Ask HN: Questions to ask a company to know you don’t want to work there?

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I’ve gotten lots of mileage out of “How do big decisions get made at this company?” And you want to turn it into a conversation – probe their answers, ask for examples, etc.

You learn about how each interviewer experiences the decision-making process. How are the decisions communicated? Who decides? Do initiatives steamroll people and teams? Are people able to filter up suggestions or start their own initiatives? Can decisions get made team-by-team, or do they have to be made for the whole company? Do they change their mind when they get new evidence? Do people change their mind too much? Do they have trouble saying “no”? If they want to tell you “no,” do they actually say it? Are they too afraid to make decisions that can change the culture, and just kinda drift?

As an IC engineer, this is what I have the least control over (and can find the most frustrating). So I want to hear exactly how broad change happens. It helps me imagine how it’ll feel to spend four years in the environment.

This is the kind of question that you need to ask everyone. You won’t get a good answer from one person. You want to ask a few people and see if their stories line up.

I’ve found Culture Queries to be a good resource for this. Helped me avoid questions that led to boilerplate answers (“do you have work/life balance?” -> “How responsive are people to emails/Slack over the weekends and after 6pm?”).
Can I talk with the staff I will be working with. It is not enough that they want you, and feel they can work with you, you also need to feel you can work with them. When talking w the staff, discuss what a typical day is like. What are their frustrations and joys. My last question is usually ‘So why have you not moved on to something better?’
Stay away from companies who don’t let you talk to the lowest-ranking members of the team.
I totally agree. Their perspective and thoughts also matter. This kinda goes along with the whole “Do they allow their entire team in interviews”.
What type of firefights have you had to deal with? How often do they occur? What did you do to make sure your last firefight never happens again?

– What’s the roadmap for this year? This gives me a lot of insight on what I could be working on, and also if the company is a bit clueless about their direction.

– What would I do in the position I’m being interviewed for? This completes the picture, similar to the previous one, but different perspective.

Let’s say I’m working on a project and am blocked by technical issues that I don’t understand. What do I do next?What is the channel for client feedback to reach the dev team? Can you give me an example of how this has worked in the past?

If I’m working on a feature and discover technical debt that will make it more difficult to implement, how do I decide whether to focus on that debt or the feature? Can you give an example?

The reason interviewers like to ask for examples is that it’s easy to bullshit when speaking abstractly, but people are less likely to lie to your face. Use that to your advantage

Questions about tests. I have found consistently that when an interviewer does not know what the test coverage of their codebase is, more likely than not they don’t care about such trivialities.

No matter how respectable the company might look on the outside, the codebase is an incorrigible mess built by cowboys and they will expect you to maintain it.

Ask about on-call expectations.How often do you go on-call. Does everyone participate. How is the documentation handled for resolutions. How often are there problems that you would get called for.

I think a good tech one that is a bit opinionated is: Does a project(s) build, and run (fully, without problems) in 5 or less steps?

how often do you do standups?
Here’s another one: Do employees actively try to recruit their friends and people they respect in their industry for reasons besides a referral bonus?
What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made on the job, and how did your team/management respond to it?

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