like these because they force the interviewer to activate their brain a bit and really highlight differences over time and differences from expectation. The surprise question especially helps you figure out unknown-unknowns as a candidate.

epolanski超过 3 年前

It's surprising no one comments with the obvious: ask things YOU care for. I hate crunches and overtime so I always ask about those.

acomjean超过 3 年前

Thats a good list. The questions are pretty specific. Interviews are 2 ways. As an interviewer realize the applicant can reject the job if they don't feel like its a good fit.I've asked a couple questions the past few interviews when looking for a job:- What do like about working here.- What could be better, or what are the pain points of working here.They're been pretty honest about those things.

anontrot超过 3 年前

I got an interview scheduled with Meta/Facebook, for monday (14th Feb 2022). Their careers portal has a lot of sample leet codes, I'm not even able to do the level 1 puzzles. Sure going to bomb the interview with live codinng session! Sigh... this would have been a life changer for me

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Rebelgecko超过 3 年前

A few questions I've been asked by interviewees that I really liked:* What's your favorite thing that you've accomplished so far in your current role?* What's a recent challenge that you personally faced? What challenges are you/your team/division/company/industry facing in the next few years?* How does your team make big decisions (the article goes into this a bit, but I think it can be helpful to be explicit about whether engineering/PM/sales are on the same page)* What time did you start work today? (Corollary to "what's a typical day like?", and a good segue to culture type questions)

comprev超过 3 年前

<pre><code> - Can you give me an example of when a project took a major turn in another direction, and what was the cause of this change? - (if applicable) How many heads is this role expected to support? - What was the team's last achievement recognised by the whole company? - When was the last time the team performed a disaster recovery exercise? - Can you explain the process of "idea to feature retirement" starting with the request from the product owner? </code></pre> I've got hundreds of questions from interviews over the years.

hintymad超过 3 年前

Usually a candidate will not have enough time to ask all these questions. My usual approach is to pass the interview, and then ask for a reverse interview. Of course, we don't have to use the term "reverse interview". I just ask politely if I can chat with two or three people: a member in the team, the hiring manager, and the skip. In such reverse interviews, I also do deep walk-throughs, such as how an engineer deploys their code to production, or how they mitigate an outage. It tells you a lot about the company.

oneepic超过 3 年前

I recommend against one question in particular:> Do you have a favorite part of the job? Least favorite?When I asked the "least favorite" question in my interviews a few months ago, the answers all fell into 2 buckets:1) it's a big company, harder to get things done (I have only worked at big co's, I already know it's hard... so this is not an insightful answer)2) COVID makes life/work harder (I understand it's hard, but some of these people just use this excuse to avoid talking about their job/team)

denysvitali超过 3 年前

This is an awesome list! I always recommend every candidate I have interview with to ask as many questions as possible because with an interview both parties need to understand whether it makes sense to enter into an employment agreement or not.Thanks to my questions I doged some bullets when I was on the other end. Trying to understand if the company is a good fit for you is as important as it is for them to check if you're a good candidate.

yongjik超过 3 年前

This is probably too involved to be a question for your interviewer, but I kinda want to ask, "Imagine you have multiple instances of a production service with different 90% latencies, how would you measure the overall latency of the service?"A surprisingly large number of SWEs are really bad at statistics, which is kinda necessary when you're asking whether a service is fast enough.

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sircastor超过 3 年前

I always ask “what’s something that you hate/really don’t like about working here.” It’s been instructive in revealing what people don’t like about their companies. In my current role my interviewer’s response had more to do with the immaturity of the company (we don’t have x) yet, rather than bad things that happen. It was indicating to me that it was the right place.

buscoquadnary超过 3 年前

A good couple of questions I've found that are very indicative of how things work is1. How does budgeting work with your group? Who controls the budget they get?2. How are priorities set on the team?3. Who is the customer of your team, not your company but your team specifically is it sales, ops, finance, etc?It comes from the idea that if you can discover the incentives you'll be able to deduce a lot more about the position.

elliottcarlson超过 3 年前

A question I like to ask, and have gotten some great answers to, is:> If there was anything you could change about <company>, whether or not it is in your control, what would it be?It has been effective in getting an idea of some of the problems that might exist organizationally - it might not be the worst things, but there's always something.

alexashka超过 3 年前

Sigh, could you possibly ask anything to make someone want to hire you more and not less?I'm sure recruiters will say yes. Go ahead and ask anyone old enough to have interviewed people for a decade or two and see what they say.The answer is no - just be good, be pleasant, be on time. That's all anyone's looking for.

crossroadsguy超过 3 年前

For questions like this> Who supports the product once it's released? Pager duty? Monitoring email?and this> Typical working hours? Flexibility? Crunch times?In my experience it’s a huge mistake to leave such questions in its vague form as the author has shown in his post, especially if you’re living in a third world country like India where the managers and centre heads often project “getting engineers to work at any hour” as one of their USPs to their bosses, who are - very often - CEO and CTOs in USA and Europe where engineers cost more and often refuse to work absurd hours (rightly so).Rather ask specific questions like:- clearly state your intended normal working hours and ask whether there’ll be a problem with that.- what is the on-call frequency (if there’s one)?- what is the on-call hours going to be for you whenever that happens?- Is there a follow the sun policy or not? (It’s a red flag if the product is used around one timezone and engineers mostly live in another, far from it)- ask whether there’s any requirement to have an app like PagerDuty active for your phone number or needed to installed on your phone and would you be expected to be reachable also during other than your “normal working hours” and your “scheduled on call rotation” whenever that happens?- The point above is very important - my last manager tried to soft bully/pressurise me into activating pager-duty for my personal number 24x7 saying “anyway the call will be at most 2-3 times a quarter” (and I knew he was probably right) and “others are doing it”. Luckily he was my hiring manager also and I had already discussed all this with him - I confronted him right then!- ask clear questions about how often you’d be asked to attend “scheduled/recurring” calls out of your normal working hours.You don’t have to be available 24x7. You must not - under any pretext! You are made to do that only because you end up saying “yes”.If you can, ask this questions on email preferably to your hiring manager keeping recruiter in CC - at least I do that.Out of 7 verbal offers I had said yes to (around a year ago) 1 company demurred from issuing the final offer letter after these questions, others were very open and candid about it and didn’t mind at all (at least in the mail).Goldman Sachs clearly mentioned I’ll be required to be ready whenever needed, others were reasonable, Cisco was semi reasonable but seemed skittish to me, Uber flat out lied which I later found out (and hence I left within a month).

dieselgate超过 3 年前

I recently began looking for jobs again and had my first interview in about two years today. It’s nice to see some conversation on this particular topic. Does anyone have ideas on when one may be asking _too many_ questions to an interviewer?

toss1超过 3 年前

I recently saw a great question that is generally applicable to all types of job:"When you think about the person in this role doing really outstanding work in the future, say, one and five years from now, what does that look like to you?"

bryanrasmussen超过 3 年前

Out of the classical screwed up interview questions that people ask I think "where do you see yourself in 5 years" would be a pretty good one to hear the real answer to from your interviewer.

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seansmccullough超过 3 年前

I think the most telling questions are about attrition - "How many people have quit your team in the last year?" If it is more than 1-2, this is a huge red flag.

tester756超过 3 年前

This one I actually used:"What if after a 1.5 yr or two I get bored, burned out and I will want to switch teams / departments / ...?"

amai超过 3 年前

Just ask one question :Why should one not work at your company?Most interviewers are unprepared for this question and will give surprising honest answers.

PaulDavisThe1st超过 3 年前

and there I was, thinking this was going to be a list that a guest on Fresh Air (NPR/USA) ought to ask Terri Gross, to break the usual one-way flow of questions.Ah, HN, where "interview" always means "job interview" and "dependency stack" always means "for your web project".

fartcannon超过 3 年前

I had a really cool job opportunity to implement cool technology in a novel field but I rejected it for two reasons:1) My immediate manager was dressed in incredibly expensive clothing in the interview, 2) He said we didn't need Linux, we could afford to use Mac.Barf

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dizzydiz超过 3 年前

What is the one thing you wish you knew before you joined?

cduzz超过 3 年前

Those are dumb questions. The only thing that matters is how the org chart is managed, not how the internal tech is managed. Conway's law.How do you manage employee performance evaluations?How do you manage career growth?

billsmithaustin超过 3 年前

My favorite: "How do you make money?"

errcorrectcode超过 3 年前

How's the food?What do you do for fun after work?

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choletentent超过 3 年前

This is GOLD.