As an interviewer, the only signal I ever take away from interviewee questions is if they manage to come across like a complete asshole. And this isn't common because most people aren't complete assholes, and those who are usually have displayed their colors earlier on in the interview.
As an interviewee, I refuse to put any effort into gaming the system and hoping to come across as a better candidate. I treat these sessions as me interviewing them. And yes, this means that a lot of times my questions will come across as banal. But you can get some decent signal on red flags by asking several potential peers to describe their day, challenges that they're facing, and that sort of thing.
On few occasions the questions interviewees asked at the end did help me form a better picture of them as candidates; example, someone asked what Java version we run predominantly and, and this is the important bit, didn't balk when the answer was some ancient LTS version but instead a nervous laugh of commiseration followed by war story time. This told me a lot both about the candidate's maturity and experience.
That's a good heuristic. Someone just starting doesn't know what "best practices" are. Someone early into their career demands strict adherence to the best practices. Someone later into their career knows what rules can be bent, and knows a good reason for doing it.
> As an interviewee, I refuse to put any effort into gaming the system and hoping to come across as a better candidate.
That reminds me of this part of the article: "You can use mirroring in your interview process. How? Use their language when describing your experiences."
I consider mirroring to be a form of gaming the system, or at least something that can backfire. Having heard many interviewees parrot back terminology they didn't really understand, I'm sensitive to when somebody is trying to dazzle me with BS. I'd much rather hear an interviewee use much simpler, even non-technical verbiage, when describing things than try to use the words they think I want to hear.
>As an interviewee, I refuse to put any effort into gaming the system and hoping to come across as a better candidate.
This is something missing from all the "interview coaching" advise and very few people seem to understand.
Suppose there is an actual technique that allows you to get a job you otherwise would not get. Say, hypothetically, you used it to become an astronaut. Do you think you perform well as an astronaut even though the selection process would have culled you? I'd imagine you get kicked out anyways so all you gained is a line in a resume. The same advise also insists that having a whole bunch of 0.5-1 year "gigs" in your work history is normal, but is it really? Do people really believe hiring managers don't see the pattern? Does anyone really think that people go: "Oh, we should hire this person, he worked in all of FAANG, one year in each, must be very good!"?
The biggest companies and the FAANGs don't care. It's a numbers game for them. They know interviewing isn't a science but there's very little incentive for them to improve the process because they get so many applicants.
It depends on the company, I guess. The first-round interviews, which are the subject of this topic, that I have seen, were all Fizz Buzz level to cull the obviously incompetent.
> Do you think you perform well as an astronaut even though the selection process would have culled you?
Yes, and it's not even remotely close. It shouldn't really be surprising, "code up an algorithm that some genius needed half a lifetime to develop, but from scratch, in 45 minutes, on a whiteboard, while being watched, with the job on the line" has nothing whatsoever to do with what you'd do at the actual job. So why would the interview be a predictor of job performance?
>So why would the interview be a predictor of job performance?
Because most companies want to hire people who perform well and not hire people who don't perform well. They have variable success at that but even some fly-by-night startup will try to adjust interviews when they find that a significant number of people they hired needs to be sacked.
Well, yes, interview preparation is a bet on the incapacity of the interviewer to determine a candidate's capacity.
Anyway, neither of those things is binary, if you ask me, I would really advise into getting some amount of preparation; but if it too useful, it's actually a red flag.
Indeed, it's a bet that you, an outsider, know better than the interviewers that you will not be fired after the first performance review (note that it says nothing about your general competency, just the performance metrics of this particular company). If you had not been personally involved, which side of such a bet you would have taken?
I would be on the interviewer having a lot of issues undermining his evaluation; and I would be on the performance review having them too. Those are very hard tasks, nobody gets them perfectly right.
It's not the absolute evaluation of the candidate as a human being. It's an evaluation of fitness for the particular job by someone who has some insight into the company requirements vs. evaluation of the same requirements by someone outside. It is not binary indeed but, statistically, the outsider will be wrong more often than the insider unless insider's evaluation has no or a negative correlation with the performance metrics.
As an interviewee, I refuse to put any effort into gaming the system and hoping to come across as a better candidate. I treat these sessions as me interviewing them. And yes, this means that a lot of times my questions will come across as banal. But you can get some decent signal on red flags by asking several potential peers to describe their day, challenges that they're facing, and that sort of thing.