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atom-morgan

Questions:

- What do you hate about your job?

- How unlimited is unlimited vacation?

- What's the mean/median number of vacation days taken last year?

- How have you shown that you value your employees?

- How do you handle disagreements with potential hires?

- If the team is split on a technical issue, how would this be resolved?

Company bullshit (bad signs):

- "We want people who want to work here. If salary is important we aren't for you."

Uncomfortable answers to any of the questions, run!

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The first one is especially important, I find. When I ask the question, "What do you dislike most about your job?" or "If there was one thing you could change about the work environment?", I expect an interviewer to have an immediate answer prepared. If they don't, I assume that they either lack critical thinking skills and are unable to independently drive change or are expected to just follow orders. I don't have any desire to work at a company where management does not respect input from employees and employees are not encouraged to think about how things could be improved.

I think you're right but I think you might get some false positives if the person has to pause and consider their answer and you interpret that as a lack of critical thinking skills. I typically fill my mind with current projects and things that interest me and it takes me a minute to shift gears and refocus on a different topic.

Or management is very receptive and they have opportunities to point out what does and doesn't work, and the things that don't work get addressed. Once something is addressed, you tend to clear it from your mind unless the place is filled with employees who really like to hold grudges, in which case being able to instantly recall all the little wrong things might be a sign you could end up with terrible coworkers.

Or having a canned answer means they've encountered this before and have an acceptable response ready to go in order to cover up greater faults. If you ask them and they immediately blurt out "Sometimes we work too hard" how honest are they being? It's no different from interviewing a prospective employee and they say "Sometimes I work too hard". Thus, an immediately prepared answer is a very unreliable indicator. Just maybe they have that answer prepared as experience has taught them to avoid being forthright about the actual problems going on, because then they'd never hire anybody.

(Just playing devil's advocate. I really do think it could go either way, dependent on their personality, how their mind works, how management operates, etc.)

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