Depending on where you are, questions 1 and 3 are just straight up illegal. No interviewer in the US would dare ask about vices or your family situation unless they don’t mind shelling out lawsuit settlements to everyone they interview and decline to hire.
I have sat across from recruiters at a previous job, in California of all places, that would quite frequently ask these very questions. The question is, how would you prove you were asked these questions if you were being interviewed in a state that has 2 party consent laws for recording?
Ask the other candidates, it’s not so hard with glassdoor etc. The questions are a red flag, so you’d never want to work there but equally some free money from a discrimination lawsuit wouldn’t hurt.
If you are in a single party consent state, you can legally record conversations you are involved in without informing the other participants. (California is not one of those states, sadly, but if you are in a state that does, and are interviewing for a California company via zoom or a phone call, I believe you can still record it legally)
> No interviewer in the US would dare ask about vices
I actually saw a job application recently asking to confirm that you haven’t used any nicotine products in 6months in order to be hired. This was very strange as it was a 100% remote job so maybe it was HR/copy paste but the wording was bizarre . They made it clear that it was about nicotine and not just tobacco and explicitly called out things like gums or patches.
I did not continue the application. I assume now it was some useless virtue signaling related to young people and vapes or something. I’m not even sure they’d seriously test people, but it’s still ridiculous that according to what was written you could be denied employment or lose your job because you had a cigarette outside the bar last weekend or have been using nicotine gum to quit smoking
Am I wrong to think this seems at least somewhat reasonable? Like obviously it's annoying to explain yourself, but it takes time to on-board someone and for them to become productive and it seems reasonable to want someone to stay on long enough for that at least. This naturally applies less to those super engineers you barely need to train and have obvious experienced, but that's probably not the normal case.
A short job or two, fine, but at a certain point it’s a pattern that needs a reason. If the reason is “my spouse was in the military and we moved around a lot for that, but we longer do”, that’s fair enough. If the answer is that you weren’t happy enough at your last jobs to stay for more than 12 months, then why should I think you’ll be any different at your next job?
My wife had really bad luck with her first three jobs: the offices would just up and close a year or so after she started (this included a Nokia office because of the Microsoft merger). But she would still have to frame her answer in a way that didn’t give vibes that she was cursed.
I've seen some resumes/linkedins that put reasons for why they left the job in similar situations. Acknowledging stuff like that is a good way to get ahead of questions.
You'll never hear the real reason. So if you have an issue with this fact, don't invite the candidate to an interview. If you don't have an issue with it, then why ask? They'll never say "because I'm constantly looking for better opportunities and will jump ship when I can".
This is what most of those questions on the list have in common: both sides of the table know that the answer will be contrived BS. They are a waste of everyone's time.
Maybe I’m 80% sure I’m gonna pass on this candidate because I’m not confident they’ll stick around, but it can still be worth my time to get on a screener call and at least ask. There can be many reasons why someone jumps around frequently and maybe after hearing their story Ill be convinced that it’s a true story and a reasonable situation for them to be moving so much.
How short? How many examples? And credible reasons, especially if I know something of the circumstances at various large companies.
I know personal counterexamples where someone verged on job-hopping who became a great relatively long-term employee. And I've also known people who had a single example of clear not-meeting-of-the-minds. But, in general, if there's a consistent pattern, no reason to believe you'll be different.
No, you're not wrong, and are even downplaying how seriously disruptive a serial job hopper is to a company. I have without regrets red-flagged numerous well-qualified candidates who were an obvious flight risk at the companies I have worked at, which were always smallish. Now that big tech is contracting its ranks somewhat, this behavior is going to be even more suspect, because they will not have that refuge so easily, and I think it's for the best that we have more pressure to curtail it industry wide.
I don't begrudge people for having good reasons to justify their job switches (e.g., wanted a manager role, and was told none would be forthcoming in the future), but e.g. "I got bored doing React and I wanted try Vue on the MEAN stack" does not bode well for the projects left in the lurch when he gets bored at my workplace.
Speaking personally, I always want to give a technically promising candidate a chance to defend his job hopping, but rarely do I hear convincing reasons for sub 2 year stints unless it is something out of their control, like a spouse needing to move for work, or their whole department getting laid off.
I'll just second this based on my experience with software engineers. Most places I've worked your looking at at least 6 months before someone is starting to get enough familiarity with everything involved in the internal ecosystem (both technical and non) to really be productive and probably a year before they're starting to reach the productivity of their peers. So if someone leaves at 2 years you've probably gotten one of something resembling their full productivity. Less than that and there's a good chance your better off hiring the slightly less impressive candidate who will stick around for a few. Less than 6 months to a year you may be better off hiring no one.
In my last job I completed a project that had been backlogged for months within about two months of starting. It was still about 6 before I really felt like I had my feet under me, and definitely closer to the year mark before I really had a grasp of the full ecosystem and was operating at the level I'd expect to be. Admittedly this was a larger organization with around 10-15 engineering teams all managing services that had to interact. The numbers I mentioned weren't a hard-fast universal rule, more a rough guideline from the environments I've been both an IC and manager in.
I 100% agree lack of fit can absolutely be a reason to leave in < 6 months. One or two of these wouldn't be a concern, however I've seen resumes of people who have been in the industry 8 years, with the average stint being between 6-8 months and none over 2-years. I'll probably pass on this candidate, even if they otherwise look better than my next choice. Sure they might make "significant changes" in the 6 months they are here, but I'll almost certainly be better off in the long run with the person who sticks around long enough to have something resembling deep knowledge of our environment. If they have had a "lack of fit" with that many previous managers, I have no reason to believe I'll be the one they finally click with.
Surely this is the baseline? If you hadn't contributed significant changes in the first three months and I was your line manager I probably would have failed your probation. I wouldn't expect you to be at maximum productivity by this point but I would be expecting you to make substantive contributions appropriate to your skill level and experience within this time.
I am baffled by this. It has to be so different between fields and companies.
At 2nd job it took 5 months until the first commit. At my 3rd like 4 months.
Getting up to speed and not being a net time sink for the coworkers, like 8 months on my 2nd job even though I did kinda the same thing in my first job. About 5 months at my third job.
This also make me have a hard time understanding how job hoppers are valued at all.
But reading your comment I realize some companies work completely differently.
At my last job I had a small bugfix (a one liner but still a bug) committed on my first day, PRed and merged by the end of my second day. That job was the definition of hit the ground running but still. Damn.
After a while its not just money, if you like your work, your manager and your teammates, have a good work life balance, it does not make sense to jump just for money.
Some companies will take a chance on you again, depending on their needs. Just not everyone.
I once reviewed a resume where someone literally had a 30 year career when their longest stint was 14 months with several stints of 2-6 months each. Not exaggerating. I passed on the candidate myself, but the last 20 or so companies who hired him were willing to take their chances.
I also once interviewed someone else much more jr who looked like a serial job hopper. During the interview he had a very good explanation for it which eased my concerns literally 100%. This was like 4 years ago and he's still onboard.
At a previous employer we hired someone who had a 15 year job history where he left every employer like clockwork every 14-16 months. We hired him anyway because he had a specific skill we were looking for.
And, yeah, sometimes people with a string of bad luck will begrudgingly grind out a couple years somewhere they'd prefer not to be to better help their future career prospects. It's REALLY not the worst thing in the world.
In my experience, mercenaries are never satisfied with their pay, they always want more. While I care about pay, I have also cared about a few other things: who do I work with and what can I learn from them, what type of work is it, location, company goals, etc. It is ironic, but I think if you optimize money by just focusing on money, you will fall short of what is achievable.
There's a nugget of truth in what you're saying: it is a valid expectation that knowledge workers be adequately stimulated. But we're not gonna start adding the latest flavor of NoSQL just because it's been popular for 4 months in the tech blogosphere.
I felt this point was very out of place on that list. I've interviewed so many people that had an average tenure of 6-9 months across many different jobs. In my field, if someone only stays for 6-9 months, then it was a complete waste of time. I suppose I could just outright reject the candidate without letting them explain, but that seems to be worse than just asking the uncomfortable question.
I have asked this question in the past, and will continue to do so. I used to be more lenient with short term stint candidates. It never paid off, so I’m a lot more strict about it now. I have not once experienced the highly competent short stint non-contractor developer that HN would have me believe exists in such frequently that’d make this an unreliable signal.
I can’t realistically envisage an employee so valuable and productive that anything less than a 12 month stint wouldn’t leave a taste in my mouth, and for good reason. Not many people would be earning their keep for a fair portion of that. And I would’ve burned a lot of time learning how to work with them. At the end of it you’ve ended up with a loss of what little institutional knowledge they had, and a bunch of code written by someone without the proven ability to build maintainable software that’s only learned by being burned and learning the hard way.
I have that same general perspective working with the kids. Don't ask questions where you both know the correct answer is the bad answer. Examples, "Who did this?" "Why haven't you done your homework yet?" "Have you started your homework?"
Much better to do the invitation style questions. "Who is going to help me clean this up?" "What is left to your homework?", etc.
With the obvious major caveat of things being very tailored to the specific kid and situation, of course.
I was curious if there were going to be good questions at the bottom. I suspect the general idea is that good questions are essentially unstable due to Goodhart's Law. (That is, as soon as they are on a list, they are no longer good.)
I like to ask the following as a starting point for an interview:
What is the most interesting project you have worked on recently? Doesn't have to be work related, but should be relevant to the job, e.g. programming, not gardening for a developer role. Why was it interesting? What were the biggest challenges on that project? How did you solve those?
Will show if people are passionate about something specific, and also gives a general measurement on what they consider challenging, and a first insight into their problem solving skills. If the person goes into detail, go along and ask more questions. Very helpful to figure out how a person works. This should hopefully be a low pressure "just talking" question to get started and help people to calm down a bit.
I like to ask about tradeoffs - what kind of tradeoffs they've made and why they chose that; where their opinion lies on the pragmatic vs perfection scale and that sort of thing. Quite a lot of tech work involves making tradeoffs, so they should be able to talk about it easily, and it leads to some interesting discussion as well as giving you an idea of their opinions and decision-making.
There's no need to lie or have a canned response, because tradeoffs are inherently between things which are both desirable.
4. Why do you change jobs so often (so rarely)?
How does that matter? If I am a match for the company
in terms of qualifications and personal qualities, how
will my job history and reflection help? I changed jobs
every year or so. Is that “often” or “rarely”? What’s
wrong with changing jobs frequently?
It is actually important to ask this of a candidate who seems to frequently change jobs. A hiring manager may not want to hire someone who will leave soon. It often makes more sense to hire someone who is capabale and wants to work for you.
Several of the questions in the article are very good questions to ask. Their purpose isn't for the candidate to give some canned response, like the article states. Their purpose is to help the candidate shine by asking questions that can be answered with examples from the candidate's background. If the candidate can't give solid answers that's not an issue with the questions.
"I actually come prepared for this question, and have a line to explain each and every job I've departed in reverse chronological order. And I'd be happy to read them off if you'd like. You do? Okay...
- VCs merged us with a Chinese acquisition and sent our work overseas
- Manager ignored my memos for 5 years and then said "you have no new ideas" to my face in a review
- Sales team demanded an emergency prototype and then let a competitor steal the contract
- Company pivoted into a different tech stack overnight
- Google rewrote our code in a weekend and kicked us out of Android
- Owner wouldn't install health benefits (+$5K) but hired his daughter for the summer for busywork
- Company abandoned the market and went into Facebook games
Now hopefully none of these scenarios will ever happen here. Right? Glad to hear it."
While I agree all of these scenarios are good reasons to leave, I have a feeling (based on being an American for all 30 years of my life now), these answers would be classified as "TOO REAL" and as a result you might be filtered for "culture fit" aka manager doesn't think he/she can control you.
I agree, but at that point if they're going to make this kind of observation on my resume ("hmm, you move around a lot"), the reply is going to be of equal tone ("I move around a lot because the companies I choose tend to make bad decisions and change direction with equal frequency").
Lol, after 3 small companies, I joined a large systemic bank. It's less exciting but I can see projects to their completion without being surrounded by bumbling idiots barely out of business school barking nonsensical orders.
Agreed. You changed twice last year and you have good reasons, fine. You changed every 6 months for the last 10 years and it is always the others fault? Either you've been really unlucky and I am sorry for you or the blame is not on the others and you may want to ask yourself some existential questions.
Interviews are here to determine if the place is a good fit, on both sides.
Exactly, I dont get it why some folks are clearly in the job for short stints over and over, and clearly dont have stability in mind, yet they want this stable position and frown upon rejection as clearly a bad match. I'd say this is an epitome of bad match, since people with too little/incorrect experience are normally filtered out by agencies, but this is more personality mismatch.
Some things are just damn too easy to spot without even trying, and this one of them. Have a great story to explain why you are actually wont leave when meeting first frustrating item at your work.
Also, everything is being evaluated, including how you react to uncomfortable questions. Parents snarky response would be a nogo on itself, regardless of subject.
Yeah it's ridiculous to think it's a wrong question because you're in a resume competition and a peer is at 4 years per job average and you're at 1. Purely neutrally, for the hiring person, he s faced with a short term guy vs a medium term guy.
If the guy reply "why do you care", then it s def suspicious and the short term guy might be so incompetent he s pushed away and doesnt last more than a year. I d take the guy who seem to survive 4 years most jobs to be safe.
That's a fine question. The "what's with this gap in your resume" makes me want to slap someone. I didn't feel like working and I am compensated well for my skillset that you seek hereto, so how about why haven't you taken a break recently, son? Huh? Too busy catching up on the Joneses to keep yourself relevant? Thought so.
> A hiring manager may not want to hire someone who will leave soon.
I was one of those, but I don't think that there's many.
I remember talking to a manager of a startup we were working with, and he told me that the average stay of an engineer was 18 months, and that they plan for that.
I bounced like that, for my first three jobs, but stuck at my fourth, for nearly 27 years.
#10 is a measurement of ability to mentally model and estimate problems. Relevant to engineering ability.
#8 measures self-awareness. Many people can answer this question with "I know I could be much better at X and I am working on it" which is what it's about.
Eg. if I guess NYC population is 10M, with every 100th household having a piano, I can guess there are 100k pianos in NYC. If each of them needs tuning once every two years, that's 50k tunes each year. That's roughly 1k tunes each week, which, if a tuner can do 2 a day (5 work days per week), is 100 tuners.
And then it'd be worth comparing to tuning of venue pianos which are tuned more frequently: let's say 10k venues with pianos requiring tuning every month, or 2k tunes a week. So another 200 tuners.
You can also talk about pattern of work instead of market demands (eg most tuners only get 1 tune a week, so we can multiply the number of tuners by 10), just to show off you are ignoring other variables knowingly.
Obviously, each of the guesses has a large error margin, and errors multiply, so you can be off by way more than a single order of magnitude.
But just coming up with things to include in your calculation, and not being scared of exploring such random situations with little data you know, signals some generic problem solving ability.
Eg for a better answer, I now know I need exact number of people and venues in NYC, I need to ask tuners how often are pianos tuned, get some data on how frequent are pianos in homes, how long does a tune take, etc.
While I think I am decent at these questions, and I do believe they signal a very generic problem solving ability, I agree they are terrible interview questions for most software engineering roles, since you rarely hire for such generic ability, and might even get more out of a more specific question/test..
But that still presupposes a whole lot of knowledge about pianos that most people just wouldn't be expected to have. From what percentage of households have them to how often they need tuning to how long it takes to tune one. Unless you're a serious piano nut, you're at best throwing out random numbers, and likely not only don't know the answers, but don't even know what questions to ask. What about peak demand? Do lots of parents also sign their kids up for piano lessons at the start of each school year? Do pianos get played more often during the winter months?
It's like the Drake equation - it doesn't matter what factors you choose (you can always come up with more) or what values you assign them (you can't know what most of them would be anyway). It's meaningless as a whole. And also irrelevant to software development or most anything else; at best it would be only very loosely relevant to managing a piano tuning company.
I have no idea what those values are! I am still able to make guesses to show that I can figure out a bunch of variables that affect the final value. And since I am multiplying data that's off maybe even by few orders of magnitude, errors multiply as well: I am aware of how erroneous input data affects the results too.
Is it relevant to software development as a whole? It definitely is.
You've got to provision web workers for new service being developed: you can only (guess)timate number of expected users, you can guess how much CPU time each request will take, figure out cost per unit, look at bandwidth requirements, and make your pick. To improve on your guess, you actually go and measure request times (p50, p99), decide on the number of users you can sustain with your team cost effectively, measure network usage, etc.
Or you need to decide on what type of DB to use? Depending on access patterns (read heavy, write heavy, time series...), data size and scalability demands, team familiarity with different tech, you make a guess at what should work: you can only measure after you've got the system exposed to real, live load.
Now, I still think it's a bad interview question: people can be perfectly comfortable answering above questions, yet not see that they are in abstract exactly the same as the number of piano tuners in NYC. It tests for that generic and general ability to estimate anything, and to break down any problem.
Yet some people get flabbergasted (like you seem to do?), since they think too much about specifics of each of the numbers they use and how wrong they might be. Basically, they have a hard time of letting go of the inaccurracies :)
As such, it's a mixture of tests: supposedly only tests you problem breakdown skills, but in reality tests your confidence in using inaccurrate numbers or lack of problem domain knowledge to solve a problem.
Which makes it a bad interview question unless both of those is what you want to learn about someone.
I have no problem with the question being abstract; my main gripe lies in the first part of your explanation, compounded noise is still noise. Why go through all the mental gymnastics if you yourself are aware that it can be way off? Your next-in-chain-of-command will treat it as hard fact and make a decision or commit to something based on it- then you have all these piano tuners loitering around and nothing to do.
The thing is that it gives you questions to ask. I am sure NYC population is a web search away. Or tuning frequency recommendations for pianos. Or how long does tuning a piano really take? Some are certainly harder (how frequent are piano-households?), but maybe someone already looked into it.
It shows that one can break a problem down into more manageable pieces. Being more manageable means you can get a better estimate by delving deeper.
The question is not about finding the right answer, but about employing the right methodology.
And if you've got next-in-the-chain taking estimates as hard boundaries or facts, you need to be explicit they are not, and hopefully teach them to be a bit more suspicious of everything.
Even then, it's ok if someone else takes your ballpark and runs with, as long as you are willing to take responsibility. If you are higher in job title, be explicit this is what you are asking them to do, and that you will take the responsibility! Invite them to improve upon it as they learn more, though!
> It tests for that generic and general ability to estimate anything, and to break down any problem.
Ability to BS and multiply, more or less. Feels like a waste of a question even for the one asking it!
> Yet some people get flabbergasted . . . since they think too much about specifics of each of the numbers they use and how wrong they might be. Basically, they have a hard time of letting go of the inaccuracies :)
Having a hard time letting go of inaccuracies seems justified if you're in a more technical profession. Too often there's good engineering reasons for not wanting to excuse loose reasoning with bad guesses. On the software dev side, there are also too many cases where those kinds of fudged numbers are inevitably used against us.
Being able to tell when highly accurate approach is required and when it is not is as much a quality in a technical profession as being simply accurate is.
Never once in twenty year I needed to do a ballpark estimate as an engineer. All my estimates were sourced or derived from known reference datapoints.
According to recruiter and many answer here it appears people are spending days at job throwing numbers to the wall.
Can anyone explain what these numbers with massive uncertainty are used for and why go tough all that effort if you still have to go back to sources and references to fix up the estimate anyway?
I'll mention one which I've had which I considered bad. Worse than most on the linked list IMO.
The question was "What is the worst challenge you've faced, and how did you deal with it or overcome it?" and on me asking if it should be work related, "it doesn't have to be work related".
I can't remember whether the wording was exactly "hardest challenge" or "worst problem" or "most difficult challenge", but it used an absolute term (worst/hardest/most, not "a difficult challenge" or "a time in which you faced..."), and it was certainly very close to one of those.
I think that most people's hardest challenges in life are things like "my parents passed away" or "I came out as trans, and my parents disowned me, and I've had to come to terms with that" or "I had a divorce".. basically, interpersonal relationship experiences which really aren't very work relevant.
The use of "hardest" also makes it feel like you're lying if you go for something less serious, but work related.
I brought up a non-work-related rough time in my life from years ago, which still easily stood out as the most challenging time in my life, and then specifically asked again "this doesn't seem work relevant, should I choose a less serious work-related challenge?" and the interviewer asked me to continue with my non-work relevant one (i.e. asked me to relive some trauma).
It soured the experience massively for me, I had to try and disassociate some to avoid crying, and all in all it was the least comfortable I've ever felt in an interview. I can't imagine what signal that gave them.
That somehow also didn't disqualify me since I still got an offer, though I of course declined it.
Anyway, the company was osohq. I hope they don't ask this question anymore, but I guess prepare a story just in case if you do interview there.
The interviewer’s phrasing is a little clumsy, but an interview goes both ways. The candidate has a responsibility to maintain boundaries too. It sounds like the interviewer was trying to give you the opportunity to provide a non-work related response if you wanted, and anticipated something like you volunteering on a difficult project where you overcame challenges and helped people. Really, the challenge isn’t what’s important, it’s how you handled it and the result that matters.
It’s like how, in the US, if a stranger asks how you’re doing, you shouldn’t actually tell them how you’re doing. You should just say you’re doing fine, because they aren’t asking the question literally.
#10 is not only fine, but ought to be mandatory. How can you expect anyone ever to "engineer" something if they are not capable of making (and refining) rough estimates?
Sure, often you just have to measure. But I'd much rather work with the person who can get an order-of-magnitude estimate from a 10 minute measure than the person who gets a reasonably accurate estimate but only after taking half a day to set up the experiment.
Worst one I got recently was "What is your perfect number of working hours per week?" I said 40 and the interview process was ended early after the CEO said "oh we put in 50 per week because we know it takes extra effort for a startup". I expanded on how 40 is what works for me, interview got very cold after that. I felt pretty incredulous after that. Especially when the recruiter asked if 40 was a hard requirement. I thought those types of startup cultures were long gone by now but I guess not!
Sounds like it was actually a perfect question. It made it crystal clear that you and the company didn't see eye to eye on work conditions, and that neither of you would be happy working together.
Personally, if the expectation is to work 50 hours a week, then the question to ask them is "OK, do you pay 25% more than the average salary for this position?"
Of course, the only reason you'd ask such a question in the interview is that you have already decided you don't want the job. But the response can still be illuminating/entertaining. :)
Attention any quant firms-- I'll do it for 250k, 80 hours a week, 24/7 on call, fire me if I don't deliver satisfactory results.
10 years of experience in Cpp, Java, Javascript, Python, SQL, the last 5 of which as a lead (aka designing the data model and optimizing slow parts of the code base through better ds and algo implementations).
Only catch is I won't show up physically in NY or Philly or Chicago, etc.
These were startups who were not making up for the long hours with financial compensation. They just felt that they were entitled to cheap labor that doesn't value their time.
Can't speak for most firms, but I interned at Jane Street and this definitely wasn't the case: almost everyone there worked 45 hours/week with a consistent schedule (market hours + a small buffer).
It makes sense: they value people doing high-quality work and avoiding mistakes. Everybody there was also clearly very productive—it was one of my first experiences that convinced me that long hours are actively counterproductive.
I understand other firms in the space (like Citadel) have pretty different cultures, so it's not going to be true for the entire field.
You never put a ceiling: otherwise it makes them believe you work the hours, not the job (I mean, if you care to "win" the job offer).
A good response is "there s no hour limit: as long as there s work and the client isnt satisfied, we work. I think it's important to sleep a bit between work day sto stay coherent, otherwise as long as I can".
There is always someone who will make their lack of forethought into your problem. As long as they can override pushback with a little bit of social engineering they will never learn.
Response to the 50: "Sounds like you need to work _smarter_, not longer and harder like my--" and then walk out but walk with a gait gorilla walk due to the weight.
Sounds like you dodged a bullet there! If the question is specifically about work for someone else, that they decide you do, I'd be suspicious of anyone answering anything other than "zero".
Can't speak for the company and their intention - but here's how I'd answer that question, authentically to me:
"Work is variable. If we are on a super tight deadline with real implications, then people should put in extra hours if they can. Like, if we need to deliver for a major client, let's just do that.
And then other times, you can back off and work at a sustainable pace. It really depends on what makes sense in the situation"
This answer may not please everyone but I think it would resonate with reasonable people. It's worked well for me.
I'm 43 years old, been programming all of my life, and have a Master degree. I've never seen a person do concentrated work or study for more than 6 hours a day. I've met plenty of people who claimed to do double. But they were either lying to me or to themselves.
If you think people can do 50 hours per week of highly concentrated work, you still have a lot to learn. Once you understand developers have around 0 to 6 hours of productive work in a day, you can start to optimize it.
Why doesn’t anyone ever ask why people are expected to work an extra 10 hours for free? This assumes that 40hrs/wk is standard, but that doesn’t seem unreasonable.
Interviews are a two way street. They crashed and burned on your interview. Unless they can explain that they are paying 25% more to compensate for 25% more time, why would you work for them?
I had a similar situation interviewing with one of Musk’s companies a while back. Who would want to work 80 hour weeks to make a 40 hour a week salary? The answer should be no one. You did great.
That was actually a great question for both parties!
They were filtering out people who were not willing to work 50 hours a week
You were filtering out companies who expected over 40 hours of work a week.
The only complaint I have is they should have put hour requirements it in the job posting so you both filtered each other out before it got to the interview stage.
Everytime they asked me "why should we hire you?", I always replied a small introduction saying that that position might be an interesting next step for my career followed by "and also your recruiter contacted me, so I guess you guys know better than me why you should hire me".
The oversaturated modern job market melted the brain of the HR departments to the point that they think it's a great privilege to work for them when they are just another company and you only want to earn a salary.
I had several screen calls with HR recruiters recently where they asked me why I wanted to work at their company, and I said something like, "Well, you reached out to me, so what do you think?" I did not get any of those jobs.
Questions like #5 are some of my least favorite. I don’t know if it’s only prevalent in the US, but can we stop throwing around phrases like “why are you the best” or “what is your super power”, etc. Not only this makes me cringe, it also leads to an uncomfortable moment since I always reply that I am not the best and don’t have super powers.
One of the most ridiculous questions I've encountered was asked by a manager on the Alexa team. First question in and this guy sneers at me and says tell me the smartest thing you've ever done. Hmmm... what?
To say this rubbed me the wrong way is an understatement. I knew immediately that I would loathe reporting to someone so egotistical, so it went downhill from there. I'm just never going humor to someone who starts a conversation with a pissing contest.
I don't understand the animus against Fermi questions. I think they're quite indicative of a candidate's basic abilities, particularly for technical roles.
Most coders are bad at thinking with numbers, and so bad at answering these type of questions. So, instead of improving themselves, they invent reasons why the questions are bad.
Something I find myself doing is saying, “the reason I’m asking X is because Y.” I aim for absolute transparency. This isn’t a game of subterfuge, I’ll leave that part to
HR…
I would much rather have these questions than go thru the LeetCode grinder. Without spending significant prep time, you can’t get through the grinder. For most software developers, the grinder isn’t actually representative of how we work.
I was asked this question in an interview for a startup. I gave the regular answer that was expected of me. The interview went well, and at the end when the interviewer (who was the co-founder) asked if I had any questions, I turned this around on him: "where do you see [company x] in five years?"
He laughed and talked about finding product-market fit and getting a certain amount of funding, and having so many employees, and that kind of thing. In other words, the things you're expected to say in that position. I was impressed, and took the position when it was eventually offered to me.
18 months later, the company was on fire, most of the staff were laid off, the product I had been working on was shelved, and the company pivoted to a completely different product. I put in my notice just before that co-founder left the company completely, and eventually took a salaried position in a different industry, and moved across the country.
So, we both just said the right things, but had absolutely no fucking idea where we'd be in even two years. If either of us had any idea, we wouldn't have told the other person anyway. Questions like this have no answer, but a trivially correct response, and so are meaningless wastes of time.
It's a fine question to chew the fat with, and there _are_ wrong answers, needn't I go in to those. Probably the best answer: even better off, more happy, more fulfilled, and not worrying about where I will be in the next 5 years.
I interview people for support roles, when I ask this question it’s to see what their future goals are career wise. If they say they want to be in marketing or something else, I simply ask how they see this job helping them get there. That’s where they can come in with the wrong answer.
If this role can’t help you get to your actual goals, chances are you’ll be looking to leave sooner than later and you most likely wont be as invested.
> I simply ask how they see this job helping them get there.
So just curious, in my last job the real answer would have been “it’s paying enough to let me fund things on the side to help me move towards my goals”. Is this a wrong answer? I imagine most places wouldn’t care for such a blunt, cynical answer, but it’s the truth.
I would try to answer (to my future supervisor) something like "I'll have your job, because I want to grow and get better". But that might the interview. Of all the dumb questions, I think this one is the dumbest because there are only wrong answers.
I disagree. I ask this question to get an idea of what you think about your own career and how goal oriented you are. There is no right answer to this question. I don't care if you think the answer is "management" or "team leader" or whatever. I try to read between the lines. If it feels like you had to come up with an answer, then I already know you don't care too much. That is not necessarily a negative but people who do have an idea or at least care about where they want to be, they have the potential to do bigger things. As a hiring manager, I absolutely care about that even though I understand it takes a lot more than just wishful thinking.
The idea of this question is not about getting spot on prognosis, but about the general sanity and maturity of the candidate. It is not a technical, it is a behavioral question.
Biggest problem is any of these can be rehearsed and the best interviews are spontaneous ones where the person opens up into uncharted authentic territory vs canned responses.
Of these, I've only been asked questions 5-9 back circa 1990 when I was just starting out and the "where do you see yourself in 5 years" and "what are your strengths/weaknesses" were ubiquitous. Something must have happened in HR world in the 2000's because interviewers stopped asking these questions even thought I was still hiring for dev positions so maybe a memo went out or possibly the internet was blowing up. By the 2010's I was 20+ years into my career and at that point your CV speaks for itself and they just want to know if you are going to be behaviorally difficult person. Interviewing very senior people is a much more difficile proposition.
When I was 20 (cusp of 21) and hiring for internships my mentor told me the answer to "where do you want to be" should be "in your seat" but I my mentor was so old he didn't understand the concept of HR people giving the first interview lolololol.
Having interviewed innumerable candidates for software development roles, I seldom used anything resembling these questions. If the candidate had relevant domain knowledge, e.g., financial apps, we’d talk about that. If not, how did that person go about acquiring the relevant knowledge. Same on the development platform. If they weren’t experienced with our suite of technologies, how do they approach learning it. What were they reading currently? Some answers were disqualifying. The most extreme case being an individual who said he was reading “Shades of Gray”. When I clarified that I only cared about technical material, he replied that he only read technical material on the job, not after hours. Pass. Who/what was their favorite development source? Assuming they were good prospects, possibly they would be subjected to more in depth technical interviews with senior staff. Generally, we hired for talent not specific skill sets. As such, we had relatively long tenures with excellent productivity and quality. I considered pure behavioral interviewing to be a horrible way to select new hires. Making the individual uncomfortable seems to be counterproductive. Fortunately, I’m retired now. The various ATS’s cost companies untold millions in missed opportunities as do many HR departments.
Work/life balance? Yes, work/life balance matters. On the other hand, when one enters a professional field, the expectation of the employer is that they maintain their value. The employer is paying for productivity. The individual has the responsibility of maintaining and enhancing their knowledge. Those thinking otherwise are opening the door to foreign competition, against which they will lose. And comparing software development to cashiering is apples and oranges.
You're saying that if I didn't regularly read technical materials after working hours, I'd have lost value after 10+ years of industry experience compared with my 25 year-old self?
It seems very narrow minded to think that newer technologies could be "read" by any classical understanding of the word. I mostly learn new tech by cloning github projects and tinkering with them; or pick some interesting subjects and follow whatever scattered pieces of documentation I could find. You're not going to catch any seasoned engineer reading Machine Learning for Dummies.
It would be a much more straightforward question if you just asked the candidates what they learned recently.
Read was all encompassing, I.e. how do you learn/keep up? If one doesn’t, one’s value diminishes. Simple as that. Experimentation coupled with reading is common among SEs. It’s not the company’s responsibility to keep them current. The problem I saw emerging over the last decade or so of my career, was a proliferation of individuals that wanted the money, but didn’t want to put in the effort. And that situation only worsened as they gained more tenure. Couple that with new grads or boot camp graduates, all wanting to start somewhere around 6 figures, and the industry has an issue. Hence, many companies have turned to outsourcing.
That is a terrible list. Many of those questions are perfectly fine.
10 - Fermi problems. Good to get an indication of a candidate's problem solving skills.
9,8,7,6 - The candidates's motivation, weaknesses, strengths, plans. What's wrong with that? Evidently, you have to modulate the answers somewhat, but the extent to which you do that well is indicative of your understanding of the job requirements, the competition, etc. Perfectly legitimate.
5 - Best candidate. Again, this is a fine question - it allows you to highlight your understanding of the job, and your fit, and your accomplishments, and so on.
4,2 - If you've had unusually short tenures at prior jobs, why? Again, perfectly legitimate question. There might be some reason pertaining to the prior company, or there might be a character trait with the candidate. Insofar as training a candidate incurs some fixed costs, it is legitimate to aim to find out whether they'll stay around for a while.
1,3 - "bad habits", family. Agreed, irrelevant.
But 2/10 is a pretty bad hit ratio for a top 10 list.
I actually disagree on 10, I just estimated the population of New York then looked it up and was off by an order of magnitude. Good chance I'd do worse in an interview situation than sitting at home. A few more estimates with errors of this size and we've learned what? I have a poor grasp of US census data? Unless this is a realistic approximation of the kind of thing your doing with this job, the time in the interview would be better spent on a problem within your domain, but that means the interviewer has to spend time coming up with something instead of Googling "interview questions". See also: "why are manhole covers round?" Which is a real question we asked all of our candidates at a previous job right up until I got control of the process (fun fact, invalid assumption. They come in all shapes and triangles are surprisingly common)
But agreed on the rest. OP thinks they are bad, when really they are poorly worded, and they would be better off taking a moment to think what kind of information the interviewer is trying to get at with their questions. Heck if the job involves interfacing with other people the ability to do this can even be an important signal on if the candidate is right for the job. A lot of people are really bad at asking what they are looking for.
2023 answer: Excuse me? You mean a street-level maintenance access lid? So it can't fall in. And why are a bunch of the other similar lids not circle? I leave that one up to you vape hit
The goal isn’t to see how close you can get to the correct answer, it’s to see the extent to which you’re able to break down a complex problem you haven’t seen before into steps you can take to solve it.
And are you sure the person on the other side of the table can assess your problem solving skills correctly? That would make them an expert on Fermi-like problems. OTOH, perhaps HR really knows how many civilizations are out there in the universe.
Correctly? I could be bullshitting the heck out of it. I think I could teach anyone to pass such questions, if not vetted. It seems to boil down to: initial estimate, then multiply by a fraction for each narrowing specification in the question (how many red-haired, left-handed, gay piano tuners are there in New York), dependence between factors be damned, if it doesn't matter if the outcome is 1 or 500.
the goal of these tasks is not to provide the most correct answer, but to show how you think about problems. Even the fact that you googled the right answer after may set you apart from candidates who just don't care, and that's relevant for the job. Of course if the recruiter judges candidates based on how close they were to the correct number, then they are doing it wrong and you might want to stay away.
> 10 - Fermi problems. Good to get an indication of a candidate's problem solving skills.
Well, you could ask them to solve a problem that might realistically come up on the job.
There are a lot of professions that require problem solving, but they don't use Fermi problems.
Interviewees for car mechanic or doctor positions don't get asked how many piano tuners there are in Chicago. They get asked questions like "A 2021 Prius is emitting a high-pitched whine and exhibiting poor acceleration from stop lights. What is the likely cause?" or "This patient has a blood pressure of foo/bar, a creatinine level of blah and has this other symptom blugh. What would be your next step?" If you gave them a Fermi problem they'd probably walk out the door.
Many of these "interview questions" are basically just cargo cult stuff. The company has heard that Microsoft or one of the FAANGs has used some weird-assed question at some point, and thinks that if only they do the same, they'll be the next FAANG. It's a tacit admission that the hiring manager actually has no clue as to how to evaluate a candidate based on metrics that are actually relevant to the job.
Do mechanics and doctors actually get asked those questions? I don't think doctors do, they have credentials and references. I'm pretty sure mechanics around here wouldn't get asked that, just references and maybe credentials and "how soon can you start?"
Software is a weird industry where you have to quiz every applicant to make sure they know how to program even though they've been the industry for years, and we seem to get it wildly wrong anyway.
Coincidentally, although I've been offered jobs after doing these kind of interviews and technical tests, I've only ever accepted jobs that are on the basis of "we know you, just come along" and I guess I now don't have any trust in a full interview process.
You're right that doctors have a well-established credentialing process, but yes, I believe that they are asked questions like that. Or maybe "For a herniated bupkis, some doctors prefer the Bloggs reduction, while others prefer the Quimby resection. Which do you prefer and why?"
There are nearly as many poseurs in mechanics as there are in programming, though. I think reputable shops grill candidates pretty hard. And not with Fermi questions.
I guess the only doctors I've known are ones going through the state run education and health system and it seems pretty streamlined. You go and work where you're told to based on your educational choices and achievements, there aren't interviews as such. It must be different going into a private health system.
Nah, software is weird because they so rarely ask people to do anything related to the task at hand. "solve a toy problem without using libraries. Please don't paste off SE/AI".
I prefer to actually think about what I want and devise a problem set to work through with the last candidates. You know, "here's a simple TCP server with a minor bug in the handler for one packet. Let's fix it". Real job: here's a 100k LoC server. Add a report/packet type/etc or fix a bug...
Uses up my time as well as theirs, but shows me a lot about how they work as well as what they'll be like to deal with.
Many software applications actually require estimates and thinking similar to how you would solve Fermi problems. Like, how many disks are needed to backup our database every week with 6 months retention?
It's actually a very straightforward equation, but way too often people just trial-and-error or make an assumption out of nowhere, instead of plugging in the disk-size, user-count and growth rate multiplied with size per user.
Same goes for understanding what a computer is capable of, instead of throwing in some complex kubernetes cluster because requests are processing slow. If you actually knew the order of magnitude of queries per second that is normal, you would question the application first before questioning the number of servers.
> Interviewees for car mechanic or doctor positions
Because those are different jobs. A good software engineer must be able to reason around all sort of real world problems. Software does not exist in a vacuum.
> 10 - Fermi problems. Good to get an indication of a candidate's problem solving skills.
Calculating the number of pencils used by Chicago's public school system in one year or whatever is pointless, though. I could "solve" this problem, or at least make a reasonable estimate, I suppose, but I'm a web developer. Wouldn't you get a better indication of my problem solving skills if you asked me about a problem related to web development?
A question like "what are some problems you ran into on previous projects and how did you solve them?" will be one I can answer instantly as well as give you a better indication of the competence I have doing the job you actually want to hire me for.
I offer 5 good "situation / behavior /outcome" (SBO, sometimes called STAR) questions, the key is there aren't objectively "correct" answers, you decide what behaviors you prefer (humility, risk management, bias for action, respect for chain of command, etc) and then select for answers that demonstrate them.
Interviewer tips: listen not just to the answer, but also how do they communicate, do they use deflective or passive language, ask them to elaborate a lot with lots of details (bullshitters are bad at this), let them do all the talking ("why? Tell me more" Or "and then what happened?" are all the additional prompts needed), take good notes
* tell me about a time you disagreed with someone senior to you. (After every prompt ask "How did you handle it" and "what were the results?")
* tell me about a time you failed
* tell me about a time you had too much to do and not enough time do it.
* tell me about a time you solved a problem in a way you were really proud of.
* tell me about a time you felt you were asked to do something that was outside your skillset or comfort zone.
Lots of alternative questions you could ask instead, but again the key is no right answers, and you'll get a lot more signal compared to most questions.
This blog post is pretty self congratulatory. We get it, employer bad -> employee good.
The fact of the matter is, they are investing in you. It often costs more to hire frequent replacements than one long-standing employee.
I’ve been places 9 months, 6 MONTHS, this question drives me up the walls. At the back of my head, I never once thought, “I don’t deserve to be asked this”.
Most of the questions by themselves are not stupid, it looks like the author just used them for the wrong reasons. It's more of a HR questions and as a manager he can leave it to recruiters. Many years ago I worked in HR, here's this questions as recruiters see them:
9. Trying to understand persons motivation for the job. For culture fit, for position, etc. Not a'ways 'i love it and that's my sole interest in life' is a 'good' answer. Some companies/position are looking for cold professional approach, financial interest may be interpreted as less problematic and stable. Depends.
8, 7. To see how the candidate see himself, usually entry point for more questions and soft skills evaluation. Also gives you an idea what person in front of you sees as good and bad, and if he fits the manager/team. And people do tell their real weaknesses. Surprisingly, people tell A LOT on interviews.
6. Pretty obvious - direction of development, some want to grow to be in a managing positions, some interested in tech side only, position/company may provide support for this or no.
5. Also hate it, but used to see how motivated person is and again - how he sees his strengths.
4. Asked if person really jumps from job to job or, say, stayed in company 10 years. In first case - it's suspicious and question gives the chance for candidate to explain themselves. For people who worked in one place for a long time - let's see if we are the company that provides same benefits or not.
Last three is stupid and may be illegal.
But in general - questions are just entry points and a way to start a discussion about the things you wanna know. It's not stupid if you understand why do you ask it and not looking for just an answer.
Also his solutions for those who get this questions... Being passive aggressive rarely helps. You are in conversation with someone - speak, express your frustration, explain why. Facepalm, exhale and look deeply in the eye after being asked about why do you canned so many jobs - that's a great answer I guess, explains a lot, but just understand, that you are an asshole in this situation.
The whole how many dogs fit in to a clown car is truly a waste of time and a relic of the original Google interview questions that everyone beat off to. Value your prospect's time and ask relevant questions even if they are weird. But don't think you/they, Mr. I Just Thought of A Fun Question With No Way of Discerning If The Answer is Sufficient Or Not, are going to create some existential divide between the good candidates and the rest. Ask them how close to a fist fight have they gotten in because of a PR and did they win.
I feel the same about them. And about algorithm questions for some positions also. I understand all this "we want to see how you solve the problem" argument, but... 99% of the time I will solve a very different problems.
I learned to value good interviews. And I'm not afraid to stop and quit interviews that I don't like. If you don't like questions and don't want to participate, act like an adult - explain you are not interested and save time for both parties involved.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 294 ms ] threadI actually saw a job application recently asking to confirm that you haven’t used any nicotine products in 6months in order to be hired. This was very strange as it was a 100% remote job so maybe it was HR/copy paste but the wording was bizarre . They made it clear that it was about nicotine and not just tobacco and explicitly called out things like gums or patches.
I did not continue the application. I assume now it was some useless virtue signaling related to young people and vapes or something. I’m not even sure they’d seriously test people, but it’s still ridiculous that according to what was written you could be denied employment or lose your job because you had a cigarette outside the bar last weekend or have been using nicotine gum to quit smoking
Am I wrong to think this seems at least somewhat reasonable? Like obviously it's annoying to explain yourself, but it takes time to on-board someone and for them to become productive and it seems reasonable to want someone to stay on long enough for that at least. This naturally applies less to those super engineers you barely need to train and have obvious experienced, but that's probably not the normal case.
This is what most of those questions on the list have in common: both sides of the table know that the answer will be contrived BS. They are a waste of everyone's time.
I know personal counterexamples where someone verged on job-hopping who became a great relatively long-term employee. And I've also known people who had a single example of clear not-meeting-of-the-minds. But, in general, if there's a consistent pattern, no reason to believe you'll be different.
I don't begrudge people for having good reasons to justify their job switches (e.g., wanted a manager role, and was told none would be forthcoming in the future), but e.g. "I got bored doing React and I wanted try Vue on the MEAN stack" does not bode well for the projects left in the lurch when he gets bored at my workplace.
I 100% agree lack of fit can absolutely be a reason to leave in < 6 months. One or two of these wouldn't be a concern, however I've seen resumes of people who have been in the industry 8 years, with the average stint being between 6-8 months and none over 2-years. I'll probably pass on this candidate, even if they otherwise look better than my next choice. Sure they might make "significant changes" in the 6 months they are here, but I'll almost certainly be better off in the long run with the person who sticks around long enough to have something resembling deep knowledge of our environment. If they have had a "lack of fit" with that many previous managers, I have no reason to believe I'll be the one they finally click with.
At 2nd job it took 5 months until the first commit. At my 3rd like 4 months.
Getting up to speed and not being a net time sink for the coworkers, like 8 months on my 2nd job even though I did kinda the same thing in my first job. About 5 months at my third job.
This also make me have a hard time understanding how job hoppers are valued at all.
But reading your comment I realize some companies work completely differently.
At my last job I had a small bugfix (a one liner but still a bug) committed on my first day, PRed and merged by the end of my second day. That job was the definition of hit the ground running but still. Damn.
It's easy to make a quick impact on greenfield or yellow field projects with little or no pre existing dependencies.
Hiring managers need to consider if the question is relevant, given the work to be done.
This is starting to sound a little cruel.
I once reviewed a resume where someone literally had a 30 year career when their longest stint was 14 months with several stints of 2-6 months each. Not exaggerating. I passed on the candidate myself, but the last 20 or so companies who hired him were willing to take their chances.
I also once interviewed someone else much more jr who looked like a serial job hopper. During the interview he had a very good explanation for it which eased my concerns literally 100%. This was like 4 years ago and he's still onboard.
At a previous employer we hired someone who had a 15 year job history where he left every employer like clockwork every 14-16 months. We hired him anyway because he had a specific skill we were looking for.
And, yeah, sometimes people with a string of bad luck will begrudgingly grind out a couple years somewhere they'd prefer not to be to better help their future career prospects. It's REALLY not the worst thing in the world.
And that! That is the problem to deal with.
Or just don't hire the bastard. Your choice.
I have asked this question in the past, and will continue to do so. I used to be more lenient with short term stint candidates. It never paid off, so I’m a lot more strict about it now. I have not once experienced the highly competent short stint non-contractor developer that HN would have me believe exists in such frequently that’d make this an unreliable signal.
I can’t realistically envisage an employee so valuable and productive that anything less than a 12 month stint wouldn’t leave a taste in my mouth, and for good reason. Not many people would be earning their keep for a fair portion of that. And I would’ve burned a lot of time learning how to work with them. At the end of it you’ve ended up with a loss of what little institutional knowledge they had, and a bunch of code written by someone without the proven ability to build maintainable software that’s only learned by being burned and learning the hard way.
Solid general piece of advice there. If the best answer is a lie, it’s not a good question.
Much better to do the invitation style questions. "Who is going to help me clean this up?" "What is left to your homework?", etc.
With the obvious major caveat of things being very tailored to the specific kid and situation, of course.
What is the most interesting project you have worked on recently? Doesn't have to be work related, but should be relevant to the job, e.g. programming, not gardening for a developer role. Why was it interesting? What were the biggest challenges on that project? How did you solve those?
Will show if people are passionate about something specific, and also gives a general measurement on what they consider challenging, and a first insight into their problem solving skills. If the person goes into detail, go along and ask more questions. Very helpful to figure out how a person works. This should hopefully be a low pressure "just talking" question to get started and help people to calm down a bit.
There's no need to lie or have a canned response, because tradeoffs are inherently between things which are both desirable.
Several of the questions in the article are very good questions to ask. Their purpose isn't for the candidate to give some canned response, like the article states. Their purpose is to help the candidate shine by asking questions that can be answered with examples from the candidate's background. If the candidate can't give solid answers that's not an issue with the questions.
There's nothing much to lose by that point.
Interviews are here to determine if the place is a good fit, on both sides.
Some things are just damn too easy to spot without even trying, and this one of them. Have a great story to explain why you are actually wont leave when meeting first frustrating item at your work.
Also, everything is being evaluated, including how you react to uncomfortable questions. Parents snarky response would be a nogo on itself, regardless of subject.
If the guy reply "why do you care", then it s def suspicious and the short term guy might be so incompetent he s pushed away and doesnt last more than a year. I d take the guy who seem to survive 4 years most jobs to be safe.
It seems very inaccurate to judge that probability purely on past performance, which is likely to be just a handful of data points.
I was one of those, but I don't think that there's many.
I remember talking to a manager of a startup we were working with, and he told me that the average stay of an engineer was 18 months, and that they plan for that.
I bounced like that, for my first three jobs, but stuck at my fourth, for nearly 27 years.
#8 measures self-awareness. Many people can answer this question with "I know I could be much better at X and I am working on it" which is what it's about.
I've also seen people fail #8 in interviews for junior positions. They can't introspect. It sounds impossible but it happens.
Eg. if I guess NYC population is 10M, with every 100th household having a piano, I can guess there are 100k pianos in NYC. If each of them needs tuning once every two years, that's 50k tunes each year. That's roughly 1k tunes each week, which, if a tuner can do 2 a day (5 work days per week), is 100 tuners.
And then it'd be worth comparing to tuning of venue pianos which are tuned more frequently: let's say 10k venues with pianos requiring tuning every month, or 2k tunes a week. So another 200 tuners.
You can also talk about pattern of work instead of market demands (eg most tuners only get 1 tune a week, so we can multiply the number of tuners by 10), just to show off you are ignoring other variables knowingly.
Obviously, each of the guesses has a large error margin, and errors multiply, so you can be off by way more than a single order of magnitude.
But just coming up with things to include in your calculation, and not being scared of exploring such random situations with little data you know, signals some generic problem solving ability.
Eg for a better answer, I now know I need exact number of people and venues in NYC, I need to ask tuners how often are pianos tuned, get some data on how frequent are pianos in homes, how long does a tune take, etc.
While I think I am decent at these questions, and I do believe they signal a very generic problem solving ability, I agree they are terrible interview questions for most software engineering roles, since you rarely hire for such generic ability, and might even get more out of a more specific question/test..
It's like the Drake equation - it doesn't matter what factors you choose (you can always come up with more) or what values you assign them (you can't know what most of them would be anyway). It's meaningless as a whole. And also irrelevant to software development or most anything else; at best it would be only very loosely relevant to managing a piano tuning company.
I have no idea what those values are! I am still able to make guesses to show that I can figure out a bunch of variables that affect the final value. And since I am multiplying data that's off maybe even by few orders of magnitude, errors multiply as well: I am aware of how erroneous input data affects the results too.
Is it relevant to software development as a whole? It definitely is.
You've got to provision web workers for new service being developed: you can only (guess)timate number of expected users, you can guess how much CPU time each request will take, figure out cost per unit, look at bandwidth requirements, and make your pick. To improve on your guess, you actually go and measure request times (p50, p99), decide on the number of users you can sustain with your team cost effectively, measure network usage, etc.
Or you need to decide on what type of DB to use? Depending on access patterns (read heavy, write heavy, time series...), data size and scalability demands, team familiarity with different tech, you make a guess at what should work: you can only measure after you've got the system exposed to real, live load.
Now, I still think it's a bad interview question: people can be perfectly comfortable answering above questions, yet not see that they are in abstract exactly the same as the number of piano tuners in NYC. It tests for that generic and general ability to estimate anything, and to break down any problem.
Yet some people get flabbergasted (like you seem to do?), since they think too much about specifics of each of the numbers they use and how wrong they might be. Basically, they have a hard time of letting go of the inaccurracies :)
As such, it's a mixture of tests: supposedly only tests you problem breakdown skills, but in reality tests your confidence in using inaccurrate numbers or lack of problem domain knowledge to solve a problem.
Which makes it a bad interview question unless both of those is what you want to learn about someone.
It's similar to estimating novel work.
It shows that one can break a problem down into more manageable pieces. Being more manageable means you can get a better estimate by delving deeper.
The question is not about finding the right answer, but about employing the right methodology.
And if you've got next-in-the-chain taking estimates as hard boundaries or facts, you need to be explicit they are not, and hopefully teach them to be a bit more suspicious of everything.
Even then, it's ok if someone else takes your ballpark and runs with, as long as you are willing to take responsibility. If you are higher in job title, be explicit this is what you are asking them to do, and that you will take the responsibility! Invite them to improve upon it as they learn more, though!
Ability to BS and multiply, more or less. Feels like a waste of a question even for the one asking it!
> Yet some people get flabbergasted . . . since they think too much about specifics of each of the numbers they use and how wrong they might be. Basically, they have a hard time of letting go of the inaccuracies :)
Having a hard time letting go of inaccuracies seems justified if you're in a more technical profession. Too often there's good engineering reasons for not wanting to excuse loose reasoning with bad guesses. On the software dev side, there are also too many cases where those kinds of fudged numbers are inevitably used against us.
According to recruiter and many answer here it appears people are spending days at job throwing numbers to the wall.
Can anyone explain what these numbers with massive uncertainty are used for and why go tough all that effort if you still have to go back to sources and references to fix up the estimate anyway?
The question was "What is the worst challenge you've faced, and how did you deal with it or overcome it?" and on me asking if it should be work related, "it doesn't have to be work related".
I can't remember whether the wording was exactly "hardest challenge" or "worst problem" or "most difficult challenge", but it used an absolute term (worst/hardest/most, not "a difficult challenge" or "a time in which you faced..."), and it was certainly very close to one of those.
I think that most people's hardest challenges in life are things like "my parents passed away" or "I came out as trans, and my parents disowned me, and I've had to come to terms with that" or "I had a divorce".. basically, interpersonal relationship experiences which really aren't very work relevant.
The use of "hardest" also makes it feel like you're lying if you go for something less serious, but work related.
I brought up a non-work-related rough time in my life from years ago, which still easily stood out as the most challenging time in my life, and then specifically asked again "this doesn't seem work relevant, should I choose a less serious work-related challenge?" and the interviewer asked me to continue with my non-work relevant one (i.e. asked me to relive some trauma).
It soured the experience massively for me, I had to try and disassociate some to avoid crying, and all in all it was the least comfortable I've ever felt in an interview. I can't imagine what signal that gave them.
That somehow also didn't disqualify me since I still got an offer, though I of course declined it.
Anyway, the company was osohq. I hope they don't ask this question anymore, but I guess prepare a story just in case if you do interview there.
It’s like how, in the US, if a stranger asks how you’re doing, you shouldn’t actually tell them how you’re doing. You should just say you’re doing fine, because they aren’t asking the question literally.
Sure, often you just have to measure. But I'd much rather work with the person who can get an order-of-magnitude estimate from a 10 minute measure than the person who gets a reasonably accurate estimate but only after taking half a day to set up the experiment.
> All these riddles are aimed to reveal the person’s creative nature.
They aren't riddles, nor do they require creativity. Fermi questions exercise a basic skill: estimation.
Bread and butter.
Of course, the only reason you'd ask such a question in the interview is that you have already decided you don't want the job. But the response can still be illuminating/entertaining. :)
Would probably end the interview right then and there but so worth it to see their reaction.
Quant finance companies expect employees to work 60-80 hours per week.
But then again, they pay 400-500K USD to 22 year old new grads.
10 years of experience in Cpp, Java, Javascript, Python, SQL, the last 5 of which as a lead (aka designing the data model and optimizing slow parts of the code base through better ds and algo implementations).
Only catch is I won't show up physically in NY or Philly or Chicago, etc.
It makes sense: they value people doing high-quality work and avoiding mistakes. Everybody there was also clearly very productive—it was one of my first experiences that convinced me that long hours are actively counterproductive.
I understand other firms in the space (like Citadel) have pretty different cultures, so it's not going to be true for the entire field.
A good response is "there s no hour limit: as long as there s work and the client isnt satisfied, we work. I think it's important to sleep a bit between work day sto stay coherent, otherwise as long as I can".
Doesnt matter true or not :D
"Work is variable. If we are on a super tight deadline with real implications, then people should put in extra hours if they can. Like, if we need to deliver for a major client, let's just do that.
And then other times, you can back off and work at a sustainable pace. It really depends on what makes sense in the situation"
This answer may not please everyone but I think it would resonate with reasonable people. It's worked well for me.
I'm 43 years old, been programming all of my life, and have a Master degree. I've never seen a person do concentrated work or study for more than 6 hours a day. I've met plenty of people who claimed to do double. But they were either lying to me or to themselves.
If you think people can do 50 hours per week of highly concentrated work, you still have a lot to learn. Once you understand developers have around 0 to 6 hours of productive work in a day, you can start to optimize it.
Best of luck to you!
I had a similar situation interviewing with one of Musk’s companies a while back. Who would want to work 80 hour weeks to make a 40 hour a week salary? The answer should be no one. You did great.
They were filtering out people who were not willing to work 50 hours a week
You were filtering out companies who expected over 40 hours of work a week.
The only complaint I have is they should have put hour requirements it in the job posting so you both filtered each other out before it got to the interview stage.
More like 30. But I'm not expecting perfect one.
The oversaturated modern job market melted the brain of the HR departments to the point that they think it's a great privilege to work for them when they are just another company and you only want to earn a salary.
To say this rubbed me the wrong way is an understatement. I knew immediately that I would loathe reporting to someone so egotistical, so it went downhill from there. I'm just never going humor to someone who starts a conversation with a pissing contest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
Are we talking about NTSC composite artifacts?
Man, this question.
I was asked this question in an interview for a startup. I gave the regular answer that was expected of me. The interview went well, and at the end when the interviewer (who was the co-founder) asked if I had any questions, I turned this around on him: "where do you see [company x] in five years?"
He laughed and talked about finding product-market fit and getting a certain amount of funding, and having so many employees, and that kind of thing. In other words, the things you're expected to say in that position. I was impressed, and took the position when it was eventually offered to me.
18 months later, the company was on fire, most of the staff were laid off, the product I had been working on was shelved, and the company pivoted to a completely different product. I put in my notice just before that co-founder left the company completely, and eventually took a salaried position in a different industry, and moved across the country.
So, we both just said the right things, but had absolutely no fucking idea where we'd be in even two years. If either of us had any idea, we wouldn't have told the other person anyway. Questions like this have no answer, but a trivially correct response, and so are meaningless wastes of time.
If this role can’t help you get to your actual goals, chances are you’ll be looking to leave sooner than later and you most likely wont be as invested.
So just curious, in my last job the real answer would have been “it’s paying enough to let me fund things on the side to help me move towards my goals”. Is this a wrong answer? I imagine most places wouldn’t care for such a blunt, cynical answer, but it’s the truth.
Standing in front of a mirror.
I would never ask this in an interview, but if I was foolish enough to do so, I'd be fine with this answer.
[Sighs heavily and pulls a tarot deck from laptop case]
Unless the chance of getting the job is unaffected by the answer, and it doesn't sound like it is, there is a right answer to the question.
> Questions like this have no answer
Is “Retired” ever a good answer to that, even if it’s true?
Of these, I've only been asked questions 5-9 back circa 1990 when I was just starting out and the "where do you see yourself in 5 years" and "what are your strengths/weaknesses" were ubiquitous. Something must have happened in HR world in the 2000's because interviewers stopped asking these questions even thought I was still hiring for dev positions so maybe a memo went out or possibly the internet was blowing up. By the 2010's I was 20+ years into my career and at that point your CV speaks for itself and they just want to know if you are going to be behaviorally difficult person. Interviewing very senior people is a much more difficile proposition.
When I was 20 (cusp of 21) and hiring for internships my mentor told me the answer to "where do you want to be" should be "in your seat" but I my mentor was so old he didn't understand the concept of HR people giving the first interview lolololol.
He's heard of work/life balance and doesn't want to do work during unpaid hours.
Nobody hires a cashier asking "tell me how you've made cashiering an integral part of your whole life or we won't hire you".
It seems very narrow minded to think that newer technologies could be "read" by any classical understanding of the word. I mostly learn new tech by cloning github projects and tinkering with them; or pick some interesting subjects and follow whatever scattered pieces of documentation I could find. You're not going to catch any seasoned engineer reading Machine Learning for Dummies.
It would be a much more straightforward question if you just asked the candidates what they learned recently.
10 - Fermi problems. Good to get an indication of a candidate's problem solving skills.
9,8,7,6 - The candidates's motivation, weaknesses, strengths, plans. What's wrong with that? Evidently, you have to modulate the answers somewhat, but the extent to which you do that well is indicative of your understanding of the job requirements, the competition, etc. Perfectly legitimate.
5 - Best candidate. Again, this is a fine question - it allows you to highlight your understanding of the job, and your fit, and your accomplishments, and so on.
4,2 - If you've had unusually short tenures at prior jobs, why? Again, perfectly legitimate question. There might be some reason pertaining to the prior company, or there might be a character trait with the candidate. Insofar as training a candidate incurs some fixed costs, it is legitimate to aim to find out whether they'll stay around for a while.
1,3 - "bad habits", family. Agreed, irrelevant.
But 2/10 is a pretty bad hit ratio for a top 10 list.
But agreed on the rest. OP thinks they are bad, when really they are poorly worded, and they would be better off taking a moment to think what kind of information the interviewer is trying to get at with their questions. Heck if the job involves interfacing with other people the ability to do this can even be an important signal on if the candidate is right for the job. A lot of people are really bad at asking what they are looking for.
So they don't fall in. Next question.
Well, you could ask them to solve a problem that might realistically come up on the job.
There are a lot of professions that require problem solving, but they don't use Fermi problems.
Interviewees for car mechanic or doctor positions don't get asked how many piano tuners there are in Chicago. They get asked questions like "A 2021 Prius is emitting a high-pitched whine and exhibiting poor acceleration from stop lights. What is the likely cause?" or "This patient has a blood pressure of foo/bar, a creatinine level of blah and has this other symptom blugh. What would be your next step?" If you gave them a Fermi problem they'd probably walk out the door.
Many of these "interview questions" are basically just cargo cult stuff. The company has heard that Microsoft or one of the FAANGs has used some weird-assed question at some point, and thinks that if only they do the same, they'll be the next FAANG. It's a tacit admission that the hiring manager actually has no clue as to how to evaluate a candidate based on metrics that are actually relevant to the job.
Software is a weird industry where you have to quiz every applicant to make sure they know how to program even though they've been the industry for years, and we seem to get it wildly wrong anyway.
Coincidentally, although I've been offered jobs after doing these kind of interviews and technical tests, I've only ever accepted jobs that are on the basis of "we know you, just come along" and I guess I now don't have any trust in a full interview process.
There are nearly as many poseurs in mechanics as there are in programming, though. I think reputable shops grill candidates pretty hard. And not with Fermi questions.
I prefer to actually think about what I want and devise a problem set to work through with the last candidates. You know, "here's a simple TCP server with a minor bug in the handler for one packet. Let's fix it". Real job: here's a 100k LoC server. Add a report/packet type/etc or fix a bug...
Uses up my time as well as theirs, but shows me a lot about how they work as well as what they'll be like to deal with.
Generally, if a person can talk in detail about a topic, they know the topic.
But it requires you also know the topic.
It's actually a very straightforward equation, but way too often people just trial-and-error or make an assumption out of nowhere, instead of plugging in the disk-size, user-count and growth rate multiplied with size per user.
Same goes for understanding what a computer is capable of, instead of throwing in some complex kubernetes cluster because requests are processing slow. If you actually knew the order of magnitude of queries per second that is normal, you would question the application first before questioning the number of servers.
Then maybe ask that question instead?
But even this question is not relevant to the vast majority of programming jobs. It's more of a devops question.
Because those are different jobs. A good software engineer must be able to reason around all sort of real world problems. Software does not exist in a vacuum.
Calculating the number of pencils used by Chicago's public school system in one year or whatever is pointless, though. I could "solve" this problem, or at least make a reasonable estimate, I suppose, but I'm a web developer. Wouldn't you get a better indication of my problem solving skills if you asked me about a problem related to web development?
A question like "what are some problems you ran into on previous projects and how did you solve them?" will be one I can answer instantly as well as give you a better indication of the competence I have doing the job you actually want to hire me for.
Interviewer tips: listen not just to the answer, but also how do they communicate, do they use deflective or passive language, ask them to elaborate a lot with lots of details (bullshitters are bad at this), let them do all the talking ("why? Tell me more" Or "and then what happened?" are all the additional prompts needed), take good notes
* tell me about a time you disagreed with someone senior to you. (After every prompt ask "How did you handle it" and "what were the results?")
* tell me about a time you failed
* tell me about a time you had too much to do and not enough time do it.
* tell me about a time you solved a problem in a way you were really proud of.
* tell me about a time you felt you were asked to do something that was outside your skillset or comfort zone.
Lots of alternative questions you could ask instead, but again the key is no right answers, and you'll get a lot more signal compared to most questions.
This blog post is pretty self congratulatory. We get it, employer bad -> employee good.
The fact of the matter is, they are investing in you. It often costs more to hire frequent replacements than one long-standing employee.
I’ve been places 9 months, 6 MONTHS, this question drives me up the walls. At the back of my head, I never once thought, “I don’t deserve to be asked this”.
9. Trying to understand persons motivation for the job. For culture fit, for position, etc. Not a'ways 'i love it and that's my sole interest in life' is a 'good' answer. Some companies/position are looking for cold professional approach, financial interest may be interpreted as less problematic and stable. Depends.
8, 7. To see how the candidate see himself, usually entry point for more questions and soft skills evaluation. Also gives you an idea what person in front of you sees as good and bad, and if he fits the manager/team. And people do tell their real weaknesses. Surprisingly, people tell A LOT on interviews.
6. Pretty obvious - direction of development, some want to grow to be in a managing positions, some interested in tech side only, position/company may provide support for this or no.
5. Also hate it, but used to see how motivated person is and again - how he sees his strengths.
4. Asked if person really jumps from job to job or, say, stayed in company 10 years. In first case - it's suspicious and question gives the chance for candidate to explain themselves. For people who worked in one place for a long time - let's see if we are the company that provides same benefits or not.
Last three is stupid and may be illegal.
But in general - questions are just entry points and a way to start a discussion about the things you wanna know. It's not stupid if you understand why do you ask it and not looking for just an answer.
Also his solutions for those who get this questions... Being passive aggressive rarely helps. You are in conversation with someone - speak, express your frustration, explain why. Facepalm, exhale and look deeply in the eye after being asked about why do you canned so many jobs - that's a great answer I guess, explains a lot, but just understand, that you are an asshole in this situation.
I learned to value good interviews. And I'm not afraid to stop and quit interviews that I don't like. If you don't like questions and don't want to participate, act like an adult - explain you are not interested and save time for both parties involved.