by james_impliu on 6/28/22, 12:45 PM with 223 comments
by Barrera on 6/28/22, 2:08 PM
1. What problem is your company solving?
If you don't get an answer, beware. If the answer sounds vague, beware. If the answer makes no sense, beware. If the answer is multifaceted, beware. This suggests that the company will not even begin the process of becoming profitable.
2. Who has this problem?
You should get a clear picture of an actual person. If not, beware. If that person has no money, beware. If that person has no pull within an organization, beware. If that person is high maintenance or fickle, beware. This suggests that the company will never find the revenue they seek.
3. What's your solution?
If the solution doesn't actually address the problem, beware. If the solution is too expensive for the customer, beware. If the solution can't be differentiated from its competitors, beware. If the solution has no competitors, beware. If there are a dozen solutions, beware. This suggests that no matter how amazing the technology or technical team, the company will not be able to execute on its business plan.
by hn_version_0023 on 6/28/22, 7:37 PM
"Are you happy here?"
Have you ever watched an interviewer change from upbeat to depressed in moments? Have you ever seen a person turn a shade of grey? Have you ever watched your interviewers start to argue about what the meaning of true happiness might be, before conceding that neither of them were happy?
My all time favorite, from a gentleman at TD Waterhouse, nearly 20 years ago:
"Is anyone really ever happy at work?"
They made an offer, I didn't accept. Nearly everyone in Corporate America looks visibly depressed. Doubly so in our new COVID world.
Someone remind me what the point of all this is again? Because I'm not really sure I get it anymore.
by viraptor on 6/28/22, 1:56 PM
by ChrisMarshallNY on 6/28/22, 2:04 PM
In the "How strong is the team?" section:
> "Can you tell me about the team I'd be working with most closely?"
> "How do you compensate the team?"
> "How do you attract and retain really strong hires?"
> "Do you share board slides with the team?"
I'd add:
> "Who's been here the longest?"
and:
> "What's the median tenure of the engineering team?"
I'd apply these directly to the team I'd be working on. These can tell you a bit about the management culture.
And that depends almost entirely on the personality, experience, and style of individual managers. I know of what I speak. I was a very good manager, and kept senior-level engineers for many years, despite the corporation, itself, having a rather employee-hostile culture.
IMNSHO, Management culture is even more important than team culture.
by Iv on 6/28/22, 6:54 PM
First, the company is hiring an engineer, not a CTO or a head of marketing. Why would they consider my input valid? Even in my field of expertise I have no idea of the size of markets or of the big players strategy there. Trying to keep afloat of the tech is hard enough.
Second, if interviewing as an employee and not a business associate, you don't really care if the company becomes the next Facebook or, as is likely, goes into oblivion in 5 years. Know your incentives: if you don't have stock, you don't care about the company's success. Want employees that care? Give them incentives.
Third, half of the founders I have met have inflated egos, delusions and/or personality issues. Never trust one who says they welcome honest feedback, especially during interviews. There is nothing in for you to gain and everything to lose.
"These questions are direct, but a company that reacts badly to them may not be a good place to work." Disagree. A company with a non workable business plan can be a fantastic place to work in as the investor money burns through the various vanity project of middle managers. There are a lot much more relevant red flags to look out to anticipate a toxic workplace.
In general, only give feedback when explicitly asked for it or once you understand the inner power dynamics of the place.
by itsmemattchung on 6/28/22, 2:02 PM
Interviewee: "Does the company have product-market fit?"
Interviewer: "Yes, we own Wholefoods, Ring, the entire internet cloud ecosystem"
Interviewee: "How much runway does the company have?"
Interviewer: "We have 86.2 billion. Should last us a while"
Interviewee: "What's in store in the future?"
Interviewer: "Take over every market segment" ... Interviewee: "Great, where do I sign?"
by pojzon on 6/28/22, 2:09 PM
> How strong is the team?
I've actually asked it always on every interview. The generic answer I get is that "You will be working with experts in the field" yada yada.
When you actually join the team:
- Two juniors
- Few 20 years experience dudes that finished their growth at "Cobol is the best" with "Mainframe" T-Shirt on them
- And the same manager that hired you! (Avoiding eye contact)
So yea, one salary later you are on the new hunt for new job. I don't understand why ppl lie so much during interviews. It's a employee market, if I don't want to waste my time with teams like that -> it's a 100hunder I'll jump the ship ASAP.
by ivraatiems on 6/28/22, 3:53 PM
1. What kind of person would not work out well in this role?
2. Think back to your previous job/career/life before this company. What's one thing you'd like this company to have or do that you had or did before?
I ask these because I want to know where pain points are for the team/company I am considering, but I can't just out and out say "what are your problems?" because nobody will answer honestly. I've learned some interesting things.
by donatj on 6/28/22, 2:26 PM
It's such a simple, easy and cheap morale and productivity booster to give your employees. If there isn't free coffee, it's not a place you want to work because they're skimping on their employees.
by conartist on 6/29/22, 12:11 AM
- Now you've had a chance to get to know me, is there any reason you think I wouldn't be a suitable candidate for this role.
Surprisingly people are super honest when I ask this and it let's you clear up an miscommunication or simply acknowledge that there reason is probably true and pitch how you would overcome it.
by rideontime on 6/28/22, 2:29 PM
e: If you do change the name please keep "hog" in there, that mascot is adorable
by cduzz on 6/28/22, 1:43 PM
"how do you manage employee performance evaluations? What is the career advancement process like?" (if someone's got a better way to determine if a place does stack ranking without directly asking I'd love to hear it)....
by kevin_nisbet on 6/28/22, 5:10 PM
The basic premise is Startups have limited resources, so in many ways what are you consciously not working on is as important as what you are working on. While not indicative on it's own, if a early stage startup tells me they're working on say AWS, and Google, and Azure, and on-premises, it creates an area to probe further that they might not be careful about selecting the right thing to work on next which does become a red flag.
by arwhatever on 6/29/22, 4:03 AM
"Tell me about a recent time the team was allocated time to resolve some technical debt. Tell me about a recent time the team was NOT allocated time to resolve some technical debt." I worked at once place which shifted from outsource to in-house software development, discovered that some of the primary html views of the website were built using a jumble of string concatenation, and to add a new feature using the existing string concatenation.
"What percentage of my time will I spend coding in this role?" Worked at one place which assigned excessive non-coding bureaucratic duties to developers.
"How often do you release software?" Worked at once place which did not release anything for the 1.5 years that I was there.
"How do you incorporate the lessons learned partway through a project into the remainder of the project work?" Worked at one place that could not pivot due to inability to admit that they didn't have a perfect plan from Day 1.
"Tell me about some advanced design patterns that you don't use." Worked on a team that used every advanced design pattern that mankind had ever given name to, each in 200 places without an iota of consideration to the costs that go along with the potential benefits.
"Do you plan on shifting your entire tech stack into something else that can scarcely be considered software development?" Self-explanatory, but has happened to me 2x now, so be on the lookout.
Fifteen+ years into my career, I've discovered that every job will give you one or more damn good reasons to move on, and each of these lessons above took 1-2 years to learn, so my latest strategy is just optimizing for pay rate. :-)
by throwaway5752 on 6/28/22, 5:14 PM
Think of those questions in advance, do your due-diligence, and ask questions based on what you couldn't find, or follow ups from your research on the company. It will set you apart from other candidates.
by rockostrich on 6/28/22, 2:02 PM
At a start-up, sure. At any company past Series C, you should know this before talking to anyone. The other questions here are fine, especially the revenue and DAU one. Even better questions are "what's your payback period?" and "what's the company's path to profitability?" Revenue doesn't matter if the company is burning 2x the money to get it.
> How much runway does the company have? Does their spending look within reason?
Kinda the same as asking about the path to profitability except also takes into account if the company can live to get there.
> What's the culture like?
I get asked this question and similar questions to the ones listed by almost every engineering candidate I've interviewed in the past 5 years...
> How strong is the team?
I think it's a good question but if you're just looking for someone to tell you how great the team is then you're better off not asking it. I think almost all interview questions should be asked with some level of doubt and in hopes of getting an honest answer. Also, the level of honesty matters. If you ask the engineering manager this question and they throw certain folks under the bus then you should run.
> What's in store in the future?
This (and more frequently the first 2 questions under it) gets asked in plenty of interviews. People want to know what they'll be working on and what kind of impact they'll have.
The "Do you plan to sell the company?" question under this one makes it seem like these were all supposed to be directed at a CEO/founder. I wouldn't ask this question because even if the answer is honest it'll be ambiguous. No one is going to say they're dead set on selling the company if there's still funding rounds on the horizon but they also won't rule it out because they need to give the compensation package some hope for liquidity.
by pm90 on 6/28/22, 2:12 PM
This is my favorite question since it isn’t something you can generally lie about.
by omarhaneef on 6/28/22, 1:43 PM
And this is not just for engineers. I think anyone joining a startup, or new division of a company, would benefit from thinking through these questions.
by treis on 6/28/22, 1:58 PM
Archive link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220628135027/https://posthog.c...
by froggertoaster on 6/28/22, 1:58 PM
Not every engineering role is for a startup.
by red_admiral on 6/28/22, 2:12 PM
by bigwavedave on 6/28/22, 2:49 PM
1. "Why is this position open?"
and if the answer is anything other than "we're doubling the size of our company", I like to follow up with:
2. "Tell me about the last person who had this role."
The way #2 gets answered can usually tell me a lot about the culture.
by twawaaay on 6/28/22, 7:25 PM
No politics, just pure honesty and problem solving.
I will probably never again want to work for the company where the management has to please a lot of other people, make suboptimal (read: "stupid") decisions just for the optics of it and where there are no people you can talk to that have absolute decision power and the only goal being the good of the company.
by kabdib on 6/28/22, 5:32 PM
Feedback from my hiring manager was that the CEO was very impressed.
(This is the same place that later "extinguished" my paid-for stock options after I left, and is now a multi-billion dollar company. To hell with them).
by brainwipe on 6/28/22, 3:21 PM
by mrfusion on 6/28/22, 1:53 PM
I ended up with something with the cloud.
by TimPC on 6/28/22, 4:15 PM
Publicly traded companies on the other hand general have equity that somewhat reliably converts to cash. Don’t take roles where so much of your compensation is equity that you have substantial market risk but do expect to get some actual cash from this type of compensation. This disparity makes publicly traded companies more attractive as the chances of you getting $400k when you want it from $200k of salary and $200k of equity is far higher.
Start-ups are attractive if they give you additional responsibilities at an early stage of your career or otherwise improve your career trajectory. They are usually bad choices for senior people interested in optimizing earnings.
by raffraffraff on 6/29/22, 6:08 AM
1. Describe your git branching strategy
2. Who releases software, how (is it packaged / deployed), and how often?
3. Do you have dev/test environments?
4. Do you keep configuration out of your code? How? Example: IaC.
5. Describe a typical incident. How do you find out about it, who gets the first alert, how does it get resolved and how (do?) you follow up afterwards?
6. What does the oncall rota look like? Follow the sun or (immediate end of discussion) 24h?
7. Do you have superheroes (people who have been around since forever, that everybody says "well I hope <superhero> doesn't get hit by a bus, because then we'd be really effed")?
8. What is the engineering staff turnover for the last 12 months? What about for the team I'm interviewing for?
9. What are the top challenges facing this team (and wider engineering team) right now? (Not only within their problem domain, but outside it, eg communication, coordination, outages, observability, direction)
by lgleason on 6/28/22, 9:39 PM
by skeeter2020 on 6/28/22, 3:53 PM
I personally think you're better asking what are you trying to do, coming to your own conclusion as to if it's a real problem that you personally believe in, asking what they've accomplished and why THIS COMPANY is better positioned to succeed.
by edouard-harris on 6/28/22, 2:15 PM
by olliej on 6/28/22, 10:58 PM
I'm not sure why this guy's experience is so different from mine? I assume it's related to hiring/recruitment orientation (more junior/inexperienced folk?). The big one I could imagine is people failing to ask the "will the company still exist in 6 months?" question due to a default assumption that companies don't die?
by hpcjoe on 6/28/22, 5:40 PM
The strong signal is that a company not willing to share this information, is probably not going to behave well under stress. You can evaluate your risk factors on your own, and decide whether or not you can tolerate that level. But this signal is a strong caveat to taking an offer from them.
by gigatexal on 6/28/22, 2:33 PM
by snapetom on 6/28/22, 3:02 PM
Then, further, how does the sales team interact with engineering. How does customer feedback come back to engineering features, who demos, etc.
It doesn't matter if the engineering is top notch and there's no one to sell it. To me, if a company is past series A and the number of engineers is more than the number of sales employees, that's a warning sign.
by sambeau on 6/28/22, 2:06 PM
The more questions you ask, even ones about company culture and how things are managed will make you look super-interested and that you are already imagining yourself in the role.
When I interview people I always remind them of this before we start: "Don't forget to interview us back. We might not be what you are looking for". It's surprising how many candidates ignore my advice (which, sadly, makes them look unenthusiastic).
by Joel_Mckay on 6/28/22, 2:17 PM
"How much time are we going to spend dealing with unprofessional antics?"
I'll give you a hint, the question was rhetorical... and the answer should be 0 minutes regardless of the applicant. ;-)
by eschneider on 6/28/22, 11:44 PM
by donretag on 6/28/22, 3:46 PM
I also ask of the current managers (in the immediate department), how many were promoted and how many were hired. What is the shortest/longest someone in the company has gone with/without a promotion.
If unlimited PTO, what is the average/mean of days taken off. We do not have data is an immediate "I'll pass, thank you".
by corrral on 6/28/22, 3:13 PM
by cardosof on 6/28/22, 3:48 PM
This is critical and not straightforward to evaluate. Complexity is a (if somewhat bad) proxy for differentiation, in the sense that if you can build it in a weekend, so does your competitor - and maybe he's got the mythical 10x engineer who'll ship it faster.
by TameAntelope on 6/28/22, 6:37 PM
> Avoid: Companies that are fundraising as they'll otherwise run out of money, but haven't closed the round
That excludes a whole category of pre-seed orgs where you could make a huge positive impact.
by hindsightRegret on 6/29/22, 9:49 PM
For one, the people that are answering their questions are by pre-condition already drinking the company kool-aid.
by sanj on 6/29/22, 3:02 AM
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1oD7MHHTHBkgkArtF2s8J...
by mibzman on 6/28/22, 3:02 PM
by EnderWT on 6/28/22, 2:21 PM
by xrisk on 6/28/22, 3:40 PM
I’m going to get this stuff sorted out beforehand before working anywhere in the future.
by tzm on 6/28/22, 11:01 PM
by mateo411 on 6/28/22, 4:35 PM
It gives you an idea about the pain points that person's role and gives you insight into what the company needs to improve.
by Sevii on 6/28/22, 2:53 PM
Do you have project managers?
Do you have product owners?
Do you fill out timesheets with your working hours?
Do you use an RPC framework GRPC/etc
What languages do you use? Are you polyglot?
What is the promotion process?
What would you like to see change?
How big is the company and how big is your organization?
by danenania on 6/28/22, 5:18 PM
Being a startup employee essentially makes you an angel investor with a single company in your portfolio.
by docflabby on 6/28/22, 2:06 PM
"Describe what a typical day would look like?"
by wdb on 6/28/22, 2:33 PM
by vfulco2 on 6/29/22, 2:42 AM
by timoteostewart on 6/29/22, 4:41 AM
https://web.archive.org/web/20220628135027/https://posthog.c...
by akhmatova on 6/28/22, 8:02 PM
Hoped for (but seldom received) answer: "Why of course - to be your 24x7 shit umbrella."
Or some honestly inspired variant thereof.
by wiseowise on 6/28/22, 7:02 PM
by mandeepj on 6/28/22, 1:46 PM
by autokad on 6/28/22, 11:18 PM