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Comment by wccrawford | Hacker News Reader

> Even asking "what did you have for lunch" is better than asking nothing; the interviewer might start talking about whether the company pays for lunch, whether it's any good.

No, it's not. I'm pretty sure anyone who asked that in an interview would be bottom of the list, regardless of how I felt about their interview otherwise. It's flippant and shows a lack of care about what's going on.

Iv'e never been upset with someone for not asking questions. Interviews are tense and we do try to answer the most common questions before they are asked. If they have no questions, we extend and offer to email us later and we'll answer any questions they come up with later.

Stupid question affect the interview. Lack of questions doesn't.

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Haha, wow. No sense of humor? As a hiring manager I’ve run somewhere north of a hundred interviews, and honestly they get so boring and repetitive. I love it when people have questions because it shows you something about them which wasn’t on the script.

If someone’s question was “what did you have for lunch?” and they asked with a smile, I would laugh out loud and then tell them about my lunch, and probably write something like “likeable candidate, has good people skills,” in my review.

Eh. I think it's a risky gamble.

It does depend on the context. If it was asked in the context of a casual conversation, say in between sessions -- it's ok.

But when I, the interviewer, am asking "do you have any questions for me?" during an interview, I invariably mean it in a professional context. Answering with "what did you have for lunch?" seems to cross the professionalism line somewhat (why the hell do you need to know what I ate?), and may not be appreciated by many. I wouldn't go as far as to outright dismiss the candidate's viability, but for me personally, it's comes across as weird and non-self-aware rather than funny.

(also, as someone who watches a lot of stand-up, I also have a high threshold for humor -- I'm kinda of a humor snob. I like light-heartedness, but contrived failed attempts at humor are grating to me because they often indicate someone's trying too hard. There's an inauthenticity there that rubs me the wrong way.)

So even if you're right, the trouble is an interviewee might not be able to tell a priori if they got someone like you or someone like me. So it's risky.

(otoh, "what are some good lunch spots around here, in your opinion?", mentioned by another commenter, is almost always positive and indicates a candidate's interest in the workplace environment)

Seems like you work in a different environment. Here, our interviews begin with a coffee walk or inviting them for lunch; and no one has the attitude of “why the hell do you need to know what I ate”).

My go to question is usually how does a code change go from my machine to production and I’ve noticed different people focus on different aspects. Recently I asked what can I do to help if I get hired and the interviewer actually gave me an honest answer about scalability and I realized I was grossly under qualified for the position. :(

My go to question used to be “what’s the best thing and then the worse thing about working here”, every time I used it I have got jobs I wasn’t good enough for but the feedback was that I was really motivated.

This stuff really does work, I don’t really need it now because i generally find roles through my network.

Does the "best thing or worst thing?" question work?

Is any interviewer really going to tell you the politics are awful, or managers are overbearing? They'll probably give a typical non-answer like "the food is so good you can't help but put on weight".

Candidates do this also when asked their worst traits - it doesn't work.

As always, depends!

When I'm interviewing someone and they ask this, I try to answer honestly, although I think it's human nature to still try to put a positive spin on it because a) I work here and there's some element of post purchase rationalization, for want of a better term and b) if they're a good candidate I want to sell them on working with us.

However there are forces in the other direction - it's not in my interest to deceive a candidate into a role that doesn't fit them if they're going to leave when they inevitably find out, or if they're going to be demotivated as a result. I have a vested interest in this being a good fit from both sides.

I also want to give candidates a great experience - we're a small company and not many people have heard of us. Word of mouth is the most powerful recruitment tool we have, in many respects.

To some extent this only works because I genuinely love the place I work and so the bad things I talk about genuinely aren't that bad (I would call them tradeoffs rather than things everyone would consider super negative).

Oh it sounds like I do, but the issue is also the individual interviewer. You never know who you're going to get. Hence the importance of carrying oneself in interviews in ways that don't unnecessarily disadvantage oneself. Flippancy can go both ways and is not always appreciated.

You can already see from the comments on this thread that there are strong opinions on both sides of this -- it's not a consensus. Flippant questions are a gamble is all I'm saying.

p.s. that said, if it were me, I'd treat it as a minor irritation and move on unless the candidate demonstrates a pattern of a lack of seriousness about the interview. It's one thing to be relaxed and casual, but not taking the interview seriously is not a good look.

Also if a company is extremely casual and everyone is in jeans and hoodies, ignore what I said in this entire thread. It doesn't apply.

don't mind him/her. something was off with the lunch they had

HackerNews has a pretty notorious lack of humor. I agree with your assessment and I'd probably write something similar.

On the other hand, definitely on the candidate to gauge whether the person they're asking is a total curmudgeon or not before asking.

That seems the best reason for asking the question. Why work somewhere that thinks curmudgeons make good interviewers.

I'd like to think that most companies don't really test out the friction and experience of their hiring processes. A good company might have one or more interviewers that are not so good.

A good company absolutely tests the friction and experience of their hiring process. At my company we have an entire “candidate experience” team that works hard on measuring and evaluating it, and we take that feedback seriously. Occasionally we decide take people off the interview pool for a while and have them do more interview training if they want back on.

> As a hiring manager I’ve run somewhere north of a hundred interviews, and honestly they get so boring and repetitive. I love it when people have questions because it shows you something about them which wasn’t on the script.

As an engineer, I've run at least that many engineers. I don't like it when we go off script, because it's hard to compare with previous candidates.

However, candidate question time is for the candidate to gather information, not for me. It's best for everyone if a candidate gets the information they need to decide they'll dislike the job/environment during the interview rather than during the first week.

> I don't like it when we go off script, because it's hard to compare with previous candidates.

Wow. Meep, zorp, hire me. The beauty of this section of the interview (as someone who also has done countless of these numbing, repetitive 'script' interviews), that it allows for candidates to be tiny bit unrestrained. Go on, ask whatever you think is important. Or funny. Or something that can give you insight into this job you're tyna get into. That's the part where you can actually differentiate between robots who memorized answers (whatever answer they might be) and people who are actually interesting that YOU, and your team, would find pleasant to work with.

If you’re a hiring manager and you think interviews are boring and repetitive, that’s your fault and your problem to fix.

There's nothing wrong if, as an interviewer, you get bored of interviewing candidate after candidate. The process is pretty repetitive by nature.

As an interviewer, I guess I just don’t get that at all.

Interviews are the opportunity to meet an interesting person, learn about them, talk about their interests, and sell them on the chance to work at your company.

How could that be boring and repetitive?

Imagine your company has a multi-stage interview, your job is to do the whiteboard coding part, and your pool of known-to-be-of-equal-difficulty questions is very small.

You also know that, when people are thinking through a challenging problem in a stressful situation, they mostly won't want to engage in small talk at the same time. Although you can give them hints and ask questions at appropriate times.

It's easy enough to imagine how that could get tiresome, once you've done enough that no solution or mistake is new to you.

>Interviews are the opportunity to meet an interesting person, learn about them, talk about their interests, and sell them on the chance to work at your company.

And all of that is a great way to introduce a ton of unconscious bias into your interviewing process. You should be spending your time in the interview focusing on determining if the candidate meets the requirements to do the job. Being interesting, having interests you find interesting, etc. are presumably not requirements for the position you're interviewing them for. When you find out they have (or do not have) shared interests with you, as a human being, you're wired introduce bias into your decision making process, whether you intend to or not.

Interviews SHOULD be boring in the repetitive sense. The interview should be tailored to the position, and not the person you're interviewing.

Should’ve clarified: Professional interests.

> Interviews SHOULD be boring in the repetitive sense

Repetitive isn’t boring. I believe it’s very possible (essential) for a good interviewer to see the difference.

This is a fair critique, but as sibling commenters pointed out, a well-structured interview is highly repetitive by design, so that every candidate for a particular role gets as close as possible to the same interview experience. When you’ve done dozens or hundreds of these it becomes kind of like mind-reading, you just know what the person is thinking and roughly what they’re going to say and do for the next 45 minutes based on what they do in the first 5. And yes, sometimes, that can get boring.

But your point is valid in the sense that, as an interviewer, I do try to bring energy and interest to each interview, both because it’s what the candidate deserves and it’s better for me too.

And to be clear, most interviews are interesting and enjoyable, even the sessions I’ve done a hundred times. But, just being realistic, neither I nor the candidates are always on our A game, and sometimes the result is a quiet and dull interview.

And to be clear, that may still result in an offer recommendation! Some of these interviews are dry because the candidate knows the material down pat, doesn’t want to chit chat, and has no questions. Those are, in fact, the very kind of person I imagine would improve their performance by smiling and asking what I had for lunch :)

Dude, you don't understand. THIS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS! One wrong move and he will strike you off his list :O Oh my gosh! So important :o

Note to self: ask this question in every interview for the rest of my life, to make sure I don't end up working with someone who thinks that the "professionalism line" means not asking about something as normal as lunch...

From over here, that looks more like being easily duped and/or over analyzing (no offense).

I responded to another similar comment already but suffice it to say, noting that someone was charismatic is not going to land them the job unless charisma is a valuable skill for the specific job. When hiring engineers we allow a very wide range of “people skills,” because they aren’t critical so long as they’re above a critical threshold.

Not saying this is you necessarily, but your post makes me think of certain friends I’ve had over the years who are very introverted and can be very salty about extroverted and/or “charismatic” people. They tend to judge people who are friendly and outgoing as being vapid or shallow - thinking, I suppose, that if they were deep thinkers, they too would be quiet and not care about social niceties.

I think that’s a really dangerous mental trap to fall into. It is perfectly possible to be both brilliant and charismatic. It is also very possible to learn and improve “people skills,” just as you can learn anything else. Thinking otherwise can lead to badly underestimating or misunderstanding others, and limiting ones self.

I don't think that, I just think a) you have to be careful not to let the halo effect from them being charismatic bleed into your technical evaluation, and b) you seemed to be making a huge leap from a single question, not even adding a caveat about e.g. delivery, just thinking he's suddenly brilliant from a "clever" question he may not even have thought of himself.

> As a hiring manager I’ve run somewhere north of a hundred interviews, and honestly they get so boring and repetitive.

What an insane thing to say. As if on top of everything else, you also want us to entertain you? Does anybody really believe someone would laugh at that?

When I was reading that comment it seemed like a lighthearted question was a plus if it happened, but obviously not a serious metric that anyone is tracking.

I don't know why commenting and replying has to necessarily be so hostile and adversarial.

This response doesn't seem warranted. GP didn't say you're his monkey. He said the job gets boring. Candidates with good people skills get hired more often because they bring a little more joy to the workplace. And, all other things being equal, that decision makes perfect sense.

Just because guy characterization something boring and repetitive absolutely does not imply he wants to entertain you. Such implication is illogical.

Shots fired, haha :)

Just to make sure you see it I’m copying some things I wrote to other replies:

1. Charisma is a plus, but how much depends on the role, and for most roles it’s not going to matter.

2. To be clear, most interviews are interesting and enjoyable, even the sessions I’ve done a hundred times. But, just being realistic, neither I nor the candidates are always on our A game, and sometimes the result is a quiet and dull interview. And to be clear, that may still result in an offer recommendation! Some of these interviews are dry because the candidate knows the material down pat, doesn’t want to chit chat, and has no questions. Those are, in fact, the very kind of person I imagine would improve their performance by smiling and asking what I had for lunch :)

I think maybe the question can work, depending on who does the asking and how charismatic they are, as in Mad Men when one guy tries doing what Don does and it doesn't work because he isn't Don https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP5Cd8i6Cb4

So maybe your good people skills, likeable candidate = "hey, charisma", which depending on what you're interviewing people for gets you those mythical guys who can't code.

I mean that last bit is a big jump. I don’t think any amount of charisma would help a candidate in the debrief if they did poorly on the technical segments. Where it can help is for more junior folks who have gaps, and what you’re trying to sniff out is how hard the person is going to work and how teachable they’ll be. Or, depending on the job, it may be a minor factor for someone applying to be a manager or work in HR, since the people skills are actually one of the important points of that job.

But if the most charismatic person out there interviews for an engineering job and can’t code, that debrief would take two seconds, and sound like, “Man, X sure was nice, too bad they can’t do the job.”

Ok, how do these people who can't code get in to jobs requiring coding then? If charisma doesn't do it what does?

on edit: assuming the people are not mythical, although I certainly have known people who could not code well enough to have it be worthwhile having them code, which is I guess a slightly different thing.

I think it depends on how you respond.

Coming at it with my hiring manager hat on, sometimes at the end of the day, you ask "do you have any questions for me?" and it's obvious that the candidate has really asked all the questions of people previous to them. In that way, saying something like "I can't think of anything more right now, all the other interviewers have been so open" or whatever. Plus it's usually pretty obvious the candidates are usually tired at this point.

Now at the beginning of the day, I'd expect some questions. But also, some interviewers simply don't leave enough time for this part of the interviewee, so it's really just going through the motions.

Now my best interview candidate hat on, the real thing is to ask questions while the interview is going on at relevant times. For example, when they ask you about testing, maybe ask, well what frameworks do you use to test? What's your code review process? Let's review it right now. Etc.

Asking stupid questions is definitely a red flag, although as long as they aren't offensive stupid questions, I usually give a pass. It's all a part of the experience, there are no hard and fast rules in hiring.

This is the kind of "no hire" that turns out to be a favor in the long run. Keep it up!

You're always interviewing the company as much as they are interviewing you. (Well, assuming you're good enough at interviewing to get to be choosy.)

I don't necessarily agree, it's just the personality of one person, whom you might not even work with regularly depending on what their role is.

Sure, you might say that's a window into the rest of the company, and it's true in a way, but the HR person being slightly humourless does not always equal a bad job.

Would be interesting to see data on this. I agree that asking what did you have for lunch is silly. That said, what sort of lunches do folks do around here is not.

I suspect some of this is born from the idea that you want to be remembered. Asking a question can help anchor your existence to the people that interviewed you. Again, though, I'm sceptical without data. Feels you could argue this either way.

I read it as hyperbole that means "the bar for what's a good question to ask is really low."

It's all in the delivery

I feeling not having any question usually shows during the interview everything was answered. Usually a good sign in terms of communication.

This of course depends on the context, and the 'lunch' question won't always work. For example, if you feel that your interviewer lacks any sense of humour, or is the type of person who would judge a lot questions as 'stoopid', it may be better to skip it (and for that matter, maybe also skip that job)

It won't work everywhere. However at my job it could be "I had steak" or "I grabbed sushi". A great follow-up question: what did it cost? 3.50 to $5.

This is an amazing perk to my job. I could even list ~5 other options that were available, and talk about the other 5 places to go which offer 20+ more options.

This leads into great, where did you eat? How common is it to socialize vs go back to your office?

Yet another chance to dodge a bullet and avoid working with uptight, self-important nitpickers.

The meta point of the post is it's dumb to attach too much weight to cultural signifiers that are easy for people to imitate once they know about them.

The top voted comment on the post invents a new cultural signifier, and declares that candidates who fail it should be disqualified! It would be funny if it wasn't a pervasive interviewing practice.

It's such a Michael Scott move, really. You simply love to see it.

which is a totally unproductive red herring to the goal getting on someone else's payroll and insurance program

avoiding someone you would probably never see on the job is not a silver lining

Not to mention some interviewers, like myself, will just follow up and ask if you have any more questions. Someone asking what I had for lunch would just be seen as wasting time.

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