I've consistently gotten the "tell me about a time you fucked up" and "tell me about a time you worked with a douchebag" ones. And simple "tell me about a time you disagreed with someone at work"-type ones. Not every interview, but often. And unless you've actually had an experience that happens to make for a good answer to those, you've basically got to make something up. Even if you have fucked up tons of things and worked with a bunch of douchebags—the questions are weird because if everyone answers totally honestly some people will have way better answers, especially if they're also good story-tellers, because they've been lucky ("lucky") enough to have had an experience fitted perfectly to a good answer for those questions.
Even for the simple "time you disagreed" one, I don't exactly file away details about little disagreements in my head, so I can't form a satisfying tale from those—almost all of which were pretty boring anyway—sorry, so here's some made up bullshit again. Which will be better than most people's best honest story anyway. What the fuck was the point of these, again?
[EDIT] I actually think being a smidge less psychologically stable and well-adjusted might make it easier to answer some of these! Hahaha. Shouldn't have read the Stoics so much in high school, I guess.
[EDIT, responding to edit]
> I'm sure it made sense 30-50 years ago when people spent decades with the same employer, but anyone asking that question today is just indicating how out of touch they are with the real world.
Yeah the honest answer, based even on my relatively stable employment history, would be "somewhere other than your company, with a 15-20% pay bump (by the time I leave—30% over what you're about to offer me now), probably attained leveraging something I learned here". Just following the trend line here, don't blame me :-)
(My story is about having to work with a cowboy coder on the same codebase, but the cowboy coder happened to be the boss of our sister team and had lots of apparent productivity and was thus loved by higher ups. The humility comes in from describing my own attempts at improving the situation but failing. Basically, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.)
Do you? I just say "sorry, that hasn't happened to me" if I need a 'not applicable' answer. I don't think it's affected my hit rate.
I generally just act completely openly and honestly in interviews. Could be a regional thing.
[EDIT] actually I'm fine on "tell me about when you fucked up". I've got a good real answer for that one.
Given this loose criteria, if you tell someone you've never fucked up, and you've never worked with a douchebag, and you've never disagreed with someone at work, they might think you don't have experience working in a medium-sized-or-larger company; or you had managers that insulated you extremely well; or you don't have much self-awareness.
Because, from the interviewer standpoint, here's what such questions are about. Prepare to have your mind blown, maybe.
1. Hiring is by far the most stressful, unpredictable, career-destroying part of a manager's job. And that's as an employee, if that's your business (founder, entrepreneur) you're scared shitless that a mistake may plain and simple ruin your business, and you along with it (not just financially, the stakes are much higher when it's your company).
So the 'soft' questions are attempts to weed out 'problems'. Get this through your head: when interviewing, experienced managers are not "selecting the best" but rather "avoiding the worst". And these questions... they're crapshots in the dark — “how the hell am I supposed to know if this person is OK/normal or a piece of work?” It's even more blurry from the interviewer's side. So they just try to get a 'feel' for it, intuitively.
Your answer? It does not really matter (specifics, context, etc). The real question is: are you 'normal'? Are you honest / reliable / well-adjusted / not too weird / not too aggressive / not too whatever makes life difficult for everyone (starting with you). It's really just that. (anyone who claims drawing psych profiles from interviews is basically BS'ing or a trained clinical psychologist, and don't fall for HR stuff, they're so full of their 'methods' because they know it's just super-human to judge people accurately).
2. What are the risks of a bad hire? Well, whatever they are, you are responsible if you signed that person in. You, the manager, will face the consequences — it's your team, your doing, your mistake. HR, if it exists, is usually just there to fit some bean counter + legal requirements. They won't feel the heat. You will, daily.
People lose their job over bad hires. They fail their mission. It's a stupidly high-stake decision given what little means are at their disposal — which is why some companies begin to think about it and adopt really different processes where they onboard you progressively and judge in very real terms, real work, real collaboration, if you're a fit or not.
3. The ugly truth of hiring is that we hire the people we like. Period. Full stop.
We hire the people we like. It's proven by countless psych studies. Whether you're aware of that or not does not make a difference — you can only select for what you think is right, and what is right is: 1. candidate can do the job and 2. I (thus others) can work with candidate on a daily basis. This kind of sentiment is not about skill, history, it's about being able to share a cup of coffee without feeling awkward, being able to disagree about a technical point and still come out together as a team on the other side once a decision's been made by whoever's in charge — might be none of you in the interview room, c-execs and whatnot.
So as a candidate, the worst answers you can give are anything that doesn't help to ease your interviewer's fears. Anything that doesn't tell them in so many words: "don't worry, rest assured I keep my cool, I'm reasonably balanced, I don't hit people or yell, I won't ruin your company/division/team." That's really all we can try to ask before the fact. So whatever the question —hard, soft— ask yourself: what are they afraid of? And your answer should simply solve for that. It's that simple. Convince me I'm not making a mistake by taking you in. Convince me I'm not a fool for trusting you.
If you pass in that regard, and your skills match the job, then you'll get hired — unless someone had a better human contact with the interviewer(s), in which case skills don't matter much, it's all about feeling comfortable with each other.
Remember this, a famous saying in management / entrepreneur circles: “You can always train someone (to meet whatever skill is required), but you can't change them (personality likely won't change).” Hence why “we hire a person, not a profile.”
Most managers would rather hire someone really nice and train them for 3 months before they're operational, rather than make a bet on a weirdo — whatever their expertise. The obnoxious genius is just about the worst choice you can make, whereas a great personality will always be an asset provided we can elevate their skill, and/or pay them less until they acquire the desired skillset.
4. About 'honesty'. Honesty isn't sarcasm: nobody expects you to marry the company, not even the interviewer thinks that for themselves (and founders / entrepreneurs are not clueless about job hoping these days). The '5 years' question isn't about that. It's precisely screening for the "great personality but training required" cases: if we hire you, will you be willing to evolve, to learn, to get better and meet our needs, our standards of quality?
Thus anything that says: "I see myself getting better" is a good answer. Anything that says: "I don't care / I just do this to eat and pay the bills / I have no interest whatsoever in improving myself or my work" will get you rejected (unless that's what they're looking for, to exploit you until you burn out, in which case you should see yourself to the door for your own sake).
Just my 2cts, from a management / consulting standpoint.
Remember: those people on the other side of the table have much, much more at stake than you or any candidate; you may get hired or not (so you either win a job or lose nothing) while they risk losing their own job / mission and the upside if they succeed is only to continue said mission with no perturbation. It's a much more daunting proposition for them, and yet they have to go through it and ultimately make a choice. If they take too long, budget might slip through their hands. It's a jungle for managers out there.
____
Bonus: Now let me tell you what's even worse to go through than a bad hire as a manager: firing someone. Some people literally fall in depression over this. Quit their job, even. It's a drag. It's really hard. You can't imagine how horrible it feels unless you've been there. Hence why you'd rather do it as little as humanly possible, and that means not screwing up the hiring process, which itself is very much imperfect...
I hope this gives you confidence that, however you want to see it, you very much have the easy part as a candidate. There are very few bad answers if you're honest enough about who you are (again, specifics, contexts, made-up stories, who cares as long as it tells the truth about you), which is the whole point. Know this: "courage" etymologically means "telling your truth with all your heart". It's about vulnerability. Courageous people, who know to show some vulnerability, are those we can trust because we can 'feel' them, for real, we know who they are. The "mistakes" question is partly just that: tell us you're human. Tell us you make mistakes. Tell us you learn from those. Tell us you didn't know better, not always, but you know more today than you did yesterday. Then, we can relate. We can trust you with our mistakes. We can grow together. We can count on you to support us.
And I know, I know it's not like that in every company, far from it. But it should. And there are plenty of very 'normal' people like that. They may not have the words to spell it like I do here — I just read a lot so I have these words now, from much smarter / more experienced people. Now, so do you.
If you go into interviews thinking "I'll reassure them, I'll show them they can trust me, because I'm worth it, because I'm reliable, because people can count on me, because fuck I'm likeable!" then I assure you: you're 50% in already. Compared to all the others who will try to hide who they are, in fear that they might not get liked, well guess what: don't know, don't care, won't take a chance. Next.
All the world needs is you at your best, you becoming better, growing, sharing, caring, empowering. These are the true rock stars. And make no mistake: nobody's born this way. All those who became that pretty much engineered it. It's the truth in "fake it 'till you make it", it's not actually fake but rather "play the part as best you can", i.e. elevate yourself to this ideal vision of you you have in mind. Before you know it, it's not a vision anymore, it's become real, the real you. Great managers and entrepreneurs know that, they only wish you knew it too, so we can start working together tomorrow. Today. Yesterday. Where have you been all this time without us? ; )
Oh, I get it, I've been on the other side of the table, plenty, and in more than just a "pull in some dev to get their take" role. But you've gotta have some answer to those when you're interviewing and I need some prep + a little fiction to avoid the possible red flag that comes up from simply blanking on them. My goal is to get past them such that no-one thinks about the answers again, not to wow anyone, which I know isn't what anyone's fishing for with those.
"Red flag", that's the expression I was looking for indeed.
The worst thing is that, in a cold rational way the optimum strategy for both the company and the employee is hiring with little evidence, and firing relatively quickly. But it's only good if everybody does it, and nobody is actually able to do it.
Very interesting remark on the hiring/firing process, I do concur.
It's an approach worth keeping in mind; it may one day fit in a much more dynamic labor legal framework provided both sides find interest — closer to a frictionless market[1], yielding more productivity... I think there's a case to be made for a non-zero-sum evolution here. Maybe for the next decade, or the one after.
I don't think you should be afraid to ask those questions yourself.
And people wonder why everything in tech is garbage.
When they offered me a second interview I immediately turned it down.
(If they did other weird things before, it might just be the straw to break the camels back.)
The status quo needs justification every once in a while, too. Though you could formulate the same question nicer as: "If you could do it all over again, what other fields would you be interested in? What are the pros and cons? What do you love and what do you hate about your chosen field?"
As an candidate, I often ask a variant of the latter: "What's great about the company? What sucks?" Even the greatest company has some aspects that suck, and it would be a huge red flag if they lack an honest answer. That would mean either it's a "cult" or stuff is so embarrassingly bad that they don't want to break the floodgates.
All the good places I ended up working for had decent answers about their downsides.
Do they want the truth? "I'd like to be managing you."
I did that once. Let's just say it did not help my chances getting the job
I'd say, definitely hire that guy, and if the interviewer has a whole pipeline of such great people, that I'd like to invest in her startup.
Now, if after running down that pipeline, they still have open positions, I'm still a good hire for [list all the reasons].
It sounds like a hollywood movie cliche you'd hear at an interview scene. I'd laugh if I got that question in an actual interview.
I'm sure it made sense 30-50 years ago when people spent decades with the same employer, but anyone asking that question today is just indicating how out of touch they are with the real world.