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I've made a point for myself to never ask questions like "what are your dreams" or "where do you see yourself in 10 years" in an interview, ever. For a long time, I've used these as a filter, too. Getting this kind of question in an interview is a big red flag for me and a huge disappointment.

Let me elaborate a little.

My dreams are none of an interviewer's bloody business. I'm here to work not share the things that give me hope in my darkest moments or the aspirations that shaped my adulthood. I find this question very creepy and extremely unprofessional.

I could maybe figure out a "lesser dream" to share, but then what's the point of this question? To find out the most intimate thing that I'd be willing to share?

Where I see myself in ten years is a meaningless question to ask after I've had, what, fifteen minutes of exposure to a company's culture? Maybe I'm the kind of person who sees themselves in management over ten years, but you've got such an amazing working culture that you could convince the most ambitious career builder to stick to engineering instead. Or vice-versa. Or do you really want to hire the kind of people who get an idea in their head, and then do it, even if it takes them ten years and it's really, really, really bad idea?

I've heard all sorts of ways to justify these things. That it's a way to see if a candidate can relate to you and evaluate their empathy -- if anything, this will say more about an interviewer's biases than about anything else. To see if a candidate can communicate about abstract matters -- as if there are not countless questions about ethics, aesthetics and epistemology in our profession that you need to start prying into personal things. That it's a way to see if they're "career-oriented", whatever that means, as if someone who writes amazing code but wouldn't hustle for a promotion is a bad hire.

So far, it hasn't turned out to be a bad idea.

I see these types of questions as the sign of an inexperienced interviewer. Given how many inexperienced interviewers one can see interviewing at tech companies, I would call that a chartreuse flag at best due to lack of signal.

I see these types of questions as the sign of an inexperienced interviewer.

Yup - that's all it is. And you're going to have a certain envelope of negatives (usually far worse than this) in any environment.

So while it does make the flag a bit bless verdant... to call it a "red flag" seems to be a bit of a stretch.

Props to both of you for the lovely synonyms for "greenish" :-)

(And as for the substance: agreed, and a capable interviewee should know how to work around those questions and similarly silly ones, like "what's your greatest weakness?". It's a two-way street. And while it's not a positive datapoint, it's hardly a KO-criterion. (viridescent? aquamarine? turquoise? :) )

And what happens if you answer as you have just done (slightly edited for politeness if appropriate)??

"Where do you see yourself in 10 years" is a simple way of asking how you expect your career to advance and what they should expect of you in the future - It's totally reasonable for a company to be interested in an employee's personal growth plans and yes, your long-term commitments to yourself

If you don't have any work-safe dreams, you might want to see a psychiatrist. Again, though, you've misinterpreted the question - They're looking for you to express your spark of passion. It doesn't even have to be for the job. People like people who can talk about something passionately.

They're looking for you to express your spark of passion

That's the charitable reading. The adversarial reading is that they're looking for the emotional buttons to push to maximize your output while minimizing their investment in you.

Why this has to be only "them maximizing your output" and not "giving you opportunity to grow in a direction you want and company can make use of"?

There's so much zero sum game thinking here when it comes to job relations ...

Who works somewhere for 10 years these days?

"what are your dreams" or "where do you see yourself in 10 years"

To me these are two entirely different classes of questions. The first is open ended and meaningless, while the second is directly connected to your career and thus highly relevant for both you and the company. I know where I want to be in 10 years career wise and thus I want to know if this job can help me get there. Equally the company probably knows where it wants to be in 10 years and as such wants to know if you can help it get there.

I ask a variation of this question. It is along the lines of "how would you like your career to progress over the next 3-5 years?". I am it because I don't want to hire someone for whom the organisation doesn't have a career path for. Any answer is fine. I'm not looking for a particular answer just an honest one.

> I don't want to hire someone for whom the organisation doesn't have a career path for

and

> I'm not looking for a particular answer just an honest one.

are contradictory one to another.

How so? I'm having an open conversion. The goal is to align expectations. It makes little difference to me on a personal level what their answer is. I'm representing the company and they are representing themselves so they have way more skin in the game. It's my moral perogative to have this open conversation with them. I don't want to hire them if the lack of career opportunity/progression makes them unhappy but if they still want the job even after it becomes evident that they may have difficulty reaching their goals in this organisation I'll still extend the offer. I'll only ask this question to people I've already decided to try hire.

Imagining coming up with an answer to something cool that has happened in my life makes me feel anxious. I have lived a pretty happy and fulfilling life up until this point but I can't think of one thing that I've done that would be super cool to talk about. I hope I never have to answer that question.

Not only that but having to come up with an answer on the fly in a super high pressure situation like a job interview. I'm sure I'd fumble it somehow, and then eternally wonder if I didn't get the job because I couldn't answer a question about something cool I've done.

I don't use these questions when interviewing, but I do try to find out what really excites/motivates candidates (assuming they've survived the first ten minutes of technical, where I probably already have a no and I'm just trying to finish politely). For me, interviewing the good candidates is largely about deciding whether or not I really want to work with this person - I've already decided they're technically competent and can do the job, but I actively avoid working with assholes if I can, and I strongly prefer to work with people I think are interesting. And part of that is that they're passionate about something - a hobby, their kids, whatever.

Ugh I hate interviewers like that. Just brings in bias like not wanting to work with black people and other stereotypes (older people/ethnics) etc.

That type of culture is unbearable to those that don’t perfectly fit your monoculture.

Wanting to work with interesting people is somehow correlated with not wanting to work with black people? I'm having trouble making sense of this.

"People I find interesting" is usually synonymous with "people who are like me." Even if it's not intentional, we tend to perfer people like ourselves.

My opinion is uninteresting people are just fine for coworkers, you're interviewing for an employee, not a drinking buddy.

On average I'm spending way more time with my colleagues than my drinking buddies, so I would really like someone that I can get along with.

"Get along with" is not the same as "find interesting."

You raise a good point, but at least in my case, I don't think that's what's happening, and here's why. Bias tends to strike and morph into "no" before it ever hits that "getting to know you" phase. There have been plenty of studies about the effect of things like "black" names or gender on the initial screening.

A big part of the hiring process, at least at big companies, is taking a pile of 100 resumes and reducing it to a pile of 10 resumes, because there's no way you're interviewing 100 candidates. So 90% are eliminated before ever meeting, and bias is huge there.

But the bias starts even before that. The pipeline itself is biased. There are more men than women, more whites than non-whites (proportional to society as a whole). This is a problem that needs to be addressed at the society level, not the interview level, but it affects the interview level, because candidates who are "different" lead to unconscious bias.

For older technical people... well, I'm one of them. I'm 53, which means a lot of my social group is the same age. I freely job-hop and don't struggle to find work. I've never felt that my age was a bias against me. What I do see, and I see this a lot, is people my age who worked at the same company for 10-20 years and then lost their job, for whatever reason (usually reorgs or dying companies). Their skill set has become largely about intra-company specialization rather than broad industry skills. I watched my spouse go through this. She lost her job of 13 years in a buyout, and it took her six months to find something else. She had gotten deep in a narrow business field (international e-commerce analyst), and there just weren't many jobs for her, even in our busy town. We didn't want to move to the Bay area or New York, and while she could do generic business analysis or project management, without industry-specific skills, she's not much better than someone barely past entry level. Eventually she found a job that suited her long-built skills, but it took a while. And this story is common as dirt, it's happened to a lot of my friends.

That's how age bias works. It's not discrimination, it's just being unprepared for the job market after too many years in one place. Keep your skills up to date and switch jobs regularly, and age is just a number.

So when you talk about monoculturing and bias at the interview point... nah, that's not the problem point. The problems of bias prevent the interview from happening in the first place.

But how does not having an exiting hobby make them an asshole?

Why did you correlate those? They're in the same comment, but not dependent or related. I know plenty of assholes with fantastic hobbies.

> What's the coolest thing you've done both in life and at work? - What are your dreams? - Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

Hey, I ask a lot of these questions in consulting. What I’m looking for is to tell if a) you can communicate a point clearly b) if you can talk generally about your career and are growth oriented.

If you said that field evolves rapidly bit above that would be a good answer. If you span it as a joke “surely writing angular 25, the last web framework ever” even better.

I wouldn’t ask the dreams question, but the coolest question is loaded with coolest, I would say “tell me about a previous project you enjoyed working on” and see if you have had a good project you are passionate about.

I often ask interviewees about a project they worked on that was very successful, and why it was successful - what did they like about it? That's a good way to find those passion points. It's also a good way to find weak candidates without independence or leadership skills, because they can't really talk about their role in a big success - they didn't have much of a role, usually.

A flip-side question is to ask about projects they worked on that failed. Failures rarely appear on resumes, and it can be an uncomfortable topic. But if you can get them going, you can learn a ton about how they handle adversity. Do they make excuses, or find scapegoats? Do they take responsibility? Do they give credit where credit is due for colleagues? Do they recognize the big-picture conditions that affected the situation?

projects they worked on that failed

That's a bad one, considering that everyone is supposed to be upbeat and positive in the face of adversity. You can't place blame on management and the environment that was in no way conducive to success because that's not culturally acceptable.

Are we supposed to prepare an answer for that question now as well because the true answer (unrealistic expectations from upper management and insufficient infrastructure) will make you fail the interview? What you could ask is what will make a team fail, and my answer would be autocratic management.

- Are we supposed to prepare an answer for that question now as well?

Nope. I don't want a prepared answer. I want an honest answer. Hence throwing them a rough, non-technical question that absolutely will not be on the resume, but has been part of the career of any experienced candidate.

"Autocratic management" isn't a good answer, because it's too general. What did autocratic management do? Were the requirements incomplete? The schedule unrealistic? Beaten by the competition? Depended on unproven technology? Sometimes, everyone does everything right, and a project fails anyway. There's still a reason it failed.

But when I hear a candidate talk about failure in the form of "I was a hero, but my idiot co-workers and malicious bosses ruined everything", I hear them finding someone to blame, rather than a problem that didn't get solved correctly. And that tells me a lot about what working with them will be like, when we have our inevitable failures.

How would a life scientist coming from Theranos before it became common knowledge that the company was a sham talk about their experience in a culturally acceptable manner? Developing reproducible blood tests from tiniest samples was never going to work, and upper management was actively malicious at that company. We now know where the blame was (with Holmes and Balwani), but if you started there because their projects sounded exciting and then were looking for a new job because the task was impossible and management was crazy you had a problem, and you can't say that in an interview.

"I worked on an awesome project and just kept my head down and worked like a good employee. Then one day I read the WSJ one day, and what do you know, my boss was getting investigated for fraud! Then the company shut down! I had no idea, because the sub project I was on worked perfectly. I heard people complain about managers, but they were on other teams and I didn't see them very much."

> before it became common knowledge that the company was a sham

how do you know that "reproducible tests from small samples " would never work? Is there an equivalent of Shannons law that you could prove this.

Venous blood is simply venous blood. But capillary blood from fingertip samples contains variable amounts of interstitial fluid, and cell lysis is another issue there.

There are tests where it doesn't matter - consider the blood glucose - the variability of capillary samples vs venous samples is well understood and the introduced error sufficiently small compared to reference range.

But Theranos also tried electrolyte panels, and there you have a problem because the concentrations of ions in blood plasma are very different from the concentrations of ions inside cells. Both are tightly controlled in the healthy body. Slightly less than 50 % of blood is cellular matter, and even small amounts of lysis are sufficient to distort the numbers to render them clinically meaningless. You inevitably have lysis in capillary samples. Carreyrou talks about that in his book.

I'm not worrying about corner cases here. Theranos is an exception. But someone coming from a startup that died? Yeah, they can talk about it, and I'd like them to talk about how they saw it in an honest way.

Theranos was founded in 2003 and when people first started asking hard questions in 2012 or thereabouts they were marginalized. Holmes was the darling poster woman of Silicon Valley until the WSJ started investigating in October 2015. They were very much alive for over a decade.

Startuplandia has a way of attracting hucksters, unscrupulous businessmen and crazies with a firm disregard for what is physically possible. I notice that Ubeam was founded in 2011 and they are still around!

I once worked for an outfit where one founder was named party to an investor suit (he had awarded himself stock options after a clinical trial came out favourable) and the other was frankly incompetent and afflicted with cluster B personality disorders. It ended as well as one would have predicted. Failing startups because of founder personality and founder competence issues are unfortunately common, they are not corner cases at all, and for the person coming out of one the incidence is 100 %, but discussing such matters in an interview will torpedo your chances. No honesty for you, it's counterproductive for the jobseeker!

Seriously, Dave, if you were interviewing a candidate that had been working on the gluebot that Carreyrou mentioned in Bad Blood, how would he have to spin the story to get an offer out of you?

How to describe that? Simple, describe how management was setting up cage matches between competing development teams. I'm not saying "Don't blame management", not at all. I'm saying "bad management" is an insufficient answer. How did they go wrong? Playing dev teams off one another is a different problem than, say, insisting on using tech that isn't up to the task (a situation I've been in before), or an unwillingness to say no to the customer (a situation I've been in before, too).

Hell, I've talked openly in interviews about the problems with a project that I got fired from, and blamed both management and the customer in no uncertain terms. I fault myself mostly for not walking out on it. I still get job offers when talking about how I got fired by incompetent management of an out-of-control project. But part of that is that my story leads somewhere - it leads to my lessons learned, conditions I will no longer tolerate in a workplace, #1 of which is the bottomless budget.

So I care less about how you screwed up, or who or what you blame, and more about what you learned from the failure. Tell me that, and you win my heart.

I should add, to get back to the idea of how a life scientist at Theranos would explain it... well, did you know you were doing something that couldn't be done? How did you feel about it? What did you do about it? Why did you stay/why did you leave? Did you feel your work was unethical?

Conceptually, Theranos was very exciting. I hope someone actually pulls it off someday. I can understand the attraction for a scientist.

This is a really good point about expectations in job interviews. I think a lot of this comes down to "how you say it" and the data points you have to back it up.

For example, "we made several governance mistakes on a project that meant we didn't have enough time to finish the project. On the next project, I made sure to be clearer with estimates and buffer time, so that the team etc. etc." and "Our management doesn't listen" can describe the same situation.

Again, definitely agree you are in the danger zone so its important to be thoughtful.

Why and in which culture is this not acceptable

Given that most people quit because of bad managers [1], I assume that a lot of projects fail for the same reason.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/employees-dont-leave-companie...

>they can't really talk about their role in a big success - they didn't have much of a role, usually.

I would wager that at least half of candidates are just good humble team players. Your approach optimises for egotistical braggarts at the expense of normal people.

That raises a question: how can “good humble teammates” answer these types of questions in a way that makes them look good without lying?

Assuming they did good, valuable work, then telling the truth is an excellent way to answer in a way that looks good without lying.

But, then, how do you show "leadership" and "ownership" and all those other wonderful things interviewers are supposedly looking for? And it's not just "good, valuable work" they're looking for. Fixing bugs is "good, valuable work," but I get the feeling interviewers don't want to hear about how many bugs you've fixed.

I often have a hard time putting my accomplishments into context (indeed, even seeing them as "accomplishments," because they're simply what I'm supposed to do).

(Incidentally, I hate the word "ownership" in this context. You don't own anything you can't take with you. Try taking work you did for a company with you when you leave.)

Egotistical bragging is pretty easy to spot. Good team players are easy to spot, too - they're the ones giving credit to leadership and co-workers even for work they take personal pride in. When I see a candidate's eyes light up talking about the manager who led them through a challenge into success, I know they respect others, and that matters.

It's hard for a lot of people to speak well of themselves, which makes the whole interviewing process difficult much of the time. We're trained to a beat-down that gets called humility, but it's not. Asking about successes is a way past that - it's giving them permission to say something good about themselves.

But to be fair, a lot of what I'm after is inflated claims on a resume, which are common as dirt, because people are much more comfortable deceptively bragging on paper than they are in person.

Obviously I can't speak for every company but those types of questions are typically used as a filter.

- Anyone who skips those questions are rejected outright. If you're not willing to put in a little time you're not interested enough to be considered. You'd be surprised how many people skip these questions.

- If you've done something crazy cool or interesting it's a plus but if not it isn't a negative.

- Can you communicate something that's a bit abstract?

- Relevant jokes are usually seen as a plus.

Nothing can be a plus but not a negative when people are competing. If two people are going for a job and one of them gets an extra point, that's the same as removing a point from the other person.

> ... those types of questions are typically used as a filter.

Yep, same here.

> Anyone who skips those questions are rejected outright.

Any company using these questions is rejected outright. I'm looking for someone who is willing to give me money for code, not a wife.

That's a one sided view of work and how team dynamics work.

Please don't take this the wrong way but "presenting" in this way at an interview is not helping you.

My worldview might be skewed because I am normally looking for short contracts (6 months or less), not long term employment. I get bored with never-ending projects; I prefer projects with a clear finality. Given that, I am highly unlikely to care much about team dynamics - I want to do a (good) job and get paid for it.

I think those questions come from both naïvete and a desire to increase information asymmetry in the hiring process.

Can you elaborate on the "desire to increase information asymmetry" bit? I mean, I get that the employer always wants to be on the upper hand in that way, but I don't see how questions like this do that.

Try and extract that level of detail about the company's internal dynamics, desires, and plans in an interview and see how far you get.

Well, I find I answer those types of questions at such a vague level of detail anyway that I don’t think anybody’s getting any real information out of my answers.

Eh, they're extracting more than a story from you. In the spirit of this post overall, the question is a great informal trigger for Imposter Syndrome: what you describe, and how you describe it.

I used to have the same thoughts until I did interviews myself. I don’t use these questions but I understand how other interviewers use them to get to know people. They won’t find your stuff cool (or maybe they do) or judge your cool stuff. And if they do you are at the wrong place anyways.

Is that the old "person bad at small talk judges your small talk skills" interview strategy?

Bah. I'm brilliant at small talk, which means that when I'm conversing with someone I don't know, either as interviewer or interviewee (or any other situation), I feel it's my conversational duty to make others feel comfortable and entertained, and help them along if they're uncomfortable with small talk. Good conversationalists are great listeners, because they are trying to draw interest and excitement out of other people.

It's different from being a good talker, which can be entertaining, but isn't really two-way.

Let's focus on the 'cooolest thing' questions as the others are indeed useless in an interview. The whole point of this question is to see if you are excited about something you did and if this excitement resonates with the interviewer/the company. At this point you're trying to see if you and the job match in any way. If your excitement doesn't match expectations, then eventually you might not end up happy with the job. By all means, don't answer what your think they want to hear, but what you really find cool.

Why do people have to be excited? Some people work for a living and only a living. Things they find exciting may get them fired but they're perfectly good employees all the same.

I wouldn't use these questions but they're usually coming from interviewers who are trying to have a sense of you as a person/get you out of your shell. (Except the "Where do you see yourself in 10 years" question. That's used to figure out if you want to be management. I have never given a fully honest answer to this question my whole career, and the right answer usually can be found in the job ad.)

Talk about something that you can sound excited/relatable talking about. Friends, family, volunteer work, that all works.