1. What problem is your company solving?
If you don't get an answer, beware. If the answer sounds vague, beware. If the answer makes no sense, beware. If the answer is multifaceted, beware. This suggests that the company will not even begin the process of becoming profitable.
2. Who has this problem?
You should get a clear picture of an actual person. If not, beware. If that person has no money, beware. If that person has no pull within an organization, beware. If that person is high maintenance or fickle, beware. This suggests that the company will never find the revenue they seek.
3. What's your solution?
If the solution doesn't actually address the problem, beware. If the solution is too expensive for the customer, beware. If the solution can't be differentiated from its competitors, beware. If the solution has no competitors, beware. If there are a dozen solutions, beware. This suggests that no matter how amazing the technology or technical team, the company will not be able to execute on its business plan.
If you have something nice to fall back on (rich family, nest egg) or no dependents, then sure.
If you want a regular no-risk paycheque then check out government jobs. Runway? Oh yeah we've been collecting taxes for centuries. Product-market fit? Yeah, we have these big guys with badges and guns who will come to your house if you "don't fit." We pay an absolute pittance compared to private, but your job will be there your entire working life.
At the end of the day, if you don't know these basic things about a company, why have you applied for a job there?
Because I need money, and you might be the 3XXth company I've applied to. Job hunting when there's something unappealing about yourself can be quite a pain, but rent is still due at the end of the month.
My two most recent jobs I was reached out to by a recruiter who could describe the general market the company is in but actually getting into detail and nuance required speaking with someone at the company.
OTOH well establish startups and businesses almost always have the answers to these questions front and center on their website. Some basic due diligence on a candidate's part is always welcome.
Enthusiasm is great, but the founders/current employees should have an understanding that far outstrips anything an outsider can provide (unless you're dealing with someone who already has deep knowledge of a well known domain, which is a bit of a different angle).
Because the company head-hunted me?
Second would mark you as clueless about whole business segment company operates is, and then why hire clearly inexperienced you, unless asking for intern/junior position.
Third is fine in any environment I guess, but can be weird in say banking.
What happened about asking about team, job, workflow, methodologies and tools, management structure, office structure, WFH and so on?
The set I use is below, with explanations. Note that this is entirely a b2b list. I don't think there is a meaningful list one can ask for consumer startups, since in my view the consumer space is purely the domain of the ycombinator "throw it at the wall and then double down on what sitcks" - there is no engineering, marketing, etc. that you can apply to a b2c startup that isn't working and I don't think you can ask anything other than "how fast are you growing?" for consumer stuff.
For everything else, though ...
1. What is the critical problem on the customer side? How intense is the problem?
The company should be able to explain one or two very crisp, very clear customer-side issues. This goes beyond "what problem are you solving" because solving problems aren't enough to get a buyer to take action. Diffuse or "nice to have" problems means you never have a champion or buyer who will simply say "take my money" and most likely the reason for the diffuse/dull/etc. issues are behavioral or structural and that no one will actually pay to solve them.
I cannot emphasize enough that PLANS TO ADDRESS STRUCTURAL ISSUES AT CUSTOMERS ARE ACTUALLY THE LINES IN A STARTUP SUICIDE NOTE.
The other thing you see a lot is that people try and shore up crap businesses by throwing a lot of things in the solution to address a lot of problems at once with the idea that the sum is more valuable than its parts - that is a body shop mentality, not a good startup position. Startups should have something that they address that people want to buy, not be the business equivalent of a "52-in-1" Atari cartridge. A collection of dull, diffuse issues means the solution will usually not have buyer priority. Worse is purely hypothetical """problem""" where product is just a vitamin or insurance = no buyer outside of compliance, which is super low margin and low urgency (lots of security plays have this, or worse, fail to recognize it). Let garbage vendor-integrators like IBM or Cisco weakly assemble an array of crap, low-margin products into a "solution", that is not a good startup business.
2. What is the solution? What does the solution directly and completely solve in terms of the critical problem? Why now? Is the solution a necessary part of other changes or is it in and of itself sufficient to have day one+ value without big changes on the customer side?
Another issue you see a lot is that the solution only works if the customers make other changes that would also partially alleviate the problem, and so the solution is actually part of a collection of important customer-side changes that are going to be impossible to get done in a repeatable way. The solution has to deliver value without large changes on the part of the customer, especially changes that would have helped alleviate pain _already_ since there's an obvious issue there that the solution startup is missing. Customer-side-changes also means sales repeatability will be very poor which is a death sentence for startups.
5. What is the customer type? Who is the buyer? What existing budget are you redirecting if any?
This is another issue that shows up a lot: businesses are broken into groups of functions with independent owners. If the startup's business spans multiple business areas and multiple business owners are going to need to cooperate (not just agree, but they have different timing, different priorities, and so on) that is a big problem.
If buying the solution has to come from multuple discrete budget line items, that is a big problem because that implies trying to coordinate what is effectively a sale to each of them, with different trade-offs and different priorities and timeframes, and then conclude the real sale after all of that. This is a serious momentum and timing problem because it's hard enough to rendevous with need-and-now customer side without having multiple gates.
If _both_ are required, that's a death sentence.
3. What is the value of solving the problem?
... And the actual cash on the table value of solving the problem is critical. Even if you have a very real problem, and even if that problem has acute frustration/pain/etc. on the customer side, it doesn't matter to a startup. There are, unfortunately, lots of real problems, even critical ones, that customers view (and can perhaps justify with a pure $ argument) as not being high value. No value = no margin. You need to be reducing CAPEX, OPEX, increase efficiency, increase user experience (and be very, very careful of this one because a lot of people kid themselves), etc.
6. What megatrends are in favor of this solution?
Also known as, "how much education are you going to have to do?"
Also, you have to ask yourself, "are mega trends independently solving the problem in a different way? are megatrends sucking the oxygen out of the room in terms of buyer attention?" Lots of businesses have "transformation" plans dictated by executives that intend to solve (or not) some business problem for purposes of their brand, and most of the time these are actually just trends at the CIO level, and they may not even be aligned with real pain points. These can sink you if the trend is against you.
7. Who is the team? Why is this team the right one? Why are they the ones to deliver a technical solution?
(self explanatory - they need experience)
8. What is the GTM/sales motion to get to the person in the customer most impacted by the critical problem?
9. What other business challenges are involved with the solution?
10. What is the demo? What is the sales talk track? Who is the buyer? What will be the objections of the operational team?
11. Who are the competitors? Which of them is good? How much traction are they seeing?
I kinda agree, but this question should be resolvable by looking at the source material. The reason why "does your product have good market fit?" is so effective is that it forces the people to justify why, or why they don't have market fit.
This gives you lots of chances to ask followups and figure out if they are hand waving, misinformed, know what they are doing, or just plain naive.
The other two questions are very good, and well worth asking.
The essence of all these questions is to figure out if they have put any thought into the business side(if they are a startup) or how well the business is doing, if they are more established. The crucial thing that often gets lost is that tech is there to fulfil a business function, not the other way around. Figuring out the business model helps you predict what _should_ be built later on.
It's about time we push back on this. If they need employees so bad, how about they stop making demands which resemble being in a position of power?
Even more so for startups who don't really know what their solution is.
I would prefer clarifying questions about the product or market showing they had done basic research but didn't grok everything, but there are no cookie-cutter questions for this.
(startup role, but I'm not sure it matters)
They are all good questions, but you would probably want to say more along the lines of "I understand that X is your companies product. Can you go into some more detail about what specific problems this product is solving for your customers?"
(I'd probably have more specific clarifying questions as follow-ups to the open-ended ones. Judge me on those if you wish, though that's not why I'd be asking them.)
I have seen both presumptions invalidated enough not to think poorly of anyone asking and if the interviewer decides I’m wasting their time if I ask questions like this then it was never going to be a good fit.
It's such a simple, easy and cheap morale and productivity booster to give your employees. If there isn't free coffee, it's not a place you want to work because they're skimping on their employees.
As a consultant once on a due diligence gig at a medium-sized quasi-tech company in the Midwest, on the day I arrived, one smart and charming QA engineer took me aside and shared “the free coffee in the micro kitchens is crap, here’s our [employee-provided] coffee pot on a filing cabinet in the corner, please drink as much as you want”. That told me, among other things, this was a decent team in a mediocre company..
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220426-00/?p=10...
(spoilers:) during a collab between Microsoft and IBM, Microsoft engineers were frustrated with the coffee at IBM's offices. IBM refused to let them set up their own coffee pot, but IBM was not allowed to look at anything marked "confidential". so they put a cardboard box over the coffee pot and wrote "confidential" on the side.
I've watched as promising young kids took up the addiction to make their deadlines and end up wired, tired, and burnt out. I've watched fights erupt recently at the drive-through line at Starbucks near my home. It reminds me of my time as a cocaine user, and the way people would fight to get their fix.
I've read that coffee was the fuel that sparked the colonization of the western hemisphere. I've read that when the industrial revolution kicked off, the coffee break was invented to keep workers working.
So these days, when I hear free coffee, I also hear the metaphorical cracking of the 1%'s whip at the back of the workforce. I prioritize my health over my work output. I prioritize rest over frantic action.
Hyperbolic? Absolutely. Stimulant addiction is a real thing. I wonder what human society would look like without it. But I know for certain that removing caffeine from my life has made me happier, healthier, and more able over-all.
Try it -- you might like it!
Also during college, I travelled to Australia multiple times to race solar cars. We went as a "race crew", and while I was there to do embedded electronics, there were team members responsible for providing meals to the rest of the crew. They would unnecessarily pinch pennies, and buy the absolute lowest quality bulk anything. It was so bad that I would try to go shopping with them, and offer to pay the $1-2 out of my own pocket to get the lunch meat that wasn't gray, or cheese that wasn't plastic. During the race, someone brought a seasoning salt shaker in my support vehicle to pass around, and it was a massive morale boost! I also started a "beverage club," where folk could contribute to a pool to buy liter bottles of soda when they got sick of warm tap water.
It doesn't matter how good your beans are or how far they are driven in if you are still just making industrial sized carafes of black coffee. The "mandatory" company mug becomes a symbol of control (among others; the company had some strict rules about desk adornments). The "coffee shop" mentality creates the cashier flow and long lines of an actual coffee shop, with the even more awkwardness that any conversations are in full view of your bosses (all the way up the chain) because they chose to subject themselves to this too "for good beans" every morning.
I learned a lot from that job, including how often what people say they want ("quality") is a mask for what they really want ("control"). I'm not sure I'd ever again choose to work for a company where making coffee at home and bringing it in the travel mug of your choosing was a small daily act of rebellion.
At a start-up, sure. At any company past Series C, you should know this before talking to anyone. The other questions here are fine, especially the revenue and DAU one. Even better questions are "what's your payback period?" and "what's the company's path to profitability?" Revenue doesn't matter if the company is burning 2x the money to get it.
> How much runway does the company have? Does their spending look within reason?
Kinda the same as asking about the path to profitability except also takes into account if the company can live to get there.
> What's the culture like?
I get asked this question and similar questions to the ones listed by almost every engineering candidate I've interviewed in the past 5 years...
> How strong is the team?
I think it's a good question but if you're just looking for someone to tell you how great the team is then you're better off not asking it. I think almost all interview questions should be asked with some level of doubt and in hopes of getting an honest answer. Also, the level of honesty matters. If you ask the engineering manager this question and they throw certain folks under the bus then you should run.
> What's in store in the future?
This (and more frequently the first 2 questions under it) gets asked in plenty of interviews. People want to know what they'll be working on and what kind of impact they'll have.
The "Do you plan to sell the company?" question under this one makes it seem like these were all supposed to be directed at a CEO/founder. I wouldn't ask this question because even if the answer is honest it'll be ambiguous. No one is going to say they're dead set on selling the company if there's still funding rounds on the horizon but they also won't rule it out because they need to give the compensation package some hope for liquidity.
I one declined an offer for this very reason. I had the option to join one of two teams, and each team's manager took the opportunity to crap on the other team.
I joined a start up with a great amount of equity. They got offered 100 million buyout offer after I'd been there a year. I would have been extremely happy with that outcome. But they had no interest -- they weren't interested in a 100 million dollar company. Been there, done that, that wasn't their goal. Now I ask that question. Or more generally, same line as the profitability one. What are your exit strategies (with many follow ups). You want to know if this is a multi billion dollar boom or bust play because it has serious impact on your risk and payout.
If you are gonna take a cash paycut in exchange for stock options you better damn well know this stuff. I think these questions are perfectly okay to ask.
You should also ask about preferred stock and when it converts to common stock. Since you are common stock, you won't get shit until the valuation of the company goes above whatever threshold is set for the preferred stock to convert.
In a logical world, this would be the case. But currently, I am looking at a Series B company and having serious doubts that they have PMF.
Interviewee: "Does the company have product-market fit?"
Interviewer: "Yes, we own Wholefoods, Ring, the entire internet cloud ecosystem"
Interviewee: "How much runway does the company have?"
Interviewer: "We have 86.2 billion. Should last us a while"
Interviewee: "What's in store in the future?"
Interviewer: "Take over every market segment" ... Interviewee: "Great, where do I sign?"
Interviewer: "We have 86.2 billion. Should last us a while"
In these situations you should be focusing on how much support and "runway" the product or department you'll be working on has. The company at large might not go bankrupt, but I've both seen and been involved in situations where a product/project/department went 'bankrupt' and most people involved got fired.
You could ask questions about how the position and product are related to the core business - should get the same result (it's mission critical vs it's VP's folly) without asking about financial info that nobody can/will share.
"how do you manage employee performance evaluations? What is the career advancement process like?" (if someone's got a better way to determine if a place does stack ranking without directly asking I'd love to hear it)....
A big red flag is anyone who's never fired someone or never had a bad fit. The key to me is the follow-ups you ask:
• If you've never fired someone, what was the closest you've come? What was the outcome of that situation? Did they quit or did they improve? Why'd you wait for them to quit instead of addressing the issue directly? What made them improve?
• If it was a performance issue, how did you know they were underperforming? What steps did you take to help them improve?
• If it was a culture problem, why did it get missed in the hiring process? If they were initially a good culture fit, what changed?
• How do you identify low performers? Objectively? Subjectively? A mix of the 2.
The caveats are if a) you really really want this job or b) you really really need this job. In those cases, you should only be asking questions that you think make you look good to the hiring team.
Completely fine to ask how performance is measured and/or how performance reviews are handled, but the nature of these questions is off-putting. Is a candidate trying to figure out how they can get away with being a low performer? How would their poor judgment in asking questions like this show up elsewhere? Likely a high-maintenance individual.
And, the caveats at the end of the comment indicate the author knows these questions would not make you look good to the hiring team. If the company hired you anyway, probably wouldn't be a good place to work.
At least OP phrased it as career progression question.
In the "How strong is the team?" section:
> "Can you tell me about the team I'd be working with most closely?"
> "How do you compensate the team?"
> "How do you attract and retain really strong hires?"
> "Do you share board slides with the team?"
I'd add:
> "Who's been here the longest?"
and:
> "What's the median tenure of the engineering team?"
I'd apply these directly to the team I'd be working on. These can tell you a bit about the management culture.
And that depends almost entirely on the personality, experience, and style of individual managers. I know of what I speak. I was a very good manager, and kept senior-level engineers for many years, despite the corporation, itself, having a rather employee-hostile culture.
IMNSHO, Management culture is even more important than team culture.
> when was the last re-org this team went through and what was the reason for it?
In that 18 months, they had three major reorgs.
After one one of them, the new VP (a lawyer), brought the team into his (very nice, very large) office, and started the intro talk with "I hate computers."
That was when I decided it was time to move on...
So I don't think that it's interesting to know to judge the position. It's irrelevant.
"Are you happy here?"
Have you ever watched an interviewer change from upbeat to depressed in moments? Have you ever seen a person turn a shade of grey? Have you ever watched your interviewers start to argue about what the meaning of true happiness might be, before conceding that neither of them were happy?
My all time favorite, from a gentleman at TD Waterhouse, nearly 20 years ago:
"Is anyone really ever happy at work?"
They made an offer, I didn't accept. Nearly everyone in Corporate America looks visibly depressed. Doubly so in our new COVID world.
Someone remind me what the point of all this is again? Because I'm not really sure I get it anymore.
I've been keeping a similar list for private use, only mine is much smaller - less than 30 questions now that I removed the more risky ones which I never asked like "Is any of the board members actively addicted to anything?".
Not every engineering role is for a startup.
(I've had at least one interview with a bank that I didn't bother with any next steps for exactly these sorts of reasons.)
I’m going to get this stuff sorted out beforehand before working anywhere in the future.
Why would you expect to do the company's work on your personal machine?
> How strong is the team?
I've actually asked it always on every interview. The generic answer I get is that "You will be working with experts in the field" yada yada.
When you actually join the team:
- Two juniors
- Few 20 years experience dudes that finished their growth at "Cobol is the best" with "Mainframe" T-Shirt on them
- And the same manager that hired you! (Avoiding eye contact)
So yea, one salary later you are on the new hunt for new job. I don't understand why ppl lie so much during interviews. It's a employee market, if I don't want to waste my time with teams like that -> it's a 100hunder I'll jump the ship ASAP.
Probably joking, but a reminder that people with 20 years of experience started their careers after the dotcom bubble burst, and might not even have turned 40 yet.
e: If you do change the name please keep "hog" in there, that mascot is adorable
It's pretty low on google without the "your" and doesn't even have a knowyourmeme page, so I don't think it's a big deal.
https://v.firebog.net/hosts/AdguardDNS.txt, which is available from https://firebog.net/
I don't see any particular reason for it, so I've since whitelisted it. It is indeed an odd choice, but its a long-used namespace which sees a dwindling number of available and useful domain names over time, IMO.
This is my favorite question since it isn’t something you can generally lie about.
---
[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gl-infra/reliability/-/issues/...
"How much time are we going to spend dealing with unprofessional antics?"
I'll give you a hint, the question was rhetorical... and the answer should be 0 minutes regardless of the applicant. ;-)
Think what "antics" would mean from a kindergarten teachers perspective.
Sure most adults rarely eat glue, but the number is not 0. The real insane ones will feign ignorance, and assume people will mistake it for wit. ;-)
1. What kind of person would not work out well in this role?
2. Think back to your previous job/career/life before this company. What's one thing you'd like this company to have or do that you had or did before?
I ask these because I want to know where pain points are for the team/company I am considering, but I can't just out and out say "what are your problems?" because nobody will answer honestly. I've learned some interesting things.
And this is not just for engineers. I think anyone joining a startup, or new division of a company, would benefit from thinking through these questions.
You're probably not wrong in general, but as is often the case, i imagine reality is a bit more complex.
This is critical and not straightforward to evaluate. Complexity is a (if somewhat bad) proxy for differentiation, in the sense that if you can build it in a weekend, so does your competitor - and maybe he's got the mythical 10x engineer who'll ship it faster.
The ability to make new and or leverage existing connections to open doors for the business mattered far more to success than “how complex” or “is this different.” I’ve seen literal $BigName clones with lesser quality systems make millions because the owner had another business and went to work on his Rolodex to get us in the door and start making money.
Anecdotally, I once confronted a director about negative Glassdoor reviews which claimed the company's CEO was a serial abuser of employees. I did so in a friendly/appropriately phrased way, so it didn't come across like confrontation, but that's what it was. Not only did I still get an offer, but they tried to hire me again several months later.
A company that got mad at me for asking reasonable questions about it in an interview isn't one I'd want to work for.
"Describe what a typical day would look like?"
First, the company is hiring an engineer, not a CTO or a head of marketing. Why would they consider my input valid? Even in my field of expertise I have no idea of the size of markets or of the big players strategy there. Trying to keep afloat of the tech is hard enough.
Second, if interviewing as an employee and not a business associate, you don't really care if the company becomes the next Facebook or, as is likely, goes into oblivion in 5 years. Know your incentives: if you don't have stock, you don't care about the company's success. Want employees that care? Give them incentives.
Third, half of the founders I have met have inflated egos, delusions and/or personality issues. Never trust one who says they welcome honest feedback, especially during interviews. There is nothing in for you to gain and everything to lose.
"These questions are direct, but a company that reacts badly to them may not be a good place to work." Disagree. A company with a non workable business plan can be a fantastic place to work in as the investor money burns through the various vanity project of middle managers. There are a lot much more relevant red flags to look out to anticipate a toxic workplace.
In general, only give feedback when explicitly asked for it or once you understand the inner power dynamics of the place.
- Now you've had a chance to get to know me, is there any reason you think I wouldn't be a suitable candidate for this role.
Surprisingly people are super honest when I ask this and it let's you clear up an miscommunication or simply acknowledge that there reason is probably true and pitch how you would overcome it.
The basic premise is Startups have limited resources, so in many ways what are you consciously not working on is as important as what you are working on. While not indicative on it's own, if a early stage startup tells me they're working on say AWS, and Google, and Azure, and on-premises, it creates an area to probe further that they might not be careful about selecting the right thing to work on next which does become a red flag.
"Tell me about a recent time the team was allocated time to resolve some technical debt. Tell me about a recent time the team was NOT allocated time to resolve some technical debt." I worked at once place which shifted from outsource to in-house software development, discovered that some of the primary html views of the website were built using a jumble of string concatenation, and to add a new feature using the existing string concatenation.
"What percentage of my time will I spend coding in this role?" Worked at one place which assigned excessive non-coding bureaucratic duties to developers.
"How often do you release software?" Worked at once place which did not release anything for the 1.5 years that I was there.
"How do you incorporate the lessons learned partway through a project into the remainder of the project work?" Worked at one place that could not pivot due to inability to admit that they didn't have a perfect plan from Day 1.
"Tell me about some advanced design patterns that you don't use." Worked on a team that used every advanced design pattern that mankind had ever given name to, each in 200 places without an iota of consideration to the costs that go along with the potential benefits.
"Do you plan on shifting your entire tech stack into something else that can scarcely be considered software development?" Self-explanatory, but has happened to me 2x now, so be on the lookout.
Fifteen+ years into my career, I've discovered that every job will give you one or more damn good reasons to move on, and each of these lessons above took 1-2 years to learn, so my latest strategy is just optimizing for pay rate. :-)
Think of those questions in advance, do your due-diligence, and ask questions based on what you couldn't find, or follow ups from your research on the company. It will set you apart from other candidates.
Archive link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220628135027/https://posthog.c...
1. "Why is this position open?"
and if the answer is anything other than "we're doubling the size of our company", I like to follow up with:
2. "Tell me about the last person who had this role."
The way #2 gets answered can usually tell me a lot about the culture.
No politics, just pure honesty and problem solving.
I will probably never again want to work for the company where the management has to please a lot of other people, make suboptimal (read: "stupid") decisions just for the optics of it and where there are no people you can talk to that have absolute decision power and the only goal being the good of the company.
Feedback from my hiring manager was that the CEO was very impressed.
(This is the same place that later "extinguished" my paid-for stock options after I left, and is now a multi-billion dollar company. To hell with them).
I ended up with something with the cloud.
Publicly traded companies on the other hand general have equity that somewhat reliably converts to cash. Don’t take roles where so much of your compensation is equity that you have substantial market risk but do expect to get some actual cash from this type of compensation. This disparity makes publicly traded companies more attractive as the chances of you getting $400k when you want it from $200k of salary and $200k of equity is far higher.
Start-ups are attractive if they give you additional responsibilities at an early stage of your career or otherwise improve your career trajectory. They are usually bad choices for senior people interested in optimizing earnings.
1. Describe your git branching strategy
2. Who releases software, how (is it packaged / deployed), and how often?
3. Do you have dev/test environments?
4. Do you keep configuration out of your code? How? Example: IaC.
5. Describe a typical incident. How do you find out about it, who gets the first alert, how does it get resolved and how (do?) you follow up afterwards?
6. What does the oncall rota look like? Follow the sun or (immediate end of discussion) 24h?
7. Do you have superheroes (people who have been around since forever, that everybody says "well I hope <superhero> doesn't get hit by a bus, because then we'd be really effed")?
8. What is the engineering staff turnover for the last 12 months? What about for the team I'm interviewing for?
9. What are the top challenges facing this team (and wider engineering team) right now? (Not only within their problem domain, but outside it, eg communication, coordination, outages, observability, direction)
I personally think you're better asking what are you trying to do, coming to your own conclusion as to if it's a real problem that you personally believe in, asking what they've accomplished and why THIS COMPANY is better positioned to succeed.
I'm not sure why this guy's experience is so different from mine? I assume it's related to hiring/recruitment orientation (more junior/inexperienced folk?). The big one I could imagine is people failing to ask the "will the company still exist in 6 months?" question due to a default assumption that companies don't die?
The strong signal is that a company not willing to share this information, is probably not going to behave well under stress. You can evaluate your risk factors on your own, and decide whether or not you can tolerate that level. But this signal is a strong caveat to taking an offer from them.
Then, further, how does the sales team interact with engineering. How does customer feedback come back to engineering features, who demos, etc.
It doesn't matter if the engineering is top notch and there's no one to sell it. To me, if a company is past series A and the number of engineers is more than the number of sales employees, that's a warning sign.
The more questions you ask, even ones about company culture and how things are managed will make you look super-interested and that you are already imagining yourself in the role.
When I interview people I always remind them of this before we start: "Don't forget to interview us back. We might not be what you are looking for". It's surprising how many candidates ignore my advice (which, sadly, makes them look unenthusiastic).
I also ask of the current managers (in the immediate department), how many were promoted and how many were hired. What is the shortest/longest someone in the company has gone with/without a promotion.
If unlimited PTO, what is the average/mean of days taken off. We do not have data is an immediate "I'll pass, thank you".
> Avoid: Companies that are fundraising as they'll otherwise run out of money, but haven't closed the round
That excludes a whole category of pre-seed orgs where you could make a huge positive impact.
For one, the people that are answering their questions are by pre-condition already drinking the company kool-aid.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1oD7MHHTHBkgkArtF2s8J...
It gives you an idea about the pain points that person's role and gives you insight into what the company needs to improve.
Do you have project managers?
Do you have product owners?
Do you fill out timesheets with your working hours?
Do you use an RPC framework GRPC/etc
What languages do you use? Are you polyglot?
What is the promotion process?
What would you like to see change?
How big is the company and how big is your organization?
Being a startup employee essentially makes you an angel investor with a single company in your portfolio.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220628135027/https://posthog.c...
Hoped for (but seldom received) answer: "Why of course - to be your 24x7 shit umbrella."
Or some honestly inspired variant thereof.
