Comment by bdg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bdg | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the comments in here are reacting to the large list of questions being very off-putting. There's a deeper issue here that we still don't have a good answer for: it is incredibly hard to tell what a company is like until you start working there, and asking questions either leads to very surface-level answers or just flat out catfishing candidates. Companies being transparent and detailed about how they operate is the exception.

The company gets to spend 3+ hours finding out information about a candidate, but the candidate has little option to discover company culture for themselves. They can snoop around on LinkedIn but this doesn't answer much about culture unless there is someone who is prolifically producing content inside the company. There's glassdoor which might answer part of it but generally the reviews there are extremely shallow and biased by the skills, mindset, and treatment of whoever wrote the review.

So what's the answer? I think "ask targeted questions" is fine as long as it is not "ask 100 general questions". I haven't seen a single article on the meta of how to pick what questions to ask or how to get past shallow answers. I also think the entire industry is performing pretty terrible in this space and we don't have a good answer for how to handle it that is common or even well-known. This leads to lost candidates or (intentionally or unintentionally) catfished candidates who will leave after joining.

+1 on this answer. Ideally any interviewer intentionally sets aside time to answer your questions. If it's a total one way street that'll tell you something about the company.

In our interview process we have an informal session totally dedicated to answering the candidate's questions about anything. The setup is simple, two of our engineers and the candidate hop on a call (or meet in person) and just talk.

Many of the folks who have accepted our offers refer back to that session as the thing that really sealed the deal for them.

Every interview process I've had after I got my first job I was able to talk to basically anyone I wanted and set up extra calls just to ask about the company, process, product, etc.

I don't have great insight into the meta for picking the right questions, but I feel like people really don't take advantage of their power in job-hunting. Ask to talk to an engineer currently on the team. Ask to talk to someone more customer-facing to talk about the product and the business (especially if it's a small company). Or don't if you don't care about those things.

These lists are a useful tool in figuring out what you might care about or not care about. I think that's the best insight into what meta to follow: some introspection on your values. Finally, as with anything else, it's an iterative process. You won't get everything right the first time and the target moves as your values do.

Still, there's some questions you'd want to ask that would be an immediate red flag but regardless of answer outcome you still want a job offer since you are interviewing multiple places in parallel and you don't know how picky you can be. You end up not asking those questions because they'd put your "culture fit" at risk. You can ask other questions and try to read between the lines but bottom line it's tough to know exactly what you're getting into no matter how much access you get.

Early this year I spent 3 or 4 months job searching for my next role and ended up not taking any of the 3 offers because something seemed off at all of them. After I got the offers the recruiters turned into used car salesmen which was also a different, terrible experience. So even if you do end up with the insight it can be a gigantic waste of time.

I've personally never experienced this sort of thing. It's entirely possible I'm a combination of lucky and privileged (eg I'm NT as far as I know). That aside, I feel like you need to determine what your values are and pursue lines of questioning along those. They should be things that are near deal-breakers.

I just don't really understand not asking a question whose answer is highly valuable to you because you're worried about getting red-flagged by the company. I also don't really get pursuing offers from companies you don't care about unless there are heavy job market pressures eg being a new grad/looking for your first job in the industry. Even then, the idea is to just get your first job, so your values are different than when you're more senior.

Recruiters can absolutely be awful. I've straight up ghosted multiple because they were unable to take "no" for an answer.

Maybe we can take this list, and make something like Glassdoor where companies, or departments within companies can answer the whole list in one go, then point all the candidates there?

The problem with that is that a self-referencing description will be mostly propaganda. It might be a startup based on BS and if manages to get attention, play the virtue-signalling game big time.

Stack Overflow Jobs used to do this at a very shallow level.

> it is incredibly hard to tell what a company is like until you start working there

Sometimes the dumpster fire is visible right from the interview.

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