Some of the items on this list are pretty bad IMO if you put yourself in the shoes of the candidate. Some of the ones I think are Not Good Questions:
> 3. For the last few companies you've been at, take me through: (i) When you left, why did you leave? (ii) When you joined the next one, why did you choose it?
(The (ii) is the only non-yikes part)
> 18. What's one part of your previous company's culture that you hope to bring to your next one? What one part do you hope to not find?
> 26. If I were to go and speak to people who don't think very highly of you, what would they say?
What they share in common is they're inviting the candidate into a negative position, where they must think negative thoughts about their past employers (who may also be their _current_ employer). Then, on the spot and extemporaneously, the candidate has to negotiate those negative feelings that were prompted by the interviewer to come up with an answer that translates those negative feelings into some kind of positive learning experience that the manager will be able to understand. The candidate also has to deal with the stress from having to do that negotiation, then diffuse that stress provoked by the question in a positive, open way so that it doesn't impact the rest of the interview.
edit: What's really wild about #26 is the person who explained why they like the question made it about empathy.
> "When I pose this question to candidates, I’m always looking to see how much empathy they have for the people who don’t like them,” says Otte...
How is a candidate supposed to tap into their empathy when this question seems deliberately engineered to put candidates on the defensive? "Why don't people like you?" is, in my opinion, a really terrible interview question that shows a lack of empathy from the interviewer.
There's a secondary problem too: They are questions that have right and wrong answers, and they break down quickly if the candidate realizes that the truth is a liability.
Having been in panels where we had to ask some of those specific questions (specifically for hiring managers), and then seeing how those managers acted later on the job, the very worst hires (manipulative people who have no interest in the company as a whole, but gaining power) always ace those questions. The best hires of the lot, in practice, tended to give worse answers with some red flags, and only double checking on said red flags showed that yes, the rough edges in the answers were absolutely justified by their experiences.
So I'd not ask those questions myself when I can help it, as I'd rather not select for the best available manipulator.
This kind of question ("Tell me about your weaknesses," "Tell me one thing you think your (current|ex) manager could do better to manage you," &c.) often test for one of two behaviours:
1. Diplomacy and tact, and/or;
2. Ability to regurgitate a template answer you can find in any rudimentary book on handling behavioural interviews.
It takes extreme skill to get a candid answer out of everyone, so it is easy to get gamed by the tactful people at the expense of people who don't read a book about how to ace the interview.
But people who don't read books about interviews can be very competent at their actual jobs.
I don’t think I’ve ever had an interview where one of the questions wasn’t “why are you looking to leave your current position”. Also, “what are you looking for in your next role?” Is an important question. They both tell you as an interviewer whether you think they will dislike your company for the same reason and can your company offer what they are looking for. I mostly tell the truth to both questions. I want to self select out of companies that don’t meet my requirements.
26 on the other hand is a dumb question. I wouldn’t have anyway of knowing who didn’t think highly of me besides my manager via performance reviews unless I solicited gossip.
This is a great comment. People too often think of interview questions as purely factual, existing outside the process itself, but the reality is that the questions (once asked) have a psychological impact that influences what comes next.
Would you consider this a reasonable interview question for a management role? One major communication skill for people managers is to "turn around" a conversation that would naturally put people on the defensive into something that can be a learning and growth opportunity. Two core ingredients for that skill are self-awareness and the ability to empathize with people with whom you disagree (or who may even dislike you).
I usually respond to these types of questions by asking what is the goal the interviewer has. What are they looking to learn about me? Help me to know what your evaluative goal is by acquiring this knowledge, and then I can structure my answer to be helpful to you.
If after that the interviewer still tries to press me for very generic stream of consciousness responses about why I left a job or what someone who doesn’t like me thinks, I’ll just give some vague generic and brief response. If they aren’t happy with that, I’ll invite them again to answer my questions about their specific evaluative goal.
They're not great, but the data they questions are trying to gather can be useful:
- What makes a team or a workplace a good one?
- What motivates you to seek change?
- Do you have self awareness of your own strengths and weeknesses?
- How do you respond to constructive, but perhaps difficult, feedback?
- Can you provide direct, actionable feedback to others?
This is all still valuable information for a hiring decision.
As a hiring manager of some time, I myself ask a similar question but in the form of:
- Given this previous situation we've just been talking about, how would you improve it? Did you attempt to make those changes? Why or why not?
I'm looking for someone who demonstrates:
- The ability to think beyond the current situation and look for ways for improvement
- Possible ability to affect change via influence rather than direct control
- A great answer might reveal how they championed changes or dealt with push back from management
- A great answer may also reveal an understanding of explicit and implicit power structures in an organization, i.e.- what changes are feasible versus unrealistic.
This question is better asked to someone with more experience as I expect a more nuanced answer from a "senior" compared to someone with just a few years of experience. If I don't get a good answer from someone with a decade or more of experience, I will probe further to understand if they are an agent of change in an organization or just go with the flow.
I'm totally open to feedback that I could be doing this all wrong, but one other thing to consider:
My approach to interviewing is to first and foremost gather data. I need a fair bit of data to make a hiring decision. In the moment, I'm not trying to make deep value assessments on the answers. To do that, I need a more comprehensive view of the data in context. Maybe I'm fine with someone who goes with the flow given other aspects of this person's skillset or the composition of the team or the mentality of their manager. Maybe just an attitude would be setting the person up to fail. All of that assessment is made later by the hiring manager or committee using as much data as we can possibly and reasonably gather during the interview process.
why is 3 bad? seems introspective to me, unless the answer is just 'most money'. maybe geared towards people who choose professions based more on interest/growth for happiness than getting fat stacks and buying happiness.
I hire a lot of people, and the difference between a good hire and a bad hire is hugely important. I've had some good results over time, and I like to think that my skill and process for interviewing has been helpful, in addition to a great deal of luck in having had the chance to talk with some amazing people.
Looking over this list...it's bad. A lot of the questions are phone it in questions that you can pick off of Google. They are the same questions that get asked at beauty pageants or political debates.
The great fail at interviewing is that if you go into without a plan or process, you will wind up simply hiring people based on whether or not they have a similar personality to you. This is generally severely non-optimal.
Classes of useful questions to ask at interviews:
Diagnostic questions. Does this question let you separate or rank order the candidates in some way that is deeply meaningful for the position?
Experiential questions. Does this question allow the candidate to discuss areas of his work experience in an in-depth way that would not be gathered from his resume or other information.
Human questions. Does this question give the candidate a chance to display a wide enough range of himself, socially, that you are comfortable that he can work well with other people?
There are probably more. But the next phase is that you have to match up each of these questions to your available interviewers (assuming your running a team interview). It takes a technical or numbers-orientated person to ask the diagnostic question, an experienced person to ask the experiential question -- hopefully one who will not be looking for people who have had the same experiences as himself, and a socially astute observer to ask the human questions.
And then in the hiring phase, you need to know how exactly each one of these questions can go wrong (there are some very standard ways for the question types, and generally standard ways for the individual interviewer), and then you have to interview your interviewers to make sure that none of the traps were stumbled into. And then use this to make determinations of not only who the top candidates are, but even more importantly, who the possibly undervalued candidates are.
> I hire a lot of people, and the difference between a good hire and a bad hire is hugely important.
This narrative is pushed constantly, to the point where it's started to lose believability with me. It's used by large companies to justify their BS hiring practices when the reality is a bad hire won't hurt the company that much. It's used by small companies to justify nonsensical interview practices.
> Human questions. Does this question give the candidate a chance to display a wide enough range of himself, socially, that you are comfortable that he can work well with other people?
I try not to display much of myself socially when I'm at work. I'm there to work. I'll gladly go out for lunch and be friendly with coworkers, but it's not hanging out with friends. It never will be.
I hate nearly every one of those questions, with a few exceptions which are excellent.
It comes down to this:
I am not willing to be psychoanalyzed by my future coworkers.
Most of those questions would test my ability to come up with diplomatic answers or straight up lies about the past (or my willingness to prepare those sorts of things). Some of them I am straight up unwilling to answer; no, I'm not going to dig deep and tell you how I feel about my personal flaws and the failings of the people around me.
If you're not willing to hire someone without putting them through that and I'm not willing to work for anyone who wants that from candidates, we've both figured out something quite useful.
Some people have protectable disabilities which those kinds of questions would very well filter out. Do they have to ask for reasonable accommodation that their job interview be about things directly related to the position?
A number of these questions select for people who are deeply introspective. I like both asking and answering these kinds of questions, in part because at 57 I have spent a lot of time working out who I am, what I value, what I'm good at but do not want to do any more (enterprise sales, for example), and what I ought to be better at but lack the discipline to improve.
But also in part because I have that "meta" personality that not only sold things, but asked questions about how to get better at sales. And so on and so forth in software development.
It seems like a slam-dunk to hire for this kind of person, but I have found that there are a lot of people who are really, really good at what they do without being obsessed with thinking about why they're good at what they do.
I conjecture it's a little like hiring a great athlete. Some great athletes make lousy coaches or managers, because they care more about the game than about why people are good at the game and how to get better: They hire great coaches and follow those coaches, but coaching always takes a back seat to practising and playing.
So... I love the tenor of these questions, but I am always wondering if asking a bunch of questions like these my force some false negatives from people who are good at what they do but aren't inclined to be introspective about it.
(I realize that we can always argue that being introspective makes you better at what you do, but all-too-often that's a kind of selection bias: The kind of person who is interested in interview questions is the kind of person who is introspective, and is the kind of person who got to where they are being introspective, so they argue passionately that being introspective is necessary to be good. But maybe it's not the only way to be good.)
I’m 45, and I love these questions. I like these a lot more than being asked to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard style questions. It’s just as easy to prepare for and do well on soft skill questions as technical questions. At some level, dealing with people is just as mechanical as dealing with computers and just as easy to optimize.
These questions and similar ones can be prepared, there's nothing really new here.
What's terrifying is the quick interpretation of the answers and how sure they are, this reads like a horoscope:
8. Looking back on the last five years of your career, what’s the highlight?
“For example, if they tell me about a personal accomplishment, then I know personal career development is a huge area of focus. If they tell me about the accomplishment of a direct report or the team, then I know they care about developing people,” says Vaughan. “If they tell me about a company feat, then I know that they tie their own success to the company's success — which is a great mentality for weathering the early stages of a startup.”
My problem with most of these questions is that they can be answered with bullshit and it can be very difficult to detect; you're optimizing for good bullshitters. These might be fine in conjunction with technical questions but I probably wouldn't work for a company that just asked these kinds of questions.
I mean, based on a fair bit of the news coming out of corporations lately, being adept at bullshitting is probably exactly what they want.
Corporate reps talking to the public need to bullshit. Corporate bosses don't want to hear the truth, they want to be bullshitted. Corporate management want to know the problems aren't their fault, so they want to be bullshitted too. And then when the whole thing implodes and all the executives fly away on golden chutes to ruin other companies, they'll end up bullshitting people too about everything they "learned" spending billions of other people's dollars, most of which was in turn bullshit spun to them by their subordinates.
I see a lot of room for good bullshitting to be a part of a resume.
It's worse, not answering with bullshit seems it could lead to negative results. If the real reason I would love working at company X is because the commute is 1/2 the other equal choices instead of making the world a better place, I won't admit it because 1) it makes me sound banal, and 2) in prisoners dilemma style I expect other candidates are bullshitting and I would be at a disadvantage.
I'm a freelance developer, so I get many interviews for possible engagements.
My favorite recent question was (badly paraphrased): Some developers overdesign, i.e. they design for possible future features. Some developers underdesign, i.e. they solve the current problem without too much design at all. Where are you on that spectrum?
My answer: Hard to really answer this neutrally about yourself, but I try not to prevent future changes by making things overly clever or specific.
Another one was: The project has a non-negotiable deadline and feature list and it looks like it's going to be late. What do you do?
My answer: overtime doesn't work for highly intellectual work, so I'll see which features have the worst effort to usefulness ratio and cut them. They didn't like that. Good riddance to that project.
> The project has a non-negotiable deadline and feature list and it looks like it's going to be late.
"Communicate early and communicate often. Managing expectations is key. Depending on the criticality of the project, we can look for additional resources or we can come to a consensus on alterations to the schedule or the deliverable."
> Another one was: The project has a non-negotiable deadline and feature list and it looks like it's going to be late. What do you do?
If both the deadline and feature list are actually non-negotiable and I'm quite certain it's gonna be late I'd advise them to halt it immediately to cut their losses, I guess. I don't know what else would be a sane response.
Of course "non-negotiable" when it comes to feature lists and deadlines is usually grade-A horseshit so they don't actually mean it. Hell "deadline" is more often than not an exaggeration itself—you're not gonna drop the work in the trash if it's not delivered by 12:01AM on such-and-such day.
TL;DR I'd assume "non-negotiable" was a lie because it basically always is. Bet they'd love that answer.
[EDIT] Alternate answer: fortunately I'm in possession of a clock that changes reality when something's non-negotiable, so I'd just let it know what was up and it'd go ahead and make every hour twice as long for me.
These questions are not easily answered. It also takes significant skills to ask them, interpret the responses, and follow-up with other questions.
I see them as really good starters for a behavioral-style interview. It's not easy to prepare for these. You "prepare" for them by doing your job well and being introspective about it as you're doing it.
The problem is that not everyone easily indexes their job-experiences into neat, well-narrated vignettes that can be called up and summarized to an interviewer in real-time. It's hard stuff but it's better than other forms of interviewing.
“ It also takes significant skills to ask them, interpret the responses, and follow-up with other questions.”
Agreed. In interviews I have been in some interviewers asked this kind of question but couldn’t really do anything useful with the answers. It didn’t lead to a conversation.
> It also takes significant skills to ask them, interpret the responses, and follow-up with other questions.
Most people are shit at interviewing. Those that aren't still aren't qualified to psychoanalyze people.
> The problem is that not everyone easily indexes their job-experiences into neat, well-narrated vignettes that can be called up and summarized to an interviewer in real-time. It's hard stuff but it's better than other forms of interviewing.
> Tell me about a time you disagreed with your boss?
We disagreed and then I quit because I felt like there was a pattern of him not listening.
Oops wrong answer.
These questions just get gamed. People tell dressed up versions of cherry picked stories. No one tells the story of why they finally had enough and quit. No one tells the story of a discussion turning heated because both sides got a bit too attached to their opinion. No one tells the story of just giving up and accepting that they won't win.
I don't understand all that screening bullshit -- what do you proud of, why so, why such? Somebody, tell them (HR people), it doesn't matter for a person who codes, does an architecture, ops your stuff, etc...
If someone is this high-maintenance as an interviewer, they'll be unbearable as a manager, and I do not think I'd last a whole interview bothering to pretend that this was a normal human interaction.
Might be an unpopular opinion, but I think this is BS. Do people really questions like this in interviews or are these "smart folk" trying to look good in an article that can be shared on Linkedin and wherever else?
I've only interviewed a few times in my life, and apart from smalltalk at the beginning they were mostly about judging how I think and to a lesser extent what my knowledge level is for the position.
I'm making a video series on DevOps interviews right now. I haven't seen the questions above much, but for non-technical 'warmup' questions I see these repeatedly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mIkRM7ytWc
Things like "what's your favorite software environment," "what tech hobbies have you played around with," "what's the most complicated infrastructure you've ever had to work with," "talk about a difficult outage that you were a part of diagnosing and fixing."
I guess I've chosen to stay technical, so I haven't seen a lot of the questions mentioned in the original article. They seem pretty like fairly easy behavioral questions to game, I'm not sure what the false positive vs. false negative ratio looks like there. Although I guess you can say that for any interview question.
It may sound strange but the focus of my interview questions is to encourage the candidate to express an OPINION which I hope becomes a STORY. To that end I'll ask questions that at a glance seem to be objective through a lens of sound bites on "best practices" but are really subjective. What is good code? What is good data? (And bad, of course.) Skills can be learned quickly to produce A result but experience gained over time will have wrought something more interesting.
Interviews are two-way conversations: a lot of what candidates do (or should be doing) is finding out about the team/company etc., since anything that research would show based on press releases, etc., is superficial. Questions like "What do you believe you can achieve with us personally or professionally that you can't anywhere else in the world?" make very little sense - even if I've read everything there is to read, I still know very little about your company, so there's no way I could answer a question like this.
This, however, is excellent advice: "It is amazing how many candidates won’t premeditate before diving into interview questions. Those who take the time to stop, think it through and have a few crystal clear points are amongst the best people I’ve ever worked with." I interview quite a bit at my current company, and it is amazing how few people stop to think before they answer questions.
I feel like so many of these questions require the applicant's identity and sense of self to be completely rolled up in their career. Even the question about passion for hobbies is just a proxy for understanding if the candidate will put an unhealthy amount of their life into their work. We're more than what we produce!
[+] [-] modwest|6 years ago|reply
> 3. For the last few companies you've been at, take me through: (i) When you left, why did you leave? (ii) When you joined the next one, why did you choose it?
(The (ii) is the only non-yikes part)
> 18. What's one part of your previous company's culture that you hope to bring to your next one? What one part do you hope to not find?
> 26. If I were to go and speak to people who don't think very highly of you, what would they say?
What they share in common is they're inviting the candidate into a negative position, where they must think negative thoughts about their past employers (who may also be their _current_ employer). Then, on the spot and extemporaneously, the candidate has to negotiate those negative feelings that were prompted by the interviewer to come up with an answer that translates those negative feelings into some kind of positive learning experience that the manager will be able to understand. The candidate also has to deal with the stress from having to do that negotiation, then diffuse that stress provoked by the question in a positive, open way so that it doesn't impact the rest of the interview.
edit: What's really wild about #26 is the person who explained why they like the question made it about empathy.
> "When I pose this question to candidates, I’m always looking to see how much empathy they have for the people who don’t like them,” says Otte...
How is a candidate supposed to tap into their empathy when this question seems deliberately engineered to put candidates on the defensive? "Why don't people like you?" is, in my opinion, a really terrible interview question that shows a lack of empathy from the interviewer.
[+] [-] hibikir|6 years ago|reply
Having been in panels where we had to ask some of those specific questions (specifically for hiring managers), and then seeing how those managers acted later on the job, the very worst hires (manipulative people who have no interest in the company as a whole, but gaining power) always ace those questions. The best hires of the lot, in practice, tended to give worse answers with some red flags, and only double checking on said red flags showed that yes, the rough edges in the answers were absolutely justified by their experiences.
So I'd not ask those questions myself when I can help it, as I'd rather not select for the best available manipulator.
[+] [-] braythwayt|6 years ago|reply
This kind of question ("Tell me about your weaknesses," "Tell me one thing you think your (current|ex) manager could do better to manage you," &c.) often test for one of two behaviours:
1. Diplomacy and tact, and/or; 2. Ability to regurgitate a template answer you can find in any rudimentary book on handling behavioural interviews.
It takes extreme skill to get a candid answer out of everyone, so it is easy to get gamed by the tactful people at the expense of people who don't read a book about how to ace the interview.
But people who don't read books about interviews can be very competent at their actual jobs.
[+] [-] scarface74|6 years ago|reply
26 on the other hand is a dumb question. I wouldn’t have anyway of knowing who didn’t think highly of me besides my manager via performance reviews unless I solicited gossip.
[+] [-] jfarmer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brandonb|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mlthoughts2018|6 years ago|reply
If after that the interviewer still tries to press me for very generic stream of consciousness responses about why I left a job or what someone who doesn’t like me thinks, I’ll just give some vague generic and brief response. If they aren’t happy with that, I’ll invite them again to answer my questions about their specific evaluative goal.
[+] [-] jaaron|6 years ago|reply
- What makes a team or a workplace a good one?
- What motivates you to seek change?
- Do you have self awareness of your own strengths and weeknesses?
- How do you respond to constructive, but perhaps difficult, feedback?
- Can you provide direct, actionable feedback to others?
This is all still valuable information for a hiring decision.
As a hiring manager of some time, I myself ask a similar question but in the form of:
- Given this previous situation we've just been talking about, how would you improve it? Did you attempt to make those changes? Why or why not?
I'm looking for someone who demonstrates:
- The ability to think beyond the current situation and look for ways for improvement
- Possible ability to affect change via influence rather than direct control
- A great answer might reveal how they championed changes or dealt with push back from management
- A great answer may also reveal an understanding of explicit and implicit power structures in an organization, i.e.- what changes are feasible versus unrealistic.
This question is better asked to someone with more experience as I expect a more nuanced answer from a "senior" compared to someone with just a few years of experience. If I don't get a good answer from someone with a decade or more of experience, I will probe further to understand if they are an agent of change in an organization or just go with the flow.
I'm totally open to feedback that I could be doing this all wrong, but one other thing to consider:
My approach to interviewing is to first and foremost gather data. I need a fair bit of data to make a hiring decision. In the moment, I'm not trying to make deep value assessments on the answers. To do that, I need a more comprehensive view of the data in context. Maybe I'm fine with someone who goes with the flow given other aspects of this person's skillset or the composition of the team or the mentality of their manager. Maybe just an attitude would be setting the person up to fail. All of that assessment is made later by the hiring manager or committee using as much data as we can possibly and reasonably gather during the interview process.
[+] [-] AnimalMuppet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abledon|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] romaaeterna|6 years ago|reply
Looking over this list...it's bad. A lot of the questions are phone it in questions that you can pick off of Google. They are the same questions that get asked at beauty pageants or political debates.
The great fail at interviewing is that if you go into without a plan or process, you will wind up simply hiring people based on whether or not they have a similar personality to you. This is generally severely non-optimal.
Classes of useful questions to ask at interviews:
Diagnostic questions. Does this question let you separate or rank order the candidates in some way that is deeply meaningful for the position?
Experiential questions. Does this question allow the candidate to discuss areas of his work experience in an in-depth way that would not be gathered from his resume or other information.
Human questions. Does this question give the candidate a chance to display a wide enough range of himself, socially, that you are comfortable that he can work well with other people?
There are probably more. But the next phase is that you have to match up each of these questions to your available interviewers (assuming your running a team interview). It takes a technical or numbers-orientated person to ask the diagnostic question, an experienced person to ask the experiential question -- hopefully one who will not be looking for people who have had the same experiences as himself, and a socially astute observer to ask the human questions.
And then in the hiring phase, you need to know how exactly each one of these questions can go wrong (there are some very standard ways for the question types, and generally standard ways for the individual interviewer), and then you have to interview your interviewers to make sure that none of the traps were stumbled into. And then use this to make determinations of not only who the top candidates are, but even more importantly, who the possibly undervalued candidates are.
[+] [-] dominotw|6 years ago|reply
Do you have an example of an interview question that can't be picked off of google?
[+] [-] patthebunny|6 years ago|reply
This narrative is pushed constantly, to the point where it's started to lose believability with me. It's used by large companies to justify their BS hiring practices when the reality is a bad hire won't hurt the company that much. It's used by small companies to justify nonsensical interview practices.
> Human questions. Does this question give the candidate a chance to display a wide enough range of himself, socially, that you are comfortable that he can work well with other people?
I try not to display much of myself socially when I'm at work. I'm there to work. I'll gladly go out for lunch and be friendly with coworkers, but it's not hanging out with friends. It never will be.
[+] [-] colechristensen|6 years ago|reply
It comes down to this:
I am not willing to be psychoanalyzed by my future coworkers.
Most of those questions would test my ability to come up with diplomatic answers or straight up lies about the past (or my willingness to prepare those sorts of things). Some of them I am straight up unwilling to answer; no, I'm not going to dig deep and tell you how I feel about my personal flaws and the failings of the people around me.
If you're not willing to hire someone without putting them through that and I'm not willing to work for anyone who wants that from candidates, we've both figured out something quite useful.
Some people have protectable disabilities which those kinds of questions would very well filter out. Do they have to ask for reasonable accommodation that their job interview be about things directly related to the position?
[+] [-] scarface74|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] braythwayt|6 years ago|reply
A number of these questions select for people who are deeply introspective. I like both asking and answering these kinds of questions, in part because at 57 I have spent a lot of time working out who I am, what I value, what I'm good at but do not want to do any more (enterprise sales, for example), and what I ought to be better at but lack the discipline to improve.
But also in part because I have that "meta" personality that not only sold things, but asked questions about how to get better at sales. And so on and so forth in software development.
It seems like a slam-dunk to hire for this kind of person, but I have found that there are a lot of people who are really, really good at what they do without being obsessed with thinking about why they're good at what they do.
I conjecture it's a little like hiring a great athlete. Some great athletes make lousy coaches or managers, because they care more about the game than about why people are good at the game and how to get better: They hire great coaches and follow those coaches, but coaching always takes a back seat to practising and playing.
So... I love the tenor of these questions, but I am always wondering if asking a bunch of questions like these my force some false negatives from people who are good at what they do but aren't inclined to be introspective about it.
(I realize that we can always argue that being introspective makes you better at what you do, but all-too-often that's a kind of selection bias: The kind of person who is interested in interview questions is the kind of person who is introspective, and is the kind of person who got to where they are being introspective, so they argue passionately that being introspective is necessary to be good. But maybe it's not the only way to be good.)
[+] [-] scarface74|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyant|6 years ago|reply
What's terrifying is the quick interpretation of the answers and how sure they are, this reads like a horoscope:
8. Looking back on the last five years of your career, what’s the highlight?
“For example, if they tell me about a personal accomplishment, then I know personal career development is a huge area of focus. If they tell me about the accomplishment of a direct report or the team, then I know they care about developing people,” says Vaughan. “If they tell me about a company feat, then I know that they tie their own success to the company's success — which is a great mentality for weathering the early stages of a startup.”
[+] [-] deeg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FussyZeus|6 years ago|reply
Corporate reps talking to the public need to bullshit. Corporate bosses don't want to hear the truth, they want to be bullshitted. Corporate management want to know the problems aren't their fault, so they want to be bullshitted too. And then when the whole thing implodes and all the executives fly away on golden chutes to ruin other companies, they'll end up bullshitting people too about everything they "learned" spending billions of other people's dollars, most of which was in turn bullshit spun to them by their subordinates.
I see a lot of room for good bullshitting to be a part of a resume.
[+] [-] foobarian|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ahartmetz|6 years ago|reply
My favorite recent question was (badly paraphrased): Some developers overdesign, i.e. they design for possible future features. Some developers underdesign, i.e. they solve the current problem without too much design at all. Where are you on that spectrum?
My answer: Hard to really answer this neutrally about yourself, but I try not to prevent future changes by making things overly clever or specific.
Another one was: The project has a non-negotiable deadline and feature list and it looks like it's going to be late. What do you do?
My answer: overtime doesn't work for highly intellectual work, so I'll see which features have the worst effort to usefulness ratio and cut them. They didn't like that. Good riddance to that project.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|6 years ago|reply
Answer: Polish my resume, and update my LinkedIn profile.
[+] [-] sethammons|6 years ago|reply
"Communicate early and communicate often. Managing expectations is key. Depending on the criticality of the project, we can look for additional resources or we can come to a consensus on alterations to the schedule or the deliverable."
[+] [-] shantly|6 years ago|reply
If both the deadline and feature list are actually non-negotiable and I'm quite certain it's gonna be late I'd advise them to halt it immediately to cut their losses, I guess. I don't know what else would be a sane response.
Of course "non-negotiable" when it comes to feature lists and deadlines is usually grade-A horseshit so they don't actually mean it. Hell "deadline" is more often than not an exaggeration itself—you're not gonna drop the work in the trash if it's not delivered by 12:01AM on such-and-such day.
TL;DR I'd assume "non-negotiable" was a lie because it basically always is. Bet they'd love that answer.
[EDIT] Alternate answer: fortunately I'm in possession of a clock that changes reality when something's non-negotiable, so I'd just let it know what was up and it'd go ahead and make every hour twice as long for me.
[+] [-] crispyambulance|6 years ago|reply
I see them as really good starters for a behavioral-style interview. It's not easy to prepare for these. You "prepare" for them by doing your job well and being introspective about it as you're doing it.
The problem is that not everyone easily indexes their job-experiences into neat, well-narrated vignettes that can be called up and summarized to an interviewer in real-time. It's hard stuff but it's better than other forms of interviewing.
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|6 years ago|reply
Agreed. In interviews I have been in some interviewers asked this kind of question but couldn’t really do anything useful with the answers. It didn’t lead to a conversation.
[+] [-] patthebunny|6 years ago|reply
Most people are shit at interviewing. Those that aren't still aren't qualified to psychoanalyze people.
> The problem is that not everyone easily indexes their job-experiences into neat, well-narrated vignettes that can be called up and summarized to an interviewer in real-time. It's hard stuff but it's better than other forms of interviewing.
> Tell me about a time you disagreed with your boss?
We disagreed and then I quit because I felt like there was a pattern of him not listening.
Oops wrong answer.
These questions just get gamed. People tell dressed up versions of cherry picked stories. No one tells the story of why they finally had enough and quit. No one tells the story of a discussion turning heated because both sides got a bit too attached to their opinion. No one tells the story of just giving up and accepting that they won't win.
[+] [-] more-entropy|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drstewart|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thom|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herbturbo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryloric|6 years ago|reply
I've only interviewed a few times in my life, and apart from smalltalk at the beginning they were mostly about judging how I think and to a lesser extent what my knowledge level is for the position.
[+] [-] bespoke_engnr|6 years ago|reply
Things like "what's your favorite software environment," "what tech hobbies have you played around with," "what's the most complicated infrastructure you've ever had to work with," "talk about a difficult outage that you were a part of diagnosing and fixing."
I guess I've chosen to stay technical, so I haven't seen a lot of the questions mentioned in the original article. They seem pretty like fairly easy behavioral questions to game, I'm not sure what the false positive vs. false negative ratio looks like there. Although I guess you can say that for any interview question.
[+] [-] whorleater|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilobremski|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gandutraveler|6 years ago|reply
Answer to this question helps in leveling the candidate.
[+] [-] jkingsbery|6 years ago|reply
This, however, is excellent advice: "It is amazing how many candidates won’t premeditate before diving into interview questions. Those who take the time to stop, think it through and have a few crystal clear points are amongst the best people I’ve ever worked with." I interview quite a bit at my current company, and it is amazing how few people stop to think before they answer questions.
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bspates|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kreck|6 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.jamesgwee.com/uploaded/file/Topgrading.pdf