Unpacking Interview Questions
jacobian.org
jacobian.org
Tell Me About a Project You Led - This is another good one. A good related question would be, "What leaders have you had in the past that you admired?"
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - I don't like it. I support all three, even without the business bonuses. However, the jargon in that community is vast and quickly changing. There's also potential for unintentional landmines. Worse, no sane person on Earth today is going to walk into an interview and tell you they hate those things.
Tell Me About a Disagreement - This is another good one. Conflict is present anywhere two or more people do anything. Conflict resolution is a big part of the workplace and how well you do in it. For leaders, you should also add followups on how they help mediate conflict.
The Weakness Question - This question is famously poor. In a frictionless vacuum where no one is swayed by concretions, it seems like an excellent question. Everyone has weaknesses that they have to work on. It is the central mechanism of improvement. In practice, you are going to pull in unconscious biases that shouldn't but will effect your decision. Worse, you will lose strong candidates that will see you even asking this question as a red flag. I strongly recommend never asking any version of this question in an interview.
> Only focuses on a single group (e.g. women) to the exclusion of other forms of diversity
That is, if you make the mistake of going in too much depth on one particular aspect, then this is a red flag. I could easily imagine myself doing this simply because I have a tendency to answer interview questions depth-first rather than breadth-first.
I was also a bit terrified of "when I ask this question of an underrepresented candidate…". Some forms of group identity are outwardly visible; some are not. The author notes how sensitive this subject is, and then also predicates a fifth of the "discussion" section on the assumption that they can reliably make this judgement.
And on this "red flag":
> Indicates distrust of workplace inclusivity measures like codes of conduct, anti-harassment training, etc.
There was a good while when I distrusted all corporate training, simply because the only forms of active corporate training I had been exposed to were these box-checking legal cover-your-arse arrangements. If you've only experienced that kind of training, then of course you have a generalised distrust of it.
If you give me a list of criteria on which you are judging me, I will certainly be able to find ways in which I violate those criteria, no matter what the criteria are. (It's exactly the same problem as odd-one-out questions: there's always a way to make something the odd one out, so there's no right answer.) Hence the landmines: you can't know in advance which of those violations are actually meaningful to the interviewer.
Ironic
For example on the disagreement question they have this as a red flag:
>Resolution through avoidance
Sorry, but this is how the world works. Maybe there's some idyllic companies out there full of reasonable people working through disagreements, but it's definitely not most. Most of them will punish you for openly disagreeing with them. Avoidance is an appropriate strategy in that situation.
Then there's no resolution.
Are you saying avoid talking about the conflict? Not sure how can you can resolve a situation with that.
E.g. for learning: "Let's talk about learning. What's the last new thing you've learnt? Why that and not something else? How to you choose what to learn next? What's your method of learning, what works best for you?"
About communication: hell yeah it's underrated and when you hire bad communicators and don't coach them you won't know what hit you and your team. I'm writing a lot about this and tangential topics:
https://ochronus.online/communication-for-software-engineers...
https://ochronus.online/active-listening-boosts-careers/
https://ochronus.online/how-to-stop-winning-arguments/
(sorry for the link-fest, but I do think these are interesting for this thread)
Same with any question having to do with testing. Sure, everyone tests! Why would I ever write code without tests!
First day on the job: Do I really have to write a test for this?!
It's not necessary about "target demographics". A non-"diverse" team (depending on your definition of "diverse") can still be extremely inclusive. Just look at how well they onboard new hires.
The Weakness Question is a hard one because it'll be interpreted very differently in different cultures. Some will happily give you a list of areas they want to improve while others will consider answering the question an admission of failure (losing face).
Any thoughtful person probably:
1. Agrees in principle that DEI is important, and that cultural, racial, ethnic, linguistic, economic diversity makes organizations/communities/people better
and 2. has some criticism or concerns about how DEI is typically implemented in practice.
It takes a lot of tact to express #2 in a way that it won't get you or your company canceled. Especially in a tech company, with all the moral scrutiny the industry has come under lately, the private opinion of one employee can become a very public and embarrassing matter. For that reason, I think asking a DEI question in an interview is more to see "is this person going to be a liability for us or do they know how to talk about difficult topics without pissing anybody off?"
Ugh, this question really made me cringe.
Interviewers are in a position of power over interviewees, and the whole point of a job interview is to assess a candidate. The fact is that if an interviewer doesn't like the answer, it will reflect negatively on the interviewee.
If you're in a majority group, I'd suggest seriously re-thinking whether to ask this question to a candidate from a minority group, at least during an assessment.
After they've been onboarded? Sure. But not while you're in a position of power over them.
Yeah, they don't ask this question just for fun. They write in the background section that the purpose is "It selects for candidates who share these values [...] if they believe that this is all just political correctness gone wrong, or that white people are really the oppressed ones, they aren’t going to be able to work well with me and my teams."
So I'm not sure why they'd wait to do this evaluation until after onboarding.
You also seem to think that the only time the company has a position of power over the employee is during the interview process. But generally the boss/HR has power over the worker even after onboarding (a different kind -- to fire rather than hire), so I'm not sure where your power analysis is grounded...
[1] https://www.persuasion.community/p/john-mcwhorter-the-neorac...
I agree, but it's a matter of degree. In practice, it's significantly easier to reject a candidate than it is to fire an employee.
When your interviewer is a genderqueer woman, and she tells you that she has trouble working with men (that really happened) you appreciate the honesty, and then you run as fast as you can. That was a bridge-burning move from that company.
However, I would also very much appreciate knowing whether a company has such policies as early in the hiring process as possible.
Depends on the context. For example, if your user base is diverse, it can be larger than if it wasn't - the total potential market is larger. So, diversity is profitable in that context.
Serving a diverse user base well is potentially easier with diverse staff. Remember those "Falsehoods programmers believe about X" articles? With a diverse team, chances are higher that those falsehoods are caught early, because the team covers a broader range of life experiences. So, diversity is good in that context.
How much of an impact this argument has depends on the concrete role, of course. My work tends to be very low on the overall software stack, and the notion that diversity helps seems very weak there. At the very least, I expect that diversity of thought or actual neurodiversity matters more than ethnic or gender diversity.
I think your second point is completely valid. Having a greater diversity of skills, perspectives, experience, ideas... on a team seems to be obviously beneficial. But that’s not at all relevant to the types of diversity HR programs aim to implement. Those programs are generally concerned with factors like ethnicity, gender, and sexuality... which are not at all related to the factors you mentioned.
The interview questions like this are usually designed to eliminate neurodiversity. I mean, how many people on autistic spectrum could successfully navigate them without triggering at least one "red flag"?
(When even things like "correctly answers part of the question, forgets there was a second part" are considered red flags.)
The set of categories that diversity advocates typically care about is itself not diverse.
But both those phrases are strong tribal markers.
Running the interview differently because of which (presumably protected) classes you judge the interviewee to be in is a big red flag. If you're not comfortable asking the question to some people, you shouldn't ask it.
Anyway, this question feels like a gotcha more than anything. You're supposed to say the right thing, not demonstrate it. Hiring people because they said the right thing rather than because they demonstrated the thing is a great way to get bamboozled.
If your company is doing well with diversity, inclusion, and equity, your interview team will likely be diverse. If a candidate won't work well in that environment, they'll likely make it known during the interview, or self select out.
If your company is not very diverse, or at least if the interviewers aren't, the question feels even more sketch.
If it's an important pillar of the company, by all means spend a few minutes telling candidates about it and if the candidate says or does something that raises a flag, handle it.
It is, after all, logically impossible for every company to hire the best candidate on the same scale. If you interview people by general aptitude, one company (with the best salary etc.) will get the top folks and everyone else will settle. (It also makes independent interviewing rather useless: each company may as well outsource the job to a single service provider who's good at interviewing and returns a scalar.)
So, the effective way to interview, if you happen not to be a monopoly in your field, is to find candidates who are better for your company.
Some companies believe diversity of skin color actually matters and demonstrates a serious commitment to avoiding groupthink. Some companies believe they should not be caring about skin color at all. You're looking for a company in the latter group, and they're looking for you.
If you give a poor answer to this question, as posed by a company in the first group, it serves the purpose of interviewing - it accurately determines that both you and the company will be unhappy with you being hired at that company.
This statement is based on the racist assumption that skin color makes you think differently. A middle class Asian person who went to college at Stanford is going to think identically to a white middle class person who went to college. A white person who grew up dirt poor and self taught online is going to be vastly different from either.
Skin color doesn't make you think differently, but it (and, even moreso, racial identity, which is different than skin color) does correlate with things beyond socioeconomic class and personal level of education that do.
> A middle class Asian person who went to college at Stanford is going to think identically to a white middle class person who went to college.
It's possible, because the range of variation overlaps considerably, but, overall, no, major subcultural and lived-experience differences in the US don't reduce to economic class and whether (or even where) you went to college.
I thought this was true for a while but I've worked with enough asians (who are also born in USA - some even with their parents being American too) to realize this just isn't true. The white/asian experience has a very different parental/family background. A lot of kids learning some other language from an early age even if their parents weren't born in that country the language is known for.
Most white kids don't go through a lot of that stuff. I used to think "Ah, hello, my fellow American!" And then I realized many asians didn't align with the American identity - at least in SV. Many felt like they were very closely tied (or closer) to their parents or grandparents homeland. Super weird - imo...
Perhaps you are not losing out on perspectives and experiences, per se, but perhaps the biased person running your initial phone screens is causing you to lose out on good candidates who are from a race they don't like, i.e., you're limiting the number of candidates of this perspective and experience that you're willing to interview. That would be a problem worth being aware of! Completely ignoring race means you don't have the data. It doesn't prevent the problem from happening.
(See also, "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.*)
I think it rather is based on the assumption that you are likely to have been treated differently in your life as a result, and thus have different lived experiences that can influence your work.
The best combination for being hired by these companies is having a diverse skin color and being committed to the groupthink.
The second best combination is having a non-diverse skin color and being committed to the groupthink.
(Specifically that I have a frankness/matter of factness that people often find offputting and make conflict resolution more difficult.)
I understand that isn't how this author intends it to be used, but effectively it is. Never answer this. It's a trap.
That's a very strong claim. What research?
>The teams I’ve liked the most have been the most diverse; the teams I’ve felt the most uncomfortable on are the ones where everyone looks like me.
Not surprisingly, for the author, "diversity" is only about how people look like. He also seems to suffer from self-hatred.
The eighth guy is a white American guy in his 40s who grew up in Alabama, was in the US Air Force for a bit, then did his undergrad in an unrelated field from a relatively unheard-of university, then self-taught programming and worked a few odd IT jobs before landing here.
If you ask me, he is the true source of diversity in the team, but pretty sure none of the teams tasked with increasing diversity see it that way.
Individual people aren't diverse, teams are. To say that one guy is the source of diversity is like saying that he is the source of the eight-ness of the number of people on your team.
In USA it means "Black and Latino representation according to US demographics". It isn't the words actual meaning, but that it is how its used and if you are trying to argue something different you will almost surely be labelled racist by the person asking this question.
For example, lets say you answer this question:
> That’s a bit about what these values mean to us; what do diversity, equity, and inclusion mean to you?
With: I always worked on very diverse teams comprised of people from many backgrounds including Russians, Indians, Europeans. We worked hard to ensure that language barriers weren't a problem by forcing everyone to talk in English so nobody feels left out etc, it is a challenge but having a diverse team definitely is worth it.
Do you think you'd get hired? Maybe, but it is pretty likely they will see that answer as a dog whistle for being right wing and just end the process right then and there.
But overall, it's a great answer. You talked about your specific team, which happened to include Russians, Indians, and Europeans. You pointed out that there were challenges involved, but you made an effort to make sure nobody felt left out, and that overall it was worth it. Nice!
The reason I brought that up is because I've seen some American progressives say that trying to make people speak English is racist or non inclusive. But it is the other way around. in the teams I've worked nobody were native English speakers but everyone spoke English. That is the only sensible way to handle a diverse team and letting people speak their native language just creates silos and removes the point of diversity. And someone on the team being a native English speaker wouldn't change that point.
For example, if I worked in USA and a group of latinos spoke Spanish with each other I'd tell them to speak English. Not because I think they need to speak English in USA but because they are excluding other groups by speaking a language only they understand. Similarly if I were to speak Swedish with my teammates I'd expect others to say the same thing to me, and in diverse environments I even speak English when everyone around me knows Swedish just to make it a habit.
Now I've read a lot about American culture and politics online, but a more ignorant person with my experience would just bluntly say that as if it was common sense and as you saw you homed in on forcing people to speak English yourself. If you were a bit less understanding it would have ended the hiring process right there.
The fact that it’s a minor red flag at all is the issue.
Telling a group of Spanish-speaking people to speak English to include everyone is a major no-no right now. Do you realize how colonial that is?
Yes, which is why I said he was the 'source' of diversity. If 7 data points have value X and one has value Y, then Y is the 'source' of the variance, else the variance would be zero.
> Diversity doesn't mean "non-white," it means "varied."
It's funny that literally the sister comment of my comment links to how someone at Apple was driven out of their job for saying this. For your own sake I'd recommend you don't express these opinions at your workplace.
Companies are, for lack of better wording... diverse. Not all of them are biased the same way politically, despite the fact that a few big and prominent ones are. I've never worked in FAANG, but there are plenty of others who haven't "drunk the woke-aid".
Dissociative identity (multiple personality) disorder.
...oh wait, that's a diversity of thought -- the wrong kind of diversity...
Mixed ancestry is the correct answer, I guess. Or intersexuality (hermaphroditism). Not sure if you need to be one, or is enough to identify as one.
I wouldn't join a team like that again because of how much harder it made things. Maybe this is an argument for why diverse teams are good?
Perhaps there are studies that would justify a claim that "diverse teams are more successful", however, this particular search does not immediately lead to them and should not be used as evidence of some scientific consensus on the matter - quite the contrary.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apples-vp-diversity-12-white...
Not really. She's still at Apple.
https://www.blackenterprise.com/apple-denise-young-smith-own...
If you think correlation implies causation, I know a lot of ways to brings value to your company.
- highly intelligent
- professional work attitude
- nice people to work with
If you want to hire a more diverse group where there are some jerks in there, and idiots that screw up all the time, that's fine. But I like my team uniformly aligned like this.
;)
Is that what the writer wants? Is the intent to select for test-prep?
I recently had to do a job interview for a programmer, and on his resume he put he worked on some "ethical project". Then during the interview, he asked how our company looked at diversity, and how women should get equal chances and all that. He technically wasn't good enough to make the cut. But even then, I don't want some political complainer in my team.
In fact our team is pretty diverse. I helped hire most of them. But we hire the ones who technically make the cut, and look like nice people to work with. Hiring "for diversity" really gives me the cringes.
Keep your political bullshit out of my team.
[1] This is also called "virtue signalling".
But if you hire for diversity, you can start questions why certain people are there. Because they are good at their job, or to satisfy the diversity?
So in practice, you are discrediting those people, and maybe they don't like to be judged like that.
So in effect, such teams that hire for diversity probably end up least diversified.
Take a look at their Team page at https://www.hangar.is/team and judge for yourself how "diverse" they currently are.
Uh, what? Delete this
I have. I am as white as fallen snow and had a very thick Southern accent. "What y'all gonna need to do is git yerself..." That kind of thing.
I trained myself out of it almost immediately after hearing someone, when they thought I couldn't hear, call me a "backwater hick" and dismiss an entire meeting's worth of ideas and discussion I had led...and others agree with that person. That wasn't the only time, but it finally clicked.
I'm fortunate that I could work on that and tamp down my accent; other characteristics are more innate and cannot--nor should be required to be--"hidden from view." Even now, I will trip and slip in a "yuup" or "fixin' to" in a drawl and see the double-take on people's faces.
Now I know yer fixin to stamp out your past and I know we’ve met but we ain’t shook, but I hope you might could embrace it again some day. :)
Love southern accent. It's so cool.
Also, some people do pick up the local dialect in the country they're living or working in and attempt to speak it, it's not seen as somehow an inferior move or putting oneself down, on the contrary, it's showing a form of flattery.