Questions I'm asking in technical interviews | Hacker News Reader

Questions I'm asking in technical interviews

jvns.ca

144 pointsjvns40 comments

I wrote a blog post on a similar topic, after mentoring several would-be engineers that were curious about finding a good fit after graduating: http://blog.pamelafox.org/2013/07/what-to-look-for-in-softwa... That post also turned into a slide deck: https://speakerdeck.com/pamelafox/engineering-culture

I think we cover very similar areas. One of the big red flags for me, personally, is code review (lack thereof). If a company doesn't believe in its value, that reflects on its whole perception of coding as a collaborative process, and I just can't get on board with them.

That's a valuable slide deck, thanks for sharing.

I'm about to join a small company that doesn't have many good engineering processes in place yet (code review being one of them). It's a big red flag for me too, but I also saw it as a challenge and an opportunity to improve how things are done there.

I have experience with some of these processes because of the open source development that I've done, and that's one reason why the lead dev wanted to hire me. Hopefully I can make a positive difference in their engineering culture! Would love to hear advice from anyone who's been in a similar situation.

What about pair programming in lieu of code review? Still a red flag?

Many of the companies I have interviewed with would have ended the interview if I had asked them some of these questions. These are terrific questions though. I was once asked by an interviewer where I saw myself in three years. I said, "dead." Then I said that would depend on the career trajectory of employees there. The gulp I heard in response was all that I needed to know. Life is too chaotic to predict more than six months in advance.

Definitely. I noticed quite a few that would be totally unsuitable to ask in, say, a first interview. For instance, asking about the vacation policy early on is in bad taste and sends a signal you don't want to be sending.

One might not get an honest answer to some of them at any stage of an interview. The question on turnover might be directed to the person responsible for four resignations in the space of two months. But it certainly is a good idea to have these questions in mind, even if you don't ask the ones you would like to ask, since you just might be able to infer the answers from the responses to the questions that you do ask.

What signal is that? That you're the kind of person who takes vacation? How is that "in bad taste"? This is the opening stage of a negotiation leading to a legally binding contract; to not ask about vacation seems odd. It's a significant part of the deal. I'm not here to beg them to please please grant me the privilege of working for them.

I wouldn't want to work for an employer who wouldn't hire someone because they like to take vacation, so if this question will act as a filter for me to weed out the bad employers, I'll always ask it (and indeed, I do always ask, and for the last few jobs I've also asked about their policy on additional unpaid vacation; my current employer gave me an extra two weeks unpaid each year).

One company I interviewed at had a whiteboard where everyone wrote down the days they were taking vacation. It was titled "slackers".

I know they thought it was a funny joke, but I think even jokes can send a message.

So much of this is subjective - there's no right/wrong. I would agree that it's in poor taste to ask during the first interview but that's my opinion and it's totally biased based on my life experience. Why? Because that's third or fourth-level information.

I'm choosing the job based on whether I want to do this specific work with this specific group of people who are aligned towards these specific goals - that's first level. Second level would be whether the salary is inline with what I need/want. After that, let's consider PTO/policies/drive time/etc. A "correct" candidate IMO is most concerned with solving the first-level problem during the first interview. It's a massively complex problem - lots of moving parts. 1-5 questions won't answer that completely - I'd need hours to figure that out. The last question of the interview might be, "And by the way, what is the salary range for this position?" We all know that 2nd and 3rd-level stuff is so negotiable that it doesn't really do much point to ask pointed questions about it during a first interview. So for someone to think that the first interview is the time to dig down to 3rd/4th level information - that's just showing me that their priorities are skewed.

That said, I can think of two situations in which it would be appropriate:

1) when, during the first interview, it becomes clear that the employer is ready to hire you right now ("Can you start today?"). Obviously the long game goes out the window here!

2) During an interview that has cost either party something significant. For example, if the candidate flew you out and you spent the entire day, I think it's a fair question for the HR person at the very end of the day.

Correct - there is no right/wrong exactly, and I learned a while back to not work to those 'rules' too closely. There's an etiquette that always seemed 'common sense' to me, and now, it's generally easier to learn a lot more about a company, even a small one, before even getting to an interview stage.

I've asked about vacation and such during a 'first interview' a couple of times, mostly because in my view I was already satisfied about some of the other more 'important' stuff. Some of that came from the interview time itself, other info came from doing research on the company, staff, work, etc before the first interview.

And by the same token, I've had to shut down a couple of interview dances short because the company would not disclose salary range at all until I'd flown out to their HQ and met the team. "We don't discuss that this early in the process" was the standard response. Well... I wasn't about to reshuffle multiple days (affecting 2-3 weeks of existing stuff) without any idea if this would be worth my time 4 weeks later.

Note: pmiller wrote "a first interview".

If your first question amounts to, "How much will I get paid for not working?", something is wrong somewhere. For one thing, it's not exactly the most important issue on the table; how much vacation vs. work time do you have per year? For another, it is fairly likely to leave a bad taste in an employer's...ears, I guess.

If a company was on the ball they should have an info pack which goes to all job applicants which cover that sort of question I.E. leave allowance how sick leave /pensions etc is handled etc.

I disagree, for the most part. Perhaps a focus on vacation policy is not preferred, but if you have multiple employers competing for your attention, then pay and conditions ought naturally to be the deciding factor.

Asking about pay and conditions is therefore a very important and relevant signal.

If an employer doesn't want to tell you openly about conditions and acts like it's a bad taste question, you might consider that an important signal for you as well.

That's really silly.

As a candidate, I require 3 weeks of vacation (because life is short, I want that, and I won't work for you otherwise.) If that's not on the table, I want to know immediately; I already have a job that meets my requirements, so no need to bother with yours if it doesn't.

As a hiring manager, I offer 3 weeks of vacation; if that isn't enough for an employee, I need to either figure out if we can negotiate a special deal (someone super awesome, or maybe reduced salary, or who knows) and if not, I don't want to waste time with a candidate we won't hire.

My favorite response to the "where do you see yourself in X years" question is "CTO". Its a joke masquerading as ambition.

Or simply, "your boss." Gets right to the point.

Yup -- definitely use your discretion here. I'm nervous about asking a lot of these in a first interview, but once I have an offer I'll ask pretty much anything.

"Where do you see yourself in 3 years?" is actually a good question, if overused. If answered honestly, it gives you a sense of what is important to a person (titles? achievements? freedom? money?) That's really useful in hiring, because you want to bring in people who want different things so there aren't conflicts over finite resources.

The problem is that few people will answer it honestly, and that's a shame. I'd be happy if someone said, "I want a high income and short working hours." It may not be the socially acceptable answer, but it'd give me a clear, no-bullshit sense of what the person wants and if he or she were talented I'd find a way to work with that.

It used to be, "where do you see yourself in five years." I added one year. The understanding is that people will move around. Divide by two to obtain the mean time to burnout.

Which is the best possible result, in my opinion. If they know they don't have a good answer to one of these questions, you probably don't want to work there. I've made the mistake of ignoring that principle in the past, to my own detriment.

These would also be excellent questions to ask yourself about your current job to decide whether it's a place where you really want to be.

Yes. I'm in two minds about bringing these along to the next team meeting.

> What’s your process for making sure you have diversity in other ways?

This can be a delicate subject. I don't like forced diversity for diversity's sake. I think it's demeaning. It says "I would not normally hire you because you are not really qualified for the job but I will because I need to show I have at least 2.25 people in the company with neck tattoo's".

This, I think, is truer in technical fields where it is vitally important that the candidate have the requisite knowledge, skills, cultural fit and other criteria for the job. Would you rather have the airbag in your car designed by a fully qualified engineer hired purely on merit, experience and capabilities or by a lesser qualified engineer with neck tattoo's who got in because of a need (legal or not) to ensure diversity? I'll take option number one please.

This is not anti-women or anti-minority at all, this is anti-non-qualified candidate. Now, all qualifications being equal, what do you do? Well, that's a good one. Do you favor a woman over a man? Do you favor an attractive woman over another, less attractive woman? Do you favor one race or culture over another? What's your moral or ethical compass tell you? Do you need laws to force the right decision? As I said, it's a delicate subject.

I have worked with people of all ages, races, cultures, gender, gay, straight and even trans-sexual. I couldn't point out a pattern if my life depended on it. For example, I worked with this brilliant engineer who would literally throw desktop phones across the room when angry. Another was quiet and somewhat socially inept yet exhibited incredible dedication to the job. And then there were some who just floated by. Notice I never mentioned age, gender, race or any other differentiator of that kind. If you think of them as people and don't favor or disqualify anyone based on some artificially imposed metric I think you are on the right track.

There's a long distance the average software company can go toward encouraging diversity before it becomes forced, luckily.

This kind of sounds like the Joel test [1]. At least the technical parts.

[1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000043.html

The questions I ask are:

1. Do you have coding and documentation standards?

2. Do you conduct regular peer reviews?

3. Do you use a bug tracking system?

4. I feel more comfortable working as part of a team, not just a bunch of people working together. Do you conduct regular team building exercises, such as weekly lunches or meetups at the pub after work on Friday?

It's surprising how many companies don't have even these fundamental quality and people management procedures in place.

There are a number of good questions in here. It's too bad that companies don't send out these types of questions with the answers to them to people coming in for an interview. It would be hard to choose just a few to ask, especially since you as the interviewee doesn't have a lot of time to ask questions themselves.

One way to deal with this is to ask at the beginning of an interview how much time there is for questions. Once you have an offer, you can also schedule extra interviews just for you to ask questions.

Hell yes. It's a shame that this isn't just conventional wisdom. Having had a colleague recently join and then leave shortly afterwards because of factors that he could have uncovered by asking some of the questions in this list, this is close to home for me.

I'm sure it sucks for people with hire/fire authority to have to let somebody go early on when the decision to hire turns out to have been a bad one. But when it's the other way around, and an otherwise excellent new colleague regrets their end of the decision, the effect on morale is a lot more profound and widespread.

It takes some careful introspection and forethought to figure out what those crucial questions are. If they only come to you after the interview, send an email if you have to! But for Pete's sake, ask!

Yeah I think most people just see the offer and get too excited, especially if it's their only offer. It's a real shame because culture plays such a huge part in how happy you will be at a place. It wastes both the company's time and the new hire's time to join, hate the environment, and then quit a few months later

Why 'Are you profitable?' rather than 'Do you have positive cash flow?'

Profit is an accounting term that most people conflate with one or more of:

- cash flow

- gross margin

- operating margin

Because "profitable" is a better proxy for "successful" than "positive cash flow."

You are right, and that's the whole reason the word profit exists.

What troubles me is that it's hard to interpret an answer to 'are you profitable?' because it's:

- Somewhat subjective: Internal accounting policies (e.g. amortisation of R&D) affect the answer, and you are unlikely to know much about these accounting policies (unless the company has published audited accounts). - Poorly understood: The person who answers the question may unwittingly answer a different questions from the one asked. They may do this unintentionally, of course, because they don't understand that EBITDA != profit.

Of course, one question on the financial state of the business is not enough.

Those are fair questions - what are you going to do if the answers turn out to be a little bit less than truthful?

Once you know the truth, you re-evaluate your decision to join the company, taking the lying into account.

The women/minority questions are great!

Agree, never accept a job in a company that favors minorities during a recrutement process. You'll never know if you have been accepted only for your skills or because they think that you will make them look better with you on the company picture.

Does that count if you are a white male?

The actual questions are:

"How many women work for you? What’s your process for making sure you have diversity in other ways?"

"What’s your retention rate of women over 1.5 years? Do you think you could’ve done anything differently to keep people who left?"

Neither one of these necessarily has anything to do with "favoring" minorities (or women, who are a slight majority outside of southeast asia and the middle east). Rather, they can include doing things that encourage women to apply, ensuring that the office environment doesn't have major issues causing minorities to leave, etc. No favoritism required. Companies want to do these things because they help them find and retain good employees who their competitors may miss. I want my employer to do them (as a straight ivy-educated white male) because I want my co-workers to be the best possible, not just the best of the set of people who are able to ignore some awful brogrammer office culture (for example).

these questions are good too to ask job applicants, esp. in management roles

Reply on news.ycombinator.com