Questions to ask a company during a job interview

Re:Questions to ask a company during a job interview by war1025 on Monday September 09, 2019 @02:44PM (#20921018)

I listened to a podcast recently [1] that talked about "embodied knowledge", which is basically the idea that what we know is often very different from what we think we know.

The idea being that you will learn much more about someone / something if you ask questions that are anchored to a time and place rather than generic "unembodied" questions.

So the first question you list "Do you value code quality?" is an "unembodied question" and there is no hook for the person to dig into reality and give you an honest answer.

The second, "Who was the last person promoted?" is "embodied" in that it is anchored in time and place. And because of that, a person is going to use their memory, rather than their rehearsed "value system" answers.

Anyway, it's basically exactly what you said, but I just wanted to recommend that I thought the podcast was a worthwhile listen.

[1] https://www.thepermaculturepodcast.com/2019/1912/

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Re:Questions to ask a company during a job interview by Tronno on Monday September 09, 2019 @03:01PM (#20921186)

Without having listened to the podcast, another way to frame this is using the concept of yes/no questions, who/when/what/why/how questions, and open-ended questions.

Y/N questions are not very revealing and are likely to lead to dead-ends in the conversation.

WWWWH questions reveal a specific bit of information, but can also lead to dead-ends.

Open-ended questions ("Tell me about...", "What do you think of...", etc) will foster good conversations and uncover new threads to pull. In my experience, this is by far the best way to interact with other people, whether they are interviewing you or not.

Coming up with good/relevant questions on the spot is a skill that can be difficult to master, but is extremely valuable.

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Re:Questions to ask a company during a job interview by war1025 on Monday September 09, 2019 @03:10PM (#20921263)

To expand on this, people will commonly give you unintentional "hooks" for where you can go to increase the depth of the conversation.

For example, people use common words as short hand for many things ("Work was stressful", "The kids are being a pain", "We had a really nice weekend"), and a mistake people run into when talking with others is that they assume the person they are talking with meant they same thing they themselves would have if they had used that phrase. This leads to lots of people "listening but not understanding".

So basically, offhand comments and common phrases are a great place to get a person to dig in deeper into their feelings on a topic. Usually they indicate something that is on the person's mind but that they probably haven't worked through enough to put into words. That means you will get a much more raw and unfiltered response from them.

Also it's always good to remember that people love to talk about themselves, even if they say they don't.

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Re:Questions to ask a company during a job interview by hinkley on Monday September 09, 2019 @06:39PM (#20923269)

Hanging out with permaculture people (going on 6 years now) gives me an idea of what it must be like to hang out with famous artists. How can someone be so right and so crazy at the same time?

"The inflammation in my body"? Sounds like a dopamine response in someone whose sympathetic nervous system is strung tighter than a kettle drum.

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Re:Questions to ask a company during a job interview by war1025 on Monday September 09, 2019 @06:57PM (#20923406)

Don't have a good response other than that I completely agree. :)

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