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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

Because unless you are some sort of celebrity engineer, "interview is a conversation between both parties" is nonsense.

Company is interviewing the candidate not the other way around, no matter what we like to think.

Edit: Sorry I should've clarified. I am specially referring to companies that don't really have to care about your feelings towards their interviews. FAANGs for example. They simply don't care and there are million others who are willing and happy to go though whiteboarding. They just don't have to put up with your stuff.

Ofcourse you have leverage when you are interviewing at your local java enterprise shop. But who cares about those jobs, pointless to interview them with your smartass questions, we all know they are pretty much all the same more or less.

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This was true in my first job out of college. After that I definitely was interviewing the company. I've had the fortune to always be interviewing while having a stable job so I never needed the job I was interviewing for and it's wise to be picky if you can afford to be. There's a lot of risk associated with changing jobs and I do what I can to either minimize that or at least know what it is. I've said no to two companies. One because I got a better offer and another because I didn't want to do the kind of work they were doing which was really only evident after going through their sample project.

I only found this true when I was young and inexperienced. These days, I dig into what matters to me - the team environment, the corporate ethics, the quality of their leadership, and especially their end goal - are they trying to build a stable operation to last decades, or pushing for an acquisition/exit?

I can deal with most tech problems and flawed companies, but the above list are my deal-breakers, and I absolutely am interviewing them to find out the answers.

I am not a celebrity engineer but after 2 job changes I realized that I have more leverage than the company wants me to think I have. Since then I have always interviewed the company just as much as they have interviewed me. I've turned down positions based on the interview.

If you assume you have no leverage then you will have no leverage, but that's more because you choose not to exercise it than because you couldn't exercise it.

> Because unless you are some sort of celebrity engineer, "interview is a conversation between both parties" is nonsense.

I disagree. Unless the candidate desperately needs this job, he/she can walk away. The candidate is free to consider "company won't bother to answer my questions at the point when they have most reason to be nice to me" as a bad signal.

> I am specially referring to companies that don't really have to care about your feelings towards their interviews

"This company doesn't have to care about my feelings because they are huge and have lots of applicants and a giant incessant interview machine chugging through them efficiently" is certainly something I'd consider in whether I want to work for them, because it tells me I'd be a cog in a machine. (And if enough people consider that, perhaps they will have to care.)

To the parent question: I wouldn't ask a whiteboard question exactly, but I would certainly ask some questions about existing architecture and rationale so I have an idea what I may be working on.

> it tells me I'd be a cog in a machine.

Aren't you a cog regardless though. Why would one work for half the salary just because of an interview. If one can get over the interview part, he/she can retire 10 yrs sooner.

Well, to take the metaphor too far, there's cogs that are greased and used only within spec, then there's cogs that are never greased and deliberately run beyond spec, rust ignored, etc., and in the worst cases, cogs that are used as, err, bulletproofing or something. Metaphors. Never trust 'em, they always turn on you.

For what I'm paid, I don't mind being a bit of a cog. Work is a means to an end for me, not my identity. But I would like to be kept greased and worked within spec, not constantly in crunch time. And while I am fundamentally disposable, I prefer to work in a place that sees I'm lot more valuable not being disposed of. (Again, metaphor breaks down here; planning on your personnel being routinely disposed means you are planning on nobody ever actually developing any skill in your systems.) It's not all the same thing.

Strong disagree; it is not always this way. I'm no celebrity, and I flail at adversarial technical whiteboard exercises, but I've been paid well to do software-related things for over 20 years. Maybe in part because I insist on treating every interview as bi-directional. It is not necessary to accept a "please may I have this job" attitude towards a potential employer. Software developers are radically more empowered than many of them (us) realize, and IMHO part of the reason so many corporate hiring processes for technical roles are so brutal is that it reinforces the mindset of subservience and is an effective way to assert and maintain dominance. [In the US some of this is a structural problem tied to larger concerns like health insurance being tied to employment, which tips the scales of power, putting employees in a position where they may actually need the employer more than the other way around...]

TLDR if you don't think you're interviewing the company too, you're doing yourself a big disservice and selling yourself short.

if you don't think you're interviewing the company too, you're doing yourself a big disservice and selling yourself short.

Absolutely.

But outside of places like SV or NYC, there may not be a lot of jobs available. For someone with a similar length of career, I'm not as flexible about being able to move to where there are more jobs. Is one just SOL when trying to improve their career; take what you can get?

In the top 10 metro areas in the US outside of SV or NYC, there are still plenty of openings at any given time - speaking as someone who has spent 20+ years in Atlanta.

Company is interviewing the candidate not the other way around, no matter what we like to think.

I’ve worked for 20+ years but have only gotten serious about job hopping and interviewing for the last ten.

At any given time when I am job hunting I usually have three or four offers within three weeks. Not saying I am a special snowflake. That’s just the reality of the market. I’m very much interviewing the company. I usually have a BATNA of just keeping my current job.

Despite the HN bubble where every developer lives on the west coast and works for a FAANG or the next unicorn, that’s the reality for most developers. But there is definitely a difference.

As an occasional interviewee and mostly an interviewer, I would agree that the company has the leverage. However, the interviewee should be using the interview to find out what they need to know, to the extent that's possible.

Is tooling important to you? Ask about that. Do you want to push to prod like a cowboy, or does that repulse you? Ask about that. Whatever frustrates you about your current job, you can try to find out before you take a job where it's worse.

Framing those questions to get usable answers is a skill, of course, but if you've got a few areas to ask for, you can use lists like these to find different ways to ask. Just like interviewing, asking leading questions gets you 'right' answers that don't tell you what you want to know, so you want to get the interviewer to go off script and probably be truthful.

> Is tooling important to you? Ask about that. Do you want to push to prod like a cowboy, or does that repulse you? Ask about that.

So at FAANGs for example, there are hundreds of teams that do all of kinds of stuff. You aren't necessarily interviewing directly with people from that team.

Yeah -- so if knowing you're going to do before you accept a job is important to you; maybe they're not a good place -- or maybe you can ask enough people during the interviewing to be comfortable you'll find an appropriate team during the post hiring interviews; or ask about being pre-allocated to a team.

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