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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

Not getting a chance to ask these questions is only the fault of the interviewee. There's a shortage of engineers, and finding good people is hard. If you don't have enough time to ask these questions in an interview loop, and the company tells you they'd like to make you an offer, if you follow up with "I'm excited about this opportunity, but I'd like to chat with the hiring manager or someone from the team for half an hour before we move forward," the recruiter/coordinator will almost certainly make it happen. I've had companies big and small suggest this after an interview went well so they can sell the team and company more.

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Given the ludicrousness of the tech interview process, if I have to wait for the offer to ask about company culture, that's too late. I've already put in a dozen hours on the rest of the steps, and passed countless gates, only to now find out I don't actually want to work there with the offer in hand? These things need to be cleared up in the phone screening and the first interview, before both sides have put a tremendous amount of time and effort in.

Before you get offers, you are looking to disqualify companies, ie: What red flags can I notice that make me reasonably confident that I would never want to work at this company. After you get offers, you are looking to qualify companie, ie: What green flags can I notice that make me reasonably sure that I definitely want to work at this company.

Depending on your confidence level going in about how many offers you expect to get and how many offers you actually end up getting, your qualification and disqualification steps should be more or less rigorous. If you're confident of getting many good offers, then ask the tough questions in the phone screen to avoid wasting your time.

> Not getting a chance to ask these questions is only the fault of the interviewee.

This isn't really an accurate statement, the asymmetry of the entire process ensures you will never really have the answers you need. Interviews grill you on everything you've done. When you ask about culture, they will invariably say "it's awesome" or some other vague response because they are the ones with the power in the relationship. They are not really under any onus or responsibility to answer any direct question or field specifics. "It's a good company, you want to work here" and that's about it. 5 min at the end is all you get and it's not even guaranteed to be anything other than a sales pitch.

Funny, Just today I saw a parody tiktok of applicant answering this question, that is there anything you want to know, with that Would you give me contact details of your employee who left to ask him, why he left? Most of the commentators unanimously agree that this will kick one out of any consideration list.

>There's a shortage of engineers

r/CSCareerQuestions would readily contest you on that assertion.

Yeah: there’s a self-imposed shortage of people capable of passing the tech interview gauntlet would be the more accurate framing.

The biggest challenge I see is the years of experience requirement on certain technologies that disregards ones that are very similar, particularly when that requirement isn't central to the problems being solved.

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