If a senior engineer, at no part of the process, asks questions about the company, I would question that. To be clear, my experience is exclusively startups, but everyone I know would be very discerning about where they're going to be working for the next x years (x ≥ 2) and that's a long time with great opportunity cost. I'd be using every part of the interview that I can to extract information about how the company is run, who makes what decisions, and how long it takes to get a trivial feature out (mean-time-to-copy-change haha).
If they don't ask, then they either already know (which can only mean they're familiar with someone on the inside or someone who left on good terms, both of which are worth mentioning) or they don't know at all and don't care.
Not at all. The lack of questions shows a lack of interest. In every test I've ever prepared I've deliberately left one or two questions which are near impossible to answer and no one has ever been able to correctly answer them so far. The least you can do is ask about those. Or what does the release cycle look like or how is the development being tracked - literally anything, just to indicate that you genuinely are interested and not "I simply want this job".
What if I'm so interested in the job that I simply don't care about those things? If you're doing amazing work, who gives a crap about the small details!
Also, if you are unaware of the norm that asking questions indicates interest, you are likely to have social/cultural deficits relative to an ideal employee; the likelihood of you being unaware of other workplace norms is increased.
I recently got told by the VP of Engineering of the company I am now undergoing onboarding with, that if a senior programmer asks no questions about how the company['s teams] work and doesn't have any requirements, that to him sends the message they are desperate and don't know their value.
Other people told me that not asking anything means that the interviewee is not proactive.
I agree that you want to see someone thinking on their feet and tackling a new problem. But you can get that without making the whole interview a mystery. I can tell you "we will be giving you some C# code with concurrency bugs and asking you to find them", and it's still going to be a challenge when i do.
I have recently been doing interviews where we talk to candidates about past projects they've worked on, and ask them to go through some of the technical decisions they made. We don't warn them ahead of time that we're going to do this. Often, candidates have interesting projects they did a few years ago, and they just don't remember them in enough detail to go through them with us. This tells us nothing useful about the candidate. I think the interview would be far more useful if we had prompted them to revise their old projects, and i don't think this would generate false positives, because we can still distinguish bullshit from actual understanding (although of course i think that!).
> Also the most valuable question you can ask as a part of the non-technical interview: "So do you have any questions for us"? If the answer is "no", you are not looking at a good candidate.
I've heard people say this, but i don't see why it would be true. Is there reasoning behind this, or does it just feel smart?