There's a secondary problem too: They are questions that have right and wrong answers, and they break down quickly if the candidate realizes that the truth is a liability.

Having been in panels where we had to ask some of those specific questions (specifically for hiring managers), and then seeing how those managers acted later on the job, the very worst hires (manipulative people who have no interest in the company as a whole, but gaining power) always ace those questions. The best hires of the lot, in practice, tended to give worse answers with some red flags, and only double checking on said red flags showed that yes, the rough edges in the answers were absolutely justified by their experiences.

So I'd not ask those questions myself when I can help it, as I'd rather not select for the best available manipulator.

> There's a secondary problem too: They are questions that have right and wrong answers, and they break down quickly if the candidate realizes that the truth is a liability.

Excellent point; thought-provoking and well-put. Agreed completely.

The article does have a few good questions, and the best, IMO, is #36:

> 36. How would you build a product for people who are looking for an apartment?

That is such a good question because it's incredibly open-ended. There is no wrong answer. It doesn't even necessarily require a computer-based solution.

If the interviewer moderates the interview well, a single open-ended question with a broad scope can lead to wide-ranging conversations that shed light on more than just technical prowess.

Open-ended questions also present the interviewer the opportunity to ask spontaneous questions, digging into the thought processes behind a candidate's choices. That digging can and should yield lots of valuable, relevant information about the candidate. Assuming, of course, the interviewer has the skills necessary to extract that value from the interview.

Ask "Why?" enough in these situations, and you eventually get something close to the truth[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Whys

> If the interviewer moderates the interview well, a single open-ended question with a broad scope can lead to wide-ranging conversations that shed light on more than just technical prowess.

Yes, this is my favorite kind of interview question. These days my goal as an interviewer is more to find somebody's strengths than their weaknesses. Nobody knows everything; nobody's good at everything. So what I'm trying to figure out in an interview is what this person can add to the team.

Sure, you do need to keep an eye out for red flags. But you won't find all of those in an interview anyhow, because people can hide those. It's much harder to fake a strength, and it's their strengths are ultimately what we hire people for.

We'd probably get along well then.

> If the interviewer moderates the interview well, a single open-ended question with a broad scope can lead to wide-ranging conversations that shed light on more than just technical prowess.

Way more engineers fail these, IME, than algorithms questions. I have to have a pretty low bar for "willingness to speculate and have open-ended conversation about approaches to problems," unfortunately.

That’s a bummer. Why is that, do you think?

I see what you did there.

> Having been in panels where we had to ask some of those specific questions (specifically for hiring managers), and then seeing how those managers acted later on the job, the very worst hires (manipulative people who have no interest in the company as a whole, but gaining power) always ace those questions.

Could you define what you mean by "ace" those questions?

I don't think giving a smooth or glib answer would be acing it at all, for instance.

But someone who gets super defensive, or pissed off, that easily by questions in an interview probably isn't someone who you'd want in a managerial or high-degree-of-communication role (like even a sufficiently senior IC role). Talking to people, and convincing people, even people who don't like you, is part of the job, there.

Of course, if you're the candidate who doesn't like that stuff, and the interviewer is trying to dig on that, it's probably a good sign that the skills they expect you to be using in the role aren't the ones you want to be using.

I have no interest in management and I have answered the why did I leave my last jobs honestly. No one who has been around for awhile has “interest in the company”. It’s almost always purely transactional. It’s always transactional for the company, why shouldn’t it be for the employee?

- I was at the company for a decade and it was time to move on to bigger challenges.

- I didn’t leave the job, the job left me - they went out of business - but I survived multiple rounds of layoffs and even afterwards I went to work as a contractor for one of our clients

- the product they initially hired us for wasn’t successful and we were being moved to maintained a legacy PHP product.

- I was bought in to bring an outside perspective to the company but we were in a satellite office and our influence was limited.

- the company changed direction and decided not to be a software company.

Sounds like if you alter your rubrics slightly you'd have a very effective approach for flushing out and discarding manipulative sociopaths early in the hiring process!

was about to say a similar thing.

ask the question, but simply choose the answers with the rough edges that might merit a bit more thought and discussion vs those that 'ace' the answers.

Exactly. Too-honest people are exactly the ones I want to hire, because they're way less dangerous once hired. An important part of any interview for me is testing somebody's willingness to bluff or BS. A little's perfectly normal, but too much is an immediate no-hire for me. An employee who covers things up to look good can cause enormous problems in a high-trust environment.

They said that the very worst hires ace those questions. They did not say that everyone who aced the questions (and was hired) was a bad hire.

It's a shame because an honest answer to questions about why you left a job, what your problems with management were, etc... is actually really good info for a manager.

It's a lousy hiring indicator.

I agree.

This kind of question ("Tell me about your weaknesses," "Tell me one thing you think your (current|ex) manager could do better to manage you," &c.) often test for one of two behaviours:

1. Diplomacy and tact, and/or; 2. Ability to regurgitate a template answer you can find in any rudimentary book on handling behavioural interviews.

It takes extreme skill to get a candid answer out of everyone, so it is easy to get gamed by the tactful people at the expense of people who don't read a book about how to ace the interview.

But people who don't read books about interviews can be very competent at their actual jobs.

> Tell me about your weaknesses

Whenever that question comes up - which happens more often than it should - I always concentrate on my inability to swim and my current plans (and barriers) for rectifying the situation.

> Tell me one thing you think your (current|ex) manager could do better to manage you

This sort of question is, for me, a good opportunity to start talking about task delegation - particularly as a learning opportunity - and how difficult it can be to get it right. Making sure, of course, not to give the impression that the previous manager was a complete failure at it (circumstances derailed the plan, etc)

I work for small companies mostly, except for one stint where I was officially the “dev lead”, I mostly am on paper a “Senior Software Engineer”. But, I’ve often been put in front of client, contractors, investors. and CxOs. Having tact in those situations is important.

But, I’m also all about getting things done, I’m blunt with my direct managers after I have established a relationship with them. Yes I do soft skills interview prep and I’ve done so for the last 20+ years. My success rate at interviewing is close to 100%.

maybe it tests for how important the job is to you - is the job important enough that you will do this demeaning exercise in order to get hired?

If you use these questions in your interviews, you are selecting for skilled liars.

If that job starts with a demeaning exercise, how many more of them are ahead?

Testing for desperation is an abuser behavior. They're looking for ability to control, ability to get away with things. I strongly encourage people to stay far away from companies that hire like that.

Won’t that select for desperate candidates that don’t have many options? Wouldn’t a company prefer candidates that are so desired they don’t feel the need to do do the limbo?

On the face, maybe, but if they qualify and they're desperate, they'll agree to a lower salary and be less likely to seek out a competitor to work at.

In contrast, someone who doesn't feel pressured to take this job or else will seek a more competitive pay, and maybe leave for another job if they're dissatisfied.

The desperate candidate that you underpay will lose the desperation after getting the job, realize they are getting ripped off, and leave much quicker than someone compensated at the market rate.

I don’t think I’ve ever had an interview where one of the questions wasn’t “why are you looking to leave your current position”. Also, “what are you looking for in your next role?” Is an important question. They both tell you as an interviewer whether you think they will dislike your company for the same reason and can your company offer what they are looking for. I mostly tell the truth to both questions. I want to self select out of companies that don’t meet my requirements.

26 on the other hand is a dumb question. I wouldn’t have anyway of knowing who didn’t think highly of me besides my manager via performance reviews unless I solicited gossip.

This is a great comment. People too often think of interview questions as purely factual, existing outside the process itself, but the reality is that the questions (once asked) have a psychological impact that influences what comes next.

> but the reality is that the questions (once asked) have a psychological impact that influences what comes next.

This is a hard thing to get used to as an interview.

And it affects not just your interview, but if the candidate has other interviewers after you, and you shake them thoroughly, you ruin any signal for subsequent interviews.

This extends to technical questions as well - if a candidate gets super flustered because they can't figure out your coding question, for the next interview they're already gonna be worried about how bad they bombed the last question.

Would you consider this a reasonable interview question for a management role? One major communication skill for people managers is to "turn around" a conversation that would naturally put people on the defensive into something that can be a learning and growth opportunity. Two core ingredients for that skill are self-awareness and the ability to empathize with people with whom you disagree (or who may even dislike you).

If you want to test for their ability to "turn around" a conversation, then why not propose a hypothetical situation and ask how they might respond. Maybe:

"How would you handle it if X came to you and said Y..."

Or, if they already have past management experience, ask for an example of a time when something like this happened, and how they handled it, and what they learned. Or maybe start with this and then propose a hypothetical as a backup if the candidate doesn't have anything off the top of their head?

I don't know, just doesn't seem necessary to jump up to that level of negative self-generalization with the candidate just to "test a management skill." I mean, come on, "people who don't think very highly of you"??? Who is "people"? Why are you generalizing like that?

"Hey, so, everything bad that's ever happened to you at work, so, like, what did you learn from that??"

well I've only experienced these questions in regards to a developer role - generally ones like "tell me why you're the best person for this job" or "why should we hire you instead of someone else with the same skills who is willing to work for less" to which my answers were - "there's thousands of people who can do this particular job you're asking be done, the guy I came down with here who's sitting in the lobby to also interview is one of them, I'm another" and "obviously if they have the same skills and are willing to work for less you should hire them and not me"

I didn't get either one of those jobs, now that I think of it.

Being asked those questions in an interview is a highly synthetic situation with, in my opinion, very little diagnostic value. But my personal experience with hiring of managers, or indeed being a manager, is nil. So let's say it's a strong opinion weakly held.

I'm personally not a fan of such games and tests.

I would instead present them a situation which tests the same skill, that way it's clear I'm testing them.

I usually respond to these types of questions by asking what is the goal the interviewer has. What are they looking to learn about me? Help me to know what your evaluative goal is by acquiring this knowledge, and then I can structure my answer to be helpful to you.

If after that the interviewer still tries to press me for very generic stream of consciousness responses about why I left a job or what someone who doesn’t like me thinks, I’ll just give some vague generic and brief response. If they aren’t happy with that, I’ll invite them again to answer my questions about their specific evaluative goal.

In an ideal situation this is a great strategy. But in my opinion there is already an incredible poverty of empathy in the construction of the interview questions. I would not expect the average interviewer to be detached enough from their pet questions to not only tolerate this kind of "dissent"[1] but actually reflect and deliver a useful response.

And since _my_ interviewer is almost certainly an average interviewer, asking that question seems like an exercise in futility. I don't feel as warmly rational about my answer here as I do about the one you responded to. Maybe I'm being overly cynical here, but it's informed by experience.

[1] Hyperbole to illustrate why I used the word dissent: "Who are you to ask me what I'm trying to learn? Shut up and answer the question!"

Any job where the interviewers would react badly to a counter response like mine is a job to _run_ away from. Being rejected by such an interviewer is a massive blessing.

They're not great, but the data they questions are trying to gather can be useful:

- What makes a team or a workplace a good one?

- What motivates you to seek change?

- Do you have self awareness of your own strengths and weeknesses?

- How do you respond to constructive, but perhaps difficult, feedback?

- Can you provide direct, actionable feedback to others?

This is all still valuable information for a hiring decision.

As a hiring manager of some time, I myself ask a similar question but in the form of:

- Given this previous situation we've just been talking about, how would you improve it? Did you attempt to make those changes? Why or why not?

I'm looking for someone who demonstrates:

- The ability to think beyond the current situation and look for ways for improvement

- Possible ability to affect change via influence rather than direct control

- A great answer might reveal how they championed changes or dealt with push back from management

- A great answer may also reveal an understanding of explicit and implicit power structures in an organization, i.e.- what changes are feasible versus unrealistic.

This question is better asked to someone with more experience as I expect a more nuanced answer from a "senior" compared to someone with just a few years of experience. If I don't get a good answer from someone with a decade or more of experience, I will probe further to understand if they are an agent of change in an organization or just go with the flow.

I'm totally open to feedback that I could be doing this all wrong, but one other thing to consider:

My approach to interviewing is to first and foremost gather data. I need a fair bit of data to make a hiring decision. In the moment, I'm not trying to make deep value assessments on the answers. To do that, I need a more comprehensive view of the data in context. Maybe I'm fine with someone who goes with the flow given other aspects of this person's skillset or the composition of the team or the mentality of their manager. Maybe just an attitude would be setting the person up to fail. All of that assessment is made later by the hiring manager or committee using as much data as we can possibly and reasonably gather during the interview process.

Unsubstantiated opinion: “gathering data” is a bad mindset to be in during an interview. That may contribute to the adoption of pathological questions like, “Why don’t people like you?"

I can tell exactly why I left all of my previous jobs without either being dishonest or looking bad.

But can everyone else?

why is 3 bad? seems introspective to me, unless the answer is just 'most money'. maybe geared towards people who choose professions based more on interest/growth for happiness than getting fat stacks and buying happiness.

I'm trading a third of my life for money, but it can't be about the money?

If it's about money for you, you might be one of Those People.

You know... the people who negotiate their salary.

People who aren't team players, in other words.

We can't have any of those hanging around here. Lowers the tone.

If your working for a third of your life, wouldn't you optimize to enjoy what your doing? Life to some is far more enjoyable if they are working in an interesting domain or doing something they feel is worthwhile, rather than being absolutely miserable, making fat stacks, then trying to buy that feeling of contentment with material things

You're not wrong, but those of us lucky enough to make that choice are rare. My point, however, is the question posed to the potential employer, looking at me with judgement that I might seek to optimize the time I'm spending away from my family by making absolutely as much money as I can.

> I'm trading a third of my life for money, but it can't be about the money?

There's a lot of things you or I could be doing for money; why this career path in particular?

> There's a lot of things you or I could be doing for money; why this career path in particular?

It pays... more money?

> There's a lot of things you or I could be doing for money

Not for the amount this gig offers that aligns with my skills.

Easy answer - I go into how I was computer geek from the 6th grade programming in assembly on 8 but computers and how much I’ve enjoyed seeing the progression of technology, being a part of it, and evolving as technology has evolved.

That answer does a few things and addresses some elephants in the room.

- why am I in my mid 40s and wanting a job as “just a developer”

- yes I am “old” but I’ve always kept up with $latesr_cool_kid tech.

- No,I’m not going to try to take your job as a manager.

- I’m okay with the amount you are paying which is slightly above market.

I prefer it to working in a warehouse, operating a microfilm machine, routing faxes, end user support, security consulting, and the other jobs I have had before this one.

No it has to be about changing the world and how much you adore this amazing company that gives you the privilege of wasting 1/3 of your life on them. In fact you should be paying them.

"I've got a real passion for frozen yogurt."

Suppose you left a company because your coworkers were very difficult to work with. Poor communication, weird social dynamics, that kind of thing.

Explaining that without coming across as a "troublemaker" can be pretty difficult. You just sound like you're ragging on the company / people rather than explaining the issues well. And do you really want to get in a deep conversation about cultural issues at your previous company?

I’ve answered that very honestly.

“the software development manager was originally hired to bring new thinking into a company in $small_town so he spearheaded opening an office in $bigger_city. After awhile, the old guard pushed him and my manager out and that left us without a voice in the satellite office and our input was ignored. I want to be somewhere which allows me to be impactful”.

I should also add on, that it helped in that situation that I had two levels of management that respected me and who I used as references.

It would have been a lot harder to explain if I actively didn’t get along with my managers.

Then just be honest and say it. "I left this organization because I felt uncomfortable there. If you want more detail I can provide it."

And yes, as the hiring manager, I may want to understand the cultural issues at your last company. Why?

Because I want to understand (a) what you value, (b) how you deal with conflict, (c) will you be able to help me improve our culture here and (d) what cultural issues you may or may not bring with you.

If I'm going to help you be successful here, I do want to understand your background. I may not need all that information before hiring, but I will get to it eventually because it's pertinent to helping you and the team succeed.

The point is that it's a negative thing to talk about, and frankly sometimes you can't just turn it into a positive story of what you value and how you deal with conflict.

Sometimes a person sees bad shit and just runs, and that's a valid approach. Psychoanalyzing every decision they make is the trap of interviewing.

Agreed, and to move up one level of meta, the interviewer should be thinking about this kind of analysis when they construct their interview process/system.

“How can I moderate this conversation so the questions themselves are not obstructing the candidate’s answers?”