Ask HN: What's the biggest red flag you've encountered during a hiring process?
I'll start.
A few years back, I was interviewing at a then "hot" startup. At the end of the process, the CTO calls and says they'd like to extend an offer. I was expecting him to walk me through the offer details, when he goes "well, are you going to take it?" I asked about getting some specifics (cash comp, equity, etc.) and he explains that they ask candidates to commit before sharing any details.
I told him that didn't seem like such a great idea, and he assured me that comp wouldn't be an issue, and that they do this to avoid hiring mercenaries. I passed and never looked back.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadFortunately I had the presense of mind to see through that and walked out. When I got back to school, I found out that a friend of mine had worked for the same company selling Bibles in rural Tennessee; he hated it so much that he quit after a couple of weeks. He didn't make any money because the contract he had signed required that he stay for the entire summer before seeing a penny.
One of them condescendingly asked me if I voted for Trump, simply because I am originally from a non-blue state.
It was very strange, anti-toxic/toxic, and came out of nowhere. It made me consider secretly filming & voice recording interviews, especially in the SF Bay Area where people are a bit more influenced by political trends.
"anti-toxic/toxic" --> meant to say "anti-social/toxic"
The biggest red flag ever
But some companies take this to an extreme.
I was working on a niche clothing brand at home in my spare time for example when I wanted to work for a gaming startup. They were giving me such a repulsively hard time about my side project even though the clothing had literally nothing conceivably close to the company's business model.
It's so stupid because companies should try and hire people that have diverse experiences and are working hard to achieve something.
But, for companies that are batshit anal about side-projects, they're going to make you sign some onerous contract and have management that are assholes about this kind of thing.
What happens in the event that you "hit the lottery" and some side-project becomes a big deal worth a lot of money? Somebody from your company is eventually going to find out about it: maybe from a public interview or from public records. If they put 2 + 2 together about when you built this and figure out that they can file some legal claim to it, you're in a mess of a legal situation that you don't need to be in.
Safer to put your cards on the table and make sure there's nothing in an employment agreement that puts something you really care about at risk.
The percentage of companies that are very anal about side-projects isn't substantial. They need you more than you need them and it's safer to be honest and look elsewhere for employment.
Was told exactly the same, verbatim, followed by "besides you won't have time to work on them anyways".
like texas and california diametrically opposed (I think)
texas: we own you
california: you can start a startup in your garage while working for someone else
If a company cannot negotiate salary because of some corporate rules, I'm not interested. If a company will not give me any flexibility in working hours I'm not interested. If a company tries to make me feel bad about not immediately accepting their offer I'm very likely to not accept their offer at all.
Rigid companies which have no regard for your emotional wellbeing are not pleasant places to work and I struggle to give my best when I feel I'm not respected.
This was Nvidia in 2006 and their stock is up about 200x since then.
Who knows, maybe if you joined you would have hated it too, or loved it ! The story you shared is likely shared by many other companies that went through hyper-growth
TLDR: Stuff is hard!
Some opportunities I missed but they didn't go anywhere: Docker, Qualcomm.
Consumer Devices is a general dud I think. Software and data is where it is at. I dunno?
Even in other posts here, people are like “whew I wouldnt want to work for a company where an unrelated recruiter and hiring manager did something nonstandard” as if it was a predictor of their team
Nowadays it may be easier somewhat to get some insight into inner workings, but in 2006 there was no Blind, Glassdoor, etc. Sometimes the positive signals outweigh the negative. In my case they did not.
They’re just people like everyone else, subject to the same psychological failings as anyone.
Giving people a lot of power over other people might just be a recipe for disaster.
Of course I’ve met some compelling leaders and I’ve seen them replaced with total fools so maybe there are people who are better at it than others. (Eric Schmidt springs to mind as an example of the former and Sundar whatever his name is an example of the latter) Maybe it’s just hard to tell the difference. Or maybe our selection process is flawed.
The question comes from a self-selecting population.
Everybody would improve something, and it can give you insight into actual day-to-day challenges.
If they say, “Nothing,” either it’s the one rare perfect workplace or they are too afraid or checked out to give a real answer.
Either way it’s informative.
(sort of like: "my one weakness is I work TOO hard!")
This reminds me of the joke where the economist sees the $100 bill on the ground and says if it were real, someone would have grabbed it already. It assumes that the market is perfectly efficient when it is not. There are tons of reasons why someone would work at one job when they would prefer another job:
Maybe the local job market is poor, but the worker can't move.
Maybe their spouse has a medical condition that requires really good health insurance, and moving to another job would lose that coverage.
Maybe the worker has been job-hopping too much and has to stay at this job for another year or whatever.
etc., etc.
Example: "You've used k8s, how and in what context?" "Ok, great, so you've AWS EC2 instances, how did you manage cost and performance there?" "You're listing Clojure here, what were your thoughts on X feature/limitation"? It was a rather fluid discussion about the ins and outs of technologies, stacks by engineers.
Sometimes actually interrogating someone's knowledge of a system works just as well. I code a lot of things slowly, and need to think through my designs with a pad of paper. I really can't do it when someone is hovering over my shoulder.
"given this architecture diagram, what you would do if you have to debug/explain to junior how to debug a problem with this sympthom" or "how you would design an architecture with this kind of requirement"
oh but there's 1 coding challenge, just simple date addition/subtraction tho
I believe interviews are a two-way street, and if a company isn't willing to engage in meaningful dialogue, it might signal potential issues down the road.
For those interested, we have open positions! https://www.ratherlabs.com/open-positions
EDIT: illegal drug trafficking
"It's close to where I live / I can walk here" = You probably don't have to worry about their "car breaking down" or general issues getting to work.
"My friends work here" = You're going to have a bunch of teenagers dicking off if you're not running a tight ship.
And there are a whole bunch of neutral responses too. "I need a job and you all are hiring" is a perfectly acceptable, accurate answer to this question that literally every applicant can provide.
When I was applying for jobs like this as a teen, applications specifically asked about my transportation situation.
> You're going to have a bunch of teenagers dicking off if you're not running a tight ship
Just run a tight ship, then. People who didn't know each other beforehand will also dick around. I've made plenty of friends out of work colleagues.
> "I need a job and you all are hiring" is a perfectly acceptable, accurate answer to this question that literally every applicant can provide
Then I'd argue it's the opposite of legit: it's completely superfluous.
GP must never have worked in that industry, or they only worked that one job at Outback Steakhouse for a manager thinking they were changing the world. It’s a familiar mindset to those in tech…
If that's a red flag, the whole world is red.
I think it's hilarious being asked this question when I'm in early discussions with a company that reached out to me.
Even for fast-food service jobs, there is always some differentiator.
People who can't answer this question are more likely to turn over. That's why it is asked.
From the moment I first savored the delectable aroma of your signature charbroiled burgers, I knew that my destiny was intertwined with your esteemed establishment. The synergistic blend of your brand's values and my personal ethos is a match made in culinary heaven, a union that promises to revolutionize the gastronomic landscape.
The prospect of contributing to Hardee's renowned legacy of taste innovation and unparalleled customer satisfaction resonates deeply with my quest for self-actualization in the fast-food industry.
Each meal served, every customer smile elicited—these are the very keystones that embolden my commitment to fulfilling my dream of championing a new era of succulent satisfaction. With utmost fervor, I implore you to consider my application, for it is not just a role I seek, but a calling I am destined to embrace with zest and zeal."
I later went on a business trip with him and found out that 1) he was left of center and 2) a prior CEO was very much a Randist and sent the book to every SVP and up in the company.
Nope... I have worked there 20 years so far.
My first job was to evict the former sysadmin, and within the first 90 days I was relocating the whole company, building out the new IT infrastructure.
So in the spirit of the recent post about Charlie Munger killing a lot of pilots I would suggest not judging the company solely by its lobby. Make a list of real deal-breakers and consider overlooking the rest.
Mind linking this? The search box isn't giving me any recent results that look right.
He wore a full motorcycle-style helmet with a mirrored face visor which he refused to open; it was like talking to a member of Daft Punk. It had fake hologram bullet-holes on it.
More importantly, he skied like an asshole: cutting people off, sudden stops or changes in direction without checking if anyone else was coming, cutting ahead in the lift line, stopping to readjust his gloves or whatever directly in the lift exit ramp, shouting at people who he felt were in his way -- just totally self-absorbed and borderline dangerous.
It turned out to match his management style 1000%.
"I'm autistic"
"Oh, you don't seem autistic"
I've had that answer before... That was a fun but volatile place to work for a summer internship.
The fashion for high functioning, highly articulate individuals calling themselves "autistic" is relatively new. To the vast majority of people the word autistic means severe disability that requires constant care, involves repetitive stimming motions and often is directly visible via an abnormal facial structure.
In this conventional usage of the term autistic people don't turn up to job interviews and say "Oh your brother is autistic, cool that it inspired you, I'm autistic too!" because they don't turn up to job interviews at all. Depending on how severe her brother's condition is she may well have been quietly offended that you were trying to pass yourself off as having a similar problem.
It’s a spectrum, and you don’t know the struggles of the person you’re replying to. Just because someone can mask or play off as high functioning doesn’t mean it’s not a struggle, especially with people making flippant remarks like this - in fact one of the struggles that keep people from being continually employed is that accommodations aren’t taken seriously because people assume that a working mask means they’re trying to make up excuses. Your statement that the “vast majority of people” only equate it with only the most severe disability is based on… what? Almost everyone I know especially in tech have worked with someone on the spectrum.
I said that I was appreciative that she wanted to make healthcare better for her brother, because it would help people like me too. And her response, after hearing my story about struggling to navigate the system she claims to want to improve on account of my very real, and sometimes very debilitating, disability, was "but you don't seem disabled." I don't think I'm in the wrong for being offended here. In my mind, It'd be very similar to if I had said that I struggled with the healthcare system due to losing a leg in an accident, and her response was "oh, but I can't see that your leg is missing because this is a zoom call."
The fact that I wasn't, at _that moment_, having a visible need, doesn't negate the existence of a disability that occasionally renders me mute, or makes me so overwhelmed I lash out at the people around me, or causes me actual physical pain. And mind you, I _was_ stimming; out of necessity many autistic folks who work in professional environments find stims that are relatively invisible on camera or in person in order to help us get through social interactions without losing our minds. It wasn't visible to her, but that doesn't change the reality of my story and my situation.
just a question about the phrase, not this particular person
how does this give any predictive insight aside from you thinking they're hiding the rest of the time
- I am autistic
- I don't need any particular accommodations
- I will attempt to overcommunicate what I'm doing so that I can get your help if I rabbit hole on something (one of my common tendencies)
- I tend to need mental health days slightly more often than usual
- I will tell people I work with when I'm comfortable doing so, but this isn't a secret and don't feel bad if you accidentally out me.
I've never had a manager be anything but extremely appreciative to receive this context. Normalize talking about your needs, even if you don't have a diagnosed neurodivergence!
> he skied like an asshole: cutting people off, sudden stops or changes
It sounds like Mr. Bean was mistaken as a CEO and was just rolling with it.
They always do.
Then, I sat down with the VP of engineering, and he opened the interview with "so, what do you think it is we do here?" And I naturally stuttered through a canned answer about how they use arbitrage opportunities in the market to profit off of mis-priced securities, etc. Then he asked me, "but what benefit do we provide? Why is working here good for society?"
I blanked, and didn't answer for about 15 seconds. Then, I tried to start piecing together an answer until he stopped me, told me he had found my Facebook, and wasn't appreciative of my politics (I was moderately lefty in high school, significantly more so now; maybe this conversation is part of why). He had _printouts_ of some posts I had made criticizing George W. Bush, talking about why I thought we should be raising taxes on higher earners, supporting Obamacare, etc. He told me that he didn't think I had the "cojones to stomach the job" (direct quote), and told the recruiter not to bother with the last interview and that I had failed.
I _sobbed_ on the train home; I think it was the worst I had ever felt about an interview in my entire life, and yet looking back at it, I think this was the best possible outcome. Imagine if I had worked for this asshole.
I've worked for companies I don't personally agree with in the past; it's part of living in a society(TM). I am able to hold my nose to a certain extent to make an income for my family (heck, I am currently having to cross picket lines to come to work, which makes me feel icky). But I can't fathom what hell I would have been living under had I gotten and taken that job.
Sounds like you gave an answer that didn't mention that at all, and may have presented the firm as merely taking advantage of other people's mistakes to make profit. Clearly that's not how he saw it, and the VP correctly guessed from your social media that you may not actually have understood the part of the finance industry that you were applying to work for. The question was to check whether you'd actually be enthusiastic about the work you were doing and you did indeed fail it.
This would be like if you turned up at Google and an interviewer said, "What do we do here" and you said "exploit data to profit from people's ignorance" and when they gave you a second chance you couldn't answer.
Frankly you can't get a job at most firms if you can't explain why you think the company should exist.
An example is onions futures; see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act and check the onions price history: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WPU01130216/ compared to a commodity where futures trading in common, like corn: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PMAIZMTUSDM where there are price swings but the volatility and frequency of the swings is lower.
I’m a layperson, not involved in finance, but this is the value add I most commonly hear about.
For instance, the oil/car industry pays for basically none of the large negative externalities they create. In this case, I hazard that futures industry captures more value than they create. And that value is extracted from other players in the vertical chain, particularly farmers.
When I was an undergrad, I interviewed at a then-very small, now-very-prestigious quant firm. In the last interview or so, I asked the quant head something like, “but what value do you provide to society?”
He said, “we provide liquidity.”
I turned down the job they later offered and went to work at a software company that sells a thing people buy.
I would prefer the price of onions - seems like the price is a lot more stable other than a few points out of the year where it is very high. For those times, I could choose to have a small store of onions or go without.
For the price of corn, if the price is high, chances are it will be high for a while, so I'll have to go without for a while...
What do other people think?
I really enjoyed "The Rational Optimist" where it explains things like trade, which tends to make everyone wealthy, while generally the people trading think they are both getting the better end of the deal.
Whenever I have shitty experience like that I always think of the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, there's some part where somebody doesn't deliver and the bad guy loses out, and upon being told he lost something valuable, he says "not as valuable as knowing who to trust". Like you say, it was a bad experience but actually the best possible information you could have gotten.
Stock markets, I can see- they existed and exist to share risk and profit. But shorting and arbitrage, it's much harder for me to understand those.
(and yes, that VP was a sociopath)
Longing == buying a share
Shorting == selling a share
2/ people do it for their own (expected) personal profit
3/ at the market level, these transactions contribute to price discovery
You could imagine banning currency arbitrage, but then you’d have to at the same time enforce somehow consistent prices on all markets (I.e. literally do the same thing as arbitragers do)
Someone outside of finance exchanging one forex for another could get a more fair rate if their exchange is more efficient due to increased liquidity.
But by the same token, the other side of that trade is getting a less favourable (but still more "fair") rate
Robber Baron Capitalist comes in and says "hey wait a minute, there's money to be made!"
He starts buying goods in A, then selling them in B.
This is a very, very stupid idea, your 5 year old could have it. So that means as soon as Business A figures it out, B , D, E, and F aren't far behind.
The net for people in Market B is that now they don't pay the previous scarce price, but something closer to Market As, and more people can afford the good. This means that someone does all the work of building out all that logistics for us, simply to exploit the price differential.
If there is an imbalance in the market, someone will balance it. That's how it works. Let's say you have two different securities, that both represent the same underlying aspect of the economy. This happens all the time; there are multiple ETFs that represent the same basket of stocks, there are options and futures on those ETFs, including different types of futures that represent the same ETF but at different levels of leverage, there are options on those futures, and so on. All of this exists because there is no reason for them not to—people believe they can make money, reduce risk, or whatever by using these derivative instruments, and maybe they can.
But all of these stocks, funds, and derivatives are valued by one thing, and one thing only: their price on the open market. So, what happens when one of these funds get out of whack with the value of its derivatives, or even the underlying stocks themselves? Remember how we had multiple securities representing the same underlying aspect of the economy? Well, one is now worth more than the other, despite the fact that they represent the same thing. There's an imbalance, and if it gets too far out of balance, people are going to realize, wait, I can just buy 500 shares of SPY and short one ES contract, and that's free money! And that's entirely correct, you can. But the result of doing so is a minor market correction; the price of SPY goes up and the price of ES goes down, and boom, we're back in equilibrium.
So, arbitrage is a necessary and unavoidable aspect of the stock market. You can't have a stock market without arbitrage, because the stock market reflects so many different facets and ways to trade ownership and value of companies. Arbitrage is, in essence, the means by which information flows between various aspects of the market, and it connects them together so they effectively move in lockstep. It is nothing less than the market leveling itself, just as water poured into one side of a swimming pool fills every part of the pool.
It means you can actually ask the question "how many dollars is a pound worth" and get a meaningful answer.
If arbitrage wasn't possible for some reason, and it's a natural phenomenon so that would have to involve pretty horrific levels of state-backed control, then the answer would be:
"It's $X in London and heading down, was $Y in New York yesterday and heading up, and $Z in Chicago but you probably can't get an account there because it takes ages and requires special paperwork, and <thousands of additional prices>"
You would then spend the rest of the afternoon attempting to figure out how the hell to do a basic international trade or FX transaction and by the time you'd finished reviewing the prices they'd have all changed again.
Arbitrageurs seek out and correct fixable price disparities, thus enabling you to talk about one global price for a particular type of trade. This has tremendous value for everyone.
Nope.
I did that, got hired, and wouldn't comply again. First job after university.
Nothing bad happened. Years later I could read the report, and it was nothing remarkable.
"Graphology is the analysis of handwriting with attempt to determine someone's personality traits."
I went ahead and filled it out while I was there, but I'd already decided not to move forward by the time the interview was over.
I walk into a completely dark and empty cubicle space, one lit office in the back.
Lunch meant the interviewer ate a Hot Pocket off a paper plate as we talked.
Didn’t even offer me any.
First interview I walked out of.
I hope that middle bite was frozen.
I remember dumping a full lunch in the trash can as we walked out towards a conference room for the next interviewer I would meet...
Another red flag is that it's a freelancing site.
Role-play starts and this guy storms in, slams the door and starts shouting about how the software department are useless and how are we going to proceed. At one point he yelled that without his department we wouldn't have money to keep the lights on.
In retrospect, I'm sure this was a lot of fun for him and it might have been a good filter but I also am more than happy that I did not proceed to the next round if this is what they wanted to show me about their culture.
Wonder if your responses helped them practice for real meetings. :)
The listing was on the edge of too good to be true, and the immediate and desperate attempts to reel me in were a huge red flag.
I withdrew my application, did everything I could to block them, and reported the listing to indeed.
I have no idea what the scam was, but I'm absolutely convinced it was a scam. It was honestly pretty scary, and I'm sure that a slightly less vigilant person would get pulled in.
After a while you can tell which positions these are by how they are worded and how the recruiters associated with them talk and behave during the call.