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Comment by harimau777 | Hacker News Reader

A problem that I've had is that every company says that they value code quality, emphasize developer growth, value developer's technical feedback, etc. even if they don't in practice. I've debated taking a page from old school behavioral interviewing and asking questions like:

Tell me about a time that you made a decision to improve code quality or architecture at the expense of a deadline.

Tell me about a time that you invested resources into an engineer's technical development even though there would be no immediate, short term benefit to the company.

Tell me about a time that you pushed back on a decision from business or design because one of your engineers said that it was the wrong technical decision.

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One question I like to ask is "Tell me about the worst day (work-wise) you've had in the last six months." Most of the answers I've had gotten generally have to do with escalations and I find that answers are quite honest and unpracticed. I think the way a team/company handles an unusual high-stress situation is in many ways telling of the team/company dynamic in general. And as a bonus, there's usually a good anecdote about a buried body or two in their codebase, process, you name it.

I have a similar question - "What's your least favorite thing about working here".

I often get some very candid feedback, and have passed on couple roles because of what I've heard.

> I think the way a team/company handles an unusual high-stress situation is in many ways telling of the team/company dynamic in general

What sorts of signals do you look for in these answers?

Generally:

Good: Addressing the problem, fixing the process.

Bad: Assigning blame, firing the responsible.

(The latter especially for a first instance, though if you've got repeat instances, I'd look first to management, then to staff, for cause.)

Another bad sign is if the cause for the stress is internal, and a pass sign is if it's either management or a major (or the only) client.

If you cannot find ways to eliminate internal causes of stress, or buffer those created by the commercial environment in which you exist, it's going to be somewhere on the continuum between toxic and fatal to me.

Beware the company that replies with "there haven't really been any" - they are lying or every day is stressful.

I'd be hard-pressed to name any notably bad days at work in the last 6 months, and it's definitely not because every day is stressful. I'm not even sure why you think that's unusual unless you've had jobs exclusively in very unpleasant workplaces.

That's too cynical. I'm sure there are many places where things are mostly uneventful - or "boring" to some people.

Not in my experience.

"Firing the responsible" may be an overly-strong comment -- putting pressure on the line rather than improving line management is the upshot of what I'm getting at.

Though truly boring can be a good sign if it's the result of good planning, drilling, practices, and rewarding competence. If it's from complacency, failure to recognise problems, or the ability to push fault or failure off on others (clients, customers, vendors, suppliers, other departments), not so much.

The good sign then is understanding why and how they got to boring.

Ugh. I'd misread parent as a reply to my own comment.

I came here to say basically this. I've worked at enough companies to know that their ideas of what their values are may not be accurate.

Instead of asking about values, ask about behavior. No one is going to say no to "Do you value code quality?" Aking what they've done (and sacrificed) to support code quality will give you a better idea of what their relative values are.

Asking about their tech ladder will get you an HR answer. Asking "Who was the last person promoted to X? When?" will give you a better answer. And if they can't remember the last time, that's an answer in itself.

I listened to a podcast recently [1] that talked about "embodied knowledge", which is basically the idea that what we know is often very different from what we think we know.

The idea being that you will learn much more about someone / something if you ask questions that are anchored to a time and place rather than generic "unembodied" questions.

So the first question you list "Do you value code quality?" is an "unembodied question" and there is no hook for the person to dig into reality and give you an honest answer.

The second, "Who was the last person promoted?" is "embodied" in that it is anchored in time and place. And because of that, a person is going to use their memory, rather than their rehearsed "value system" answers.

Anyway, it's basically exactly what you said, but I just wanted to recommend that I thought the podcast was a worthwhile listen.

[1] https://www.thepermaculturepodcast.com/2019/1912/

Without having listened to the podcast, another way to frame this is using the concept of yes/no questions, who/when/what/why/how questions, and open-ended questions.

Y/N questions are not very revealing and are likely to lead to dead-ends in the conversation.

WWWWH questions reveal a specific bit of information, but can also lead to dead-ends.

Open-ended questions ("Tell me about...", "What do you think of...", etc) will foster good conversations and uncover new threads to pull. In my experience, this is by far the best way to interact with other people, whether they are interviewing you or not.

Coming up with good/relevant questions on the spot is a skill that can be difficult to master, but is extremely valuable.

To expand on this, people will commonly give you unintentional "hooks" for where you can go to increase the depth of the conversation.

For example, people use common words as short hand for many things ("Work was stressful", "The kids are being a pain", "We had a really nice weekend"), and a mistake people run into when talking with others is that they assume the person they are talking with meant they same thing they themselves would have if they had used that phrase. This leads to lots of people "listening but not understanding".

So basically, offhand comments and common phrases are a great place to get a person to dig in deeper into their feelings on a topic. Usually they indicate something that is on the person's mind but that they probably haven't worked through enough to put into words. That means you will get a much more raw and unfiltered response from them.

Also it's always good to remember that people love to talk about themselves, even if they say they don't.

Hanging out with permaculture people (going on 6 years now) gives me an idea of what it must be like to hang out with famous artists. How can someone be so right and so crazy at the same time?

"The inflammation in my body"? Sounds like a dopamine response in someone whose sympathetic nervous system is strung tighter than a kettle drum.

Don't have a good response other than that I completely agree. :)

The charitable way to put it is that the stated values of most companies are aspirational, not descriptive.

But it's hard in some cases not to feel lied to when you see the gap. At least in dating when this happens you can get out early. You don't get the same trial period with work arrangements.

I've learned this the hard way twice now. I hope people reading this pay very close attention to your comment.

In fact one of the hardest lessons I've learned is that the companies who are the most vocal/passionate about their "values" are often the ones that are the farthest from them.

Do your homework before the interview and check LinkedIn for promotions. Then ask them about that specifically... why have only x People in the team been promoted in the past few years? Why was Jane Soe promoted to y role?

Bonus is if you reach out to former employees on LinkedIn and ask what it’s like to work there.

"Your values are what you promote for."

I like to ask about recent promotions and reasons, or conversely, asking who's been promoted based on the stated values in response to the direct question. Basically: how do you track and credit for this?

Another way to phrase: "What does it take to succeed here beyond hard work?"

EDIT: and "Imagine I've been working here for 3 months and you are very happy with my performance: what am I doing?"

I just feel that most interviewers when pressed on these are just going to lie unless the company truly does it, which will make it hard to tell whose telling the truth. I guess that's what the whole interview is, detect who is telling the truth about themselves. I think more detail on these questions, and to press on follow ups for specific examples.

I think the nice thing about the "tell me about a time when..."-style questions is that it makes it harder to lie, or at least harder top lie believably. None of the interviewers will bat an eyelid answering "do you value developer growth" with a one-word lie "yes," but I think most interviewers would feel uncomfortable making up a story whole-cloth, and that would show.

The risk, of course, is that you'll seem rude and high-handed asking interviewer-style questions yourself. If you have the upper hand (the job market is hot and they need you more than you need them), that's fine, otherwise not so good.

It seems to me that offense at such questions being asked back is itself an indication of a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word "interview". The "inter-" part of the word denotes mutuality or reciprocity[1], that the questions and answers go both ways, so both parties may learn more about each other. An interview is not supposed to be solely an inquisition wherein the potential employer evaluates the applicants worthiness of the privilege of employment. It's supposed to be an exchange wherein both evaluate if this is a mutually beneficial business deal. And if a company considers it rude for you to want it to be anything other than a one-way inquisition of you, I think that's an indicator that management culture at that company will make for a work environment that's more stressful and less fulfilling than the rose-tinted one they present in the interview.

An aside, I say the above now, but damn, I wish I'd had understood it 10 years ago.

1. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/inter-

I agree. It took me a long time to learn that I'm interviewing them as much as the other way around. I learned a lot watching football (soccer) and the behavior of players with respect to their contracts. They are paid up front for services they are expected to provide. Sometimes their salary is low but they agree to high performance bonus. In the past my attitude was that I just want a job that pays the most money. I was taught in school how to interview. But, I learned that there is more to it.

One of my go to question is "When is the last time you had to work over the weekend".

This will help you determine if projects are mismanaged, how stable their prod environment is...etc

Maybe I’m weird, but I wouldn’t find a question like that rude. I’d think the interviewee is very thoughtful, and is pretty darn interested in our company if they took the time to think that up. (even if it’s a canned question)

Yes.

I love the table-turning style of these questions; but the fact is, they can always answer "No, we can't think of any such examples. Are you going to walk away from the job?"

That is to say, hiring is usually a buyer's market.

If that's their answer to something you would want in a company, it's probably way better to find out before you accept.

> That is to say, hiring is usually a buyer's market.

In the US, in the tech industry, right now? That's not even close to true.

In the tech industry it’s very cyclical. It’s hard to hire anyone right now.

We spent all spring trying to hire two engineers. It's not a buyer's market right now, at least not in my town.

Asking these questions a lot in interviews to candidates most people lie by either talking in generalities, or back off and are honest like "were going through that now" both give you an answer. I have not asked this directly in an interview but my normal tactic is to have lunch with the engineers and no manager which gets you lots of examples.

How do you get to have lunch with the engineers before joining the company?

We often (twice in the past 3-4 months) sent desirable prospective hires for coffee with a current employee to allay some of their fears. Both accepted jobs shortly after this, and likey would not have if we didn't give them relatively "unfettered" access to the real deal.

Sometimes sending the interviewee to lunch with potential co-workers is an optional part of the interview. I've been on many such lunches (mostly as a potential co-worker, only once as an interviewee)

Obviously, it's up to management if they want this to be a part of the interview.

definitely is but I've found that if the manager wants the hire (esp post the company deciding to move forward with an offer), then you have leverage and this is a very sane ask.

you tell the hiring manager that you want to do that and make it part of the hire. If you're in town you do it a separate day.

I joined a team that does agile software development.

Apparently that meant that occasionally a slack bot asks me what I did recently.

That's what happens when programmers get promoted, even your bosses try to automate their jobs.

That's a good point.

I actually don't mind it. I'm a noob, it's a small shop, and i'm not sure I'd like a pure "agile" environment anyway... or would want to risk it going wrong.

My manager does this. He is incredibly wary of adding process so he tries to automate it and it never gets implemented. For example, every quarter he tries to come up with some automated system for assigning code checks. It usually has some jank that causes it to go unused and we fall back on just asking one another as needed until he tries again.

I did work with one team that managed to make a compromise around status reports.

If the team could commit to updating their stories at the end of the day, then we could cut 15 minutes out of standup by leaving out what we did and just talking about blockers and what we learned.

There's supposed to be some osmosis around hearing what everyone else is working on. But practically if you split into separate scrums, you're only hearing about what people you're already collaborating with are working on and odds are you already know what they're going to say.

If the team is big enough you can't have a combined standup than most of the value of these conversations is already lost. You have to use the tools to telegraph your actions anyway, so why chat about it every morning? Discuss time savers and time wasters instead.

Scrum has a limit on team size, for this very reason and a few others.

I tried running a scrum of 12 and indeed it was clear from the first standup that it wouldn't fly.

More than 12 people from your team in a scrum is also highly illegal under IRB rules - though this is allowed in a maul.

I covered that. If I'm not hearing what everyone is working on what's the point of trying to use that meeting as the source of that information?

It's especially jarring when systems that claim to be self-aware are so unaware.

hahaha I love it because its true, but you do assume that your manager reads the answers right?

One thing I didn't notice for a few quarters was that the slack bot was not automatically configured to show the other people in the standup what was written. This is very important to the standup concept so you can discuss and help others on a task if it seems relevant, and everyone is aware.

I think he does read it.

Not sure how "agile" it all is but it isn't the worst system as in it isn't as disruptive as everyone chatting all the time.

If you're reporting what you did to your manager instead of to the team, it's not agile.

It's probably some measure of micromanagement going on. Don't buy it if you know what's good for you.

We're a small shop with a lot of "heads down working on stuff" going on. We actually usually know what everyone is doing to some extent. I'm not sure my manager is seriously concerned as much as he wants words to say when someone else asks ;)

Just make sure the slackbot is posting the standup in a channel that everyone is in. Problem solved. No rationalizations required.

In my own experience I have found that small (usually before market fit and series A) Bay Area tech startups tend to be fairly earnest about what the programming role would be like. I've had no shortage of interviews where I was told plainly that experimenting and shipping quickly is prioritized over having ideal code quality and architecture. Granted, I make sure to ask these questions of the most senior non-founder programmer at the company.

I can't recall the last interview when I was allowed enough time to dig into these sorts of questions. I'm gonna have to sort this out soon, and it's probably going to involve practicing my delivery at the risk of tanking the interview.

It's like they're selecting for people who make major decisions based on little or no information. I'm sure that will end well...

Be assertive and ask for 10 minutes at the end for questions. If they don’t give you time to ask questions, don’t work there.

This only works if you're interviewing with decision makers. At a larger organization, I don't think the person you're interviewing with would have any capacity to answer these (which could be a red flag for you, but also a very limiting one).

Or worse, interviews and hiring are with group A and the organization has you now working with group B. Obviously A knows little about B.

This happens at FAAMG companies.

M doesn’t really do that for anyone but new grad hires. I’m not sure either A does that either (the A closest to M doesn’t, I know from personal experience). F and G definitely do, they are notorious for it.

Apple is notorious for it. In some groups, your title/manager often have little to do with what you actually work on. "secret projects" are de-rigeur.

FAANG, for Netflix. Microsoft does not matter.

Care to elaborate? Why does Microsoft not matter, but Amazon/Apple does?

I'm not entirely sure why, but here on HN especially I've seen a lot of the use of FANG with one A [Apple] used to mean Bay Area super-powers, as opposed to GAFAM for general tech majors, because some believe the Bay Area to matter more than the rest of the industry and Seattle-focused Amazon and Microsoft somehow "outsiders"/"foreigners" to the Bay Area.

It's also fascinating to me from an anthropological/sociological view point because Microsoft has had some sort of Bay Area campus (almost continuously) for longer than several other members of GAFAM have even existed (with PowerPoint headquartered there from its acquihire in the 1980s until a reorg shuffle in the mid-90s and HoTMaiL/Hotmail/Live Mail/Outlook.com and other "web properties" carrying the torch up until a lot of recent acquihires expanded that campus again to more Office-relevant tools beyond just "web stuff").

I didn't invent the FAANG acronym myself, but, having a lot of [ex]colleagues in those companies I can see why people want to work for the interesting and somewhat innovative "FAANGs" and don't put Microsoft (or IBM, Dell, Oracle) in the list.

Perhaps because Microsoft pays less? (at least according to levels.fyi).

What if as a condition to accept a job offer you request a meeting with the CEO? Would the company refuse or do they value you enough to make it happen?

I have never taken a job without talking to a top executive. You get a view of the company bigger than your team, you get to ask those business questions your manager may not know, and you have a head start on making good connections with upper management.

You can cross off any company over 1000 people from your list, if you had that as a requirement. My company is over 80,000 people, if our CEO met with each potential employee, he would never sleep.

And also, I have to say, it's a bit arrogant to think that you deserve the attention of top executives. You can't expect them to prioritize your interview over all of the other activities their company does.

It's also a bit arrogent for a top executive to think a request for meeting/conversing with a top executive from a potential new employee in a subordinate role is a demonstration of arrogence. I don't suggest making it an absolute condition depending on the organization's size but for a job seeker wanting to evaluate the potential company just the reaction/responce to this question may serve as a useful litmus test

That question reveals a very, very specific set of assumptions (applying to very small companies); which may be relevant to the most active HN audience, but by strict numbers, is not applicable to majority of actual employees.

Who's the CEO? At my last company (fintech with customers from Google to Exxon) CEO would absolutely meet you even if just for a second if you asked, but I doubt CEO at Google or Exxon would.

The last company I worked for was hiring around 20-25 people a week for a couple years. Do you honestly think the CEO would agree if a random potential new hire asked to talk to him?

I've worked in some companies under 300 people size and the CEOs had no problems meeting you to discuss. And talking to a senior VP was almost standard part of interview for a experienced role (but maybe less so for junior roles.)

You just made me feel really good about my team, because we've done all of those things multiple times over the last year.

friend of mine joined a company that in theory checked all the boxes, in practice, none.

Extreme case but ...

Not that extreme. Interviews are meant to ensure candidates aren't lying on their resumes, but nothing is done to ensure companies aren't lying too.

I'm pretty sure you can leave in the first weeks easily in most countries.

Sure, but then you've lost out on other offers that you may have declined, and you're back to unemployed.

Indeed. The labor market is quite illiquid from the point of the laborer, with a lot of ugly sunk costs and worse opportunity costs. There's not enough safety nets if you buy the wine-and-dine sales pitch but find the reality is a lot more of a lemon than you were sold. (There are no lemon laws for the labor market, sigh.)

It's happened to me twice now. I'm loving the ideas in this thread about asking the, "tell me about a time when ..." style questions because I've always delved deep into the culture and values philosophy, and have found that so far each company was describing their aspirational ideal, which did not reflect practice at all.

As an engineering manager I try to answer truthfully to these probing questions because (1) If someone quits after being hired under false pretenses it's more work for me, (2) I'm relatively new to the position so naive/earnest enough to speak the truth (I was a developer too!)

This seems like such common sense to me that I'm surprised it isn't more common. At this point I think most managers are just too disconnected and don't realize how it really feels. I guess most people will also put up with a lot of pain before they go back out to the job market. I know I do.

I guess this should be motivation to me to get back to work on one of my crappy ideas that could turn into a startup ;-)

I have asked questions like:

Do engineers have access to safari books?

Did you sponsor any conference passes/ training?

(I got answers like we have certification amount re-reimbursement policy(turns out for only pre-approved/ business significant courses). We have internal Community Of Practice sessions, etc.)

You have to ask tangential questions questions and then read between the lines of the answers.

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