Explain a Topic At Multiple Levels - This is an excellent question. Communication is an underrated skill in most tech teams. They just complain that others "don't get it." The ability to understand others' points of view and interests and communicate with those in mind is important.
Tell Me About a Project You Led - This is another good one. A good related question would be, "What leaders have you had in the past that you admired?"
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - I don't like it. I support all three, even without the business bonuses. However, the jargon in that community is vast and quickly changing. There's also potential for unintentional landmines. Worse, no sane person on Earth today is going to walk into an interview and tell you they hate those things.
Tell Me About a Disagreement - This is another good one. Conflict is present anywhere two or more people do anything. Conflict resolution is a big part of the workplace and how well you do in it. For leaders, you should also add followups on how they help mediate conflict.
The Weakness Question - This question is famously poor. In a frictionless vacuum where no one is swayed by concretions, it seems like an excellent question. Everyone has weaknesses that they have to work on. It is the central mechanism of improvement. In practice, you are going to pull in unconscious biases that shouldn't but will effect your decision. Worse, you will lose strong candidates that will see you even asking this question as a red flag. I strongly recommend never asking any version of this question in an interview.
DEI questions is a good way to select people that can lie with a straight face. Not disclosing your cards is a valuable skill for managers and to some line employees. Weak candidates bluntly speak their mind and tell more than you ask for. Average candidates conceal their true podition in a cringy way. Strong candidates can smooth talk on the plain speech level and crack impolite jokes in such a way that only few would understand.
Isn't that what all of these "Tell me about a time when..." questions select for? They're just a filter for people that can come up with a convincing lie on the spot. Or those that have prepared a set of lies for questions that the interviewer asked.
For example on the disagreement question they have this as a red flag:
>Resolution through avoidance
Sorry, but this is how the world works. Maybe there's some idyllic companies out there full of reasonable people working through disagreements, but it's definitely not most. Most of them will punish you for openly disagreeing with them. Avoidance is an appropriate strategy in that situation.
I agree with you on the weaker / avg. responses this question, but you have no way of distinguishing a polished BSer you want from the sincere fanatic on these topics who will be absolutely toxic to your org.
"Tell me about an experience mentoring someone." would probably get better responses. Ask about DEI directly and people will just recite the woke handbook, whether they believe it or not.
I wholeheartedly agree! The DEI question is especially tricky - the topic itself, of course, but more about the way the question is asked. Similarly to the 'weakness' question, the biggest issue is that it's not situational. You can learn about the candidate's level of candor in different ways. Self-awareness and growth mindset are NOT tested with this question... I usually ask separate questions for those, and self-awareness itself is pretty obvious from other situational questions or follow-up discussions for those.
E.g. for learning: "Let's talk about learning. What's the last new thing you've learnt? Why that and not something else? How to you choose what to learn next? What's your method of learning, what works best for you?"
About communication: hell yeah it's underrated and when you hire bad communicators and don't coach them you won't know what hit you and your team. I'm writing a lot about this and tangential topics:
On DEI - the purpose is exactly that. You want to see how well someone can navigate the landmines.
Any thoughtful person probably:
1. Agrees in principle that DEI is important, and that cultural, racial, ethnic, linguistic, economic diversity makes organizations/communities/people better
and 2. has some criticism or concerns about how DEI is typically implemented in practice.
It takes a lot of tact to express #2 in a way that it won't get you or your company canceled. Especially in a tech company, with all the moral scrutiny the industry has come under lately, the private opinion of one employee can become a very public and embarrassing matter. For that reason, I think asking a DEI question in an interview is more to see "is this person going to be a liability for us or do they know how to talk about difficult topics without pissing anybody off?"
> Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - I don't like it. I support all three, even without the business bonuses. However, the jargon in that community is vast and quickly changing. There's also potential for unintentional landmines. Worse, no sane person on Earth today is going to walk into an interview and tell you they hate those things.
It's not necessary about "target demographics". A non-"diverse" team (depending on your definition of "diverse") can still be extremely inclusive. Just look at how well they onboard new hires.
The Weakness Question is a hard one because it'll be interpreted very differently in different cultures. Some will happily give you a list of areas they want to improve while others will consider answering the question an admission of failure (losing face).
Well, for example, I got a twinge of nerves on reading the following "red flag":
> Only focuses on a single group (e.g. women) to the exclusion of other forms of diversity
That is, if you make the mistake of going in too much depth on one particular aspect, then this is a red flag. I could easily imagine myself doing this simply because I have a tendency to answer interview questions depth-first rather than breadth-first.
I was also a bit terrified of "when I ask this question of an underrepresented candidate…". Some forms of group identity are outwardly visible; some are not. The author notes how sensitive this subject is, and then also predicates a fifth of the "discussion" section on the assumption that they can reliably make this judgement.
And on this "red flag":
> Indicates distrust of workplace inclusivity measures like codes of conduct, anti-harassment training, etc.
There was a good while when I distrusted all corporate training, simply because the only forms of active corporate training I had been exposed to were these box-checking legal cover-your-arse arrangements. If you've only experienced that kind of training, then of course you have a generalised distrust of it.
If you give me a list of criteria on which you are judging me, I will certainly be able to find ways in which I violate those criteria, no matter what the criteria are. (It's exactly the same problem as odd-one-out questions: there's always a way to make something the odd one out, so there's no right answer.) Hence the landmines: you can't know in advance which of those violations are actually meaningful to the interviewer.
> Diversity, equity, and inclusion are important to us. We know that diverse teams are more successful, and we work hard to ensure everyone is treated fairly and respectfully. That’s a bit about what these values mean to us; what do diversity, equity, and inclusion mean to you?
Ugh, this question really made me cringe.
Interviewers are in a position of power over interviewees, and the whole point of a job interview is to assess a candidate. The fact is that if an interviewer doesn't like the answer, it will reflect negatively on the interviewee.
If you're in a majority group, I'd suggest seriously re-thinking whether to ask this question to a candidate from a minority group, at least during an assessment.
After they've been onboarded? Sure. But not while you're in a position of power over them.
You should absolutely ask the diversity question to members of minority groups because they are not immune to having strange ideas about diversity, inclusion and especially equity.
When your interviewer is a genderqueer woman, and she tells you that she has trouble working with men (that really happened) you appreciate the honesty, and then you run as fast as you can. That was a bridge-burning move from that company.
> If you're in a majority group, I'd suggest seriously re-thinking whether to ask this question to a candidate from a minority group, at least during an assessment.
Running the interview differently because of which (presumably protected) classes you judge the interviewee to be in is a big red flag. If you're not comfortable asking the question to some people, you shouldn't ask it.
Anyway, this question feels like a gotcha more than anything. You're supposed to say the right thing, not demonstrate it. Hiring people because they said the right thing rather than because they demonstrated the thing is a great way to get bamboozled.
If your company is doing well with diversity, inclusion, and equity, your interview team will likely be diverse. If a candidate won't work well in that environment, they'll likely make it known during the interview, or self select out.
If your company is not very diverse, or at least if the interviewers aren't, the question feels even more sketch.
If it's an important pillar of the company, by all means spend a few minutes telling candidates about it and if the candidate says or does something that raises a flag, handle it.
> the whole point of a job interview is to assess a candidate. The fact is that if an interviewer doesn't like the answer, it will reflect negatively on the interviewee.
Yeah, they don't ask this question just for fun. They write in the background section that the purpose is "It selects for candidates who share these values [...] if they believe that this is all just political correctness gone wrong, or that white people are really the oppressed ones, they aren’t going to be able to work well with me and my teams."
So I'm not sure why they'd wait to do this evaluation until after onboarding.
You also seem to think that the only time the company has a position of power over the employee is during the interview process. But generally the boss/HR has power over the worker even after onboarding (a different kind -- to fire rather than hire), so I'm not sure where your power analysis is grounded...
I agree that it is definitely something they should bring up as early in the interview process as possible. If a company strongly identifies with neoracism[1], I'd like to avoid wasting my time interviewing with them. And I'm a POC!
Agreed, even as somebody liberal-leaning, I think overtly politic-checking somebody like this is tacky and a red-flag. It says to me that this employer can't separate work and politics.
If you ask a politically loaded question such as one about diversity, in an engineering interview, I would walk out. Those who do so are the reason a divide grows in the USA. Diversity of background and ideas is superb. Diversity of skin color, for skin color’s sake, is racist in the highest degree. Judge a man by his deeds and character, not his race.
It is, after all, logically impossible for every company to hire the best candidate on the same scale. If you interview people by general aptitude, one company (with the best salary etc.) will get the top folks and everyone else will settle. (It also makes independent interviewing rather useless: each company may as well outsource the job to a single service provider who's good at interviewing and returns a scalar.)
So, the effective way to interview, if you happen not to be a monopoly in your field, is to find candidates who are better for your company.
Some companies believe diversity of skin color actually matters and demonstrates a serious commitment to avoiding groupthink. Some companies believe they should not be caring about skin color at all. You're looking for a company in the latter group, and they're looking for you.
If you give a poor answer to this question, as posed by a company in the first group, it serves the purpose of interviewing - it accurately determines that both you and the company will be unhappy with you being hired at that company.
> color actually matters and demonstrates a serious commitment to avoiding groupthink
This statement is based on the racist assumption that skin color makes you think differently. A middle class Asian person who went to college at Stanford is going to think identically to a white middle class person who went to college. A white person who grew up dirt poor and self taught online is going to be vastly different from either.
Not talking about inclusion is effectively accepting the current inclusion status quo. Talking about it isn’t divisive, it’s being frank about existing division. If you really believe that inclusion is so valuable you should be willing to accept the discomfort of recognizing that it’s not where it should be.
I like the framing of the weakness question far more than I was anticipating. It’s usually so lacking in context that it encourages bullshit answers (“my biggest weakness is I’m too dedicated to my work/too humble to take credit”, which isn’t just bullshit to the speaker but tells the interviewer nothing too). I got enough from the article that I felt prompted to be sincere about a very real weakness in my social and career performance just reading along, and would likely have been able to speak to it without too much discomfort.
(Specifically that I have a frankness/matter of factness that people often find offputting and make conflict resolution more difficult.)
I was on a team where they asked the weakness question. In discussions afterwards, they used it to basically disqualify any candidate who was honest enough to give a real weakness--even if if was fairly benign like 'sometimes I don't get along with people' or 'sometimes I have anger issues'.
I understand that isn't how this author intends it to be used, but effectively it is. Never answer this. It's a trap.
Exactly. Everybody knows the bullshit of answering this question with "my weakness is that I work too hard" and all that. But it's actually the best answer to give in this case.
I am an Indian engineer in a tech company in Austin and out of the 8 people in my team 7 are Indians / Asians in their late 20s / early 30s who all followed roughly the same career trajectory (Undergrad in India / China from one of 2-3 universities, followed almost immediately by Masters in the US followed by joining tech jobs in the last 7-8 years).
The eighth guy is a white American guy in his 40s who grew up in Alabama, was in the US Air Force for a bit, then did his undergrad in an unrelated field from a relatively unheard-of university, then self-taught programming and worked a few odd IT jobs before landing here.
If you ask me, he is the true source of diversity in the team, but pretty sure none of the teams tasked with increasing diversity see it that way.
Yeah, if your team is made up of people from USA, France, Russia, India, China and Korea then you have plenty of diversity even if none of them are black. I'd argue that they are more diverse than a team comprised of people grown up in USA with latino, black, white and asian exteriors.
I've been the white guy in that situation, and it can be not great, but it was specifically with a 90% Chinese team. I can tell you who never quite fit in and who got laid off first...
I wouldn't join a team like that again because of how much harder it made things. Maybe this is an argument for why diverse teams are good?
Diversity doesn't mean "non-white," it means "varied." Yes, your team is diverse because of his inclusion, and it's diverse because of yours too.
Individual people aren't diverse, teams are. To say that one guy is the source of diversity is like saying that he is the source of the eight-ness of the number of people on your team.
Yeah people always seem to assume diversity should be based on your skin pigmentation. Reminds me of that Apple Diversity VP who said, "There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they're going to be diverse too because they're going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.” Needless to say she was forced to resign after that comment.
I want to hire the least diverse team as possible, here are the traits that they are selected on:
- highly intelligent
- professional work attitude
- nice people to work with
If you want to hire a more diverse group where there are some jerks in there, and idiots that screw up all the time, that's fine. But I like my team uniformly aligned like this.
I went through the top results of that search, and most of them make no claims at all about the performance differences of diverse vs non-diverse groups (since they instead adress some quite different questions), and those in the top results of this search who do look into performance comparisons do not find such an advantage, they find that there is no significant difference. Furthermore, a large part of the studies are focused on artificial short-term cooperations e.g. study groups or team projects at a university course (which actually eliminates a key part of diversity by ensuring that all the team members are of a similar age group and of similar specialization, they essentially only measure the effect of ethnic variation) which aren't really representative of what the success criteria are in a business environment.
Perhaps there are studies that would justify a claim that "diverse teams are more successful", however, this particular search does not immediately lead to them and should not be used as evidence of some scientific consensus on the matter - quite the contrary.
I think it's likely that certain types of diversity produce better outcomes. My problem with the research is publication bias, publication bias where finding the opposite will cost you a career, most of the experiments being contrived, social science being a joke field, and the sort of people who are attracted to social science.
I thought these were pretty good. Diversity questions are particularly hard, especially when interviewing an individual contributor who may feel like they have no say in hiring decisions. But it's so much more than just that and even then, as a manager, I would hope my team would hold me accountable around this topic if I wasn't doing a good job at it.
If the writer is going to enumerate all the "Positive Signs" and "Red Flags" for their interview questions, it seems like they're just making another shibboleth for which people will test-prep.
Is that what the writer wants? Is the intent to select for test-prep?
Readit News
Tell Me About a Project You Led - This is another good one. A good related question would be, "What leaders have you had in the past that you admired?"
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - I don't like it. I support all three, even without the business bonuses. However, the jargon in that community is vast and quickly changing. There's also potential for unintentional landmines. Worse, no sane person on Earth today is going to walk into an interview and tell you they hate those things.
Tell Me About a Disagreement - This is another good one. Conflict is present anywhere two or more people do anything. Conflict resolution is a big part of the workplace and how well you do in it. For leaders, you should also add followups on how they help mediate conflict.
The Weakness Question - This question is famously poor. In a frictionless vacuum where no one is swayed by concretions, it seems like an excellent question. Everyone has weaknesses that they have to work on. It is the central mechanism of improvement. In practice, you are going to pull in unconscious biases that shouldn't but will effect your decision. Worse, you will lose strong candidates that will see you even asking this question as a red flag. I strongly recommend never asking any version of this question in an interview.
For example on the disagreement question they have this as a red flag:
>Resolution through avoidance
Sorry, but this is how the world works. Maybe there's some idyllic companies out there full of reasonable people working through disagreements, but it's definitely not most. Most of them will punish you for openly disagreeing with them. Avoidance is an appropriate strategy in that situation.
Ironic
Same with any question having to do with testing. Sure, everyone tests! Why would I ever write code without tests!
First day on the job: Do I really have to write a test for this?!
E.g. for learning: "Let's talk about learning. What's the last new thing you've learnt? Why that and not something else? How to you choose what to learn next? What's your method of learning, what works best for you?"
About communication: hell yeah it's underrated and when you hire bad communicators and don't coach them you won't know what hit you and your team. I'm writing a lot about this and tangential topics:
https://ochronus.online/communication-for-software-engineers...
https://ochronus.online/active-listening-boosts-careers/
https://ochronus.online/how-to-stop-winning-arguments/
(sorry for the link-fest, but I do think these are interesting for this thread)
Any thoughtful person probably:
1. Agrees in principle that DEI is important, and that cultural, racial, ethnic, linguistic, economic diversity makes organizations/communities/people better
and 2. has some criticism or concerns about how DEI is typically implemented in practice.
It takes a lot of tact to express #2 in a way that it won't get you or your company canceled. Especially in a tech company, with all the moral scrutiny the industry has come under lately, the private opinion of one employee can become a very public and embarrassing matter. For that reason, I think asking a DEI question in an interview is more to see "is this person going to be a liability for us or do they know how to talk about difficult topics without pissing anybody off?"
It's not necessary about "target demographics". A non-"diverse" team (depending on your definition of "diverse") can still be extremely inclusive. Just look at how well they onboard new hires.
The Weakness Question is a hard one because it'll be interpreted very differently in different cultures. Some will happily give you a list of areas they want to improve while others will consider answering the question an admission of failure (losing face).
> Only focuses on a single group (e.g. women) to the exclusion of other forms of diversity
That is, if you make the mistake of going in too much depth on one particular aspect, then this is a red flag. I could easily imagine myself doing this simply because I have a tendency to answer interview questions depth-first rather than breadth-first.
I was also a bit terrified of "when I ask this question of an underrepresented candidate…". Some forms of group identity are outwardly visible; some are not. The author notes how sensitive this subject is, and then also predicates a fifth of the "discussion" section on the assumption that they can reliably make this judgement.
And on this "red flag":
> Indicates distrust of workplace inclusivity measures like codes of conduct, anti-harassment training, etc.
There was a good while when I distrusted all corporate training, simply because the only forms of active corporate training I had been exposed to were these box-checking legal cover-your-arse arrangements. If you've only experienced that kind of training, then of course you have a generalised distrust of it.
If you give me a list of criteria on which you are judging me, I will certainly be able to find ways in which I violate those criteria, no matter what the criteria are. (It's exactly the same problem as odd-one-out questions: there's always a way to make something the odd one out, so there's no right answer.) Hence the landmines: you can't know in advance which of those violations are actually meaningful to the interviewer.
Ugh, this question really made me cringe.
Interviewers are in a position of power over interviewees, and the whole point of a job interview is to assess a candidate. The fact is that if an interviewer doesn't like the answer, it will reflect negatively on the interviewee.
If you're in a majority group, I'd suggest seriously re-thinking whether to ask this question to a candidate from a minority group, at least during an assessment.
After they've been onboarded? Sure. But not while you're in a position of power over them.
When your interviewer is a genderqueer woman, and she tells you that she has trouble working with men (that really happened) you appreciate the honesty, and then you run as fast as you can. That was a bridge-burning move from that company.
Dead Comment
Running the interview differently because of which (presumably protected) classes you judge the interviewee to be in is a big red flag. If you're not comfortable asking the question to some people, you shouldn't ask it.
Anyway, this question feels like a gotcha more than anything. You're supposed to say the right thing, not demonstrate it. Hiring people because they said the right thing rather than because they demonstrated the thing is a great way to get bamboozled.
If your company is doing well with diversity, inclusion, and equity, your interview team will likely be diverse. If a candidate won't work well in that environment, they'll likely make it known during the interview, or self select out.
If your company is not very diverse, or at least if the interviewers aren't, the question feels even more sketch.
If it's an important pillar of the company, by all means spend a few minutes telling candidates about it and if the candidate says or does something that raises a flag, handle it.
Yeah, they don't ask this question just for fun. They write in the background section that the purpose is "It selects for candidates who share these values [...] if they believe that this is all just political correctness gone wrong, or that white people are really the oppressed ones, they aren’t going to be able to work well with me and my teams."
So I'm not sure why they'd wait to do this evaluation until after onboarding.
You also seem to think that the only time the company has a position of power over the employee is during the interview process. But generally the boss/HR has power over the worker even after onboarding (a different kind -- to fire rather than hire), so I'm not sure where your power analysis is grounded...
[1] https://www.persuasion.community/p/john-mcwhorter-the-neorac...
I agree, but it's a matter of degree. In practice, it's significantly easier to reject a candidate than it is to fire an employee.
It is, after all, logically impossible for every company to hire the best candidate on the same scale. If you interview people by general aptitude, one company (with the best salary etc.) will get the top folks and everyone else will settle. (It also makes independent interviewing rather useless: each company may as well outsource the job to a single service provider who's good at interviewing and returns a scalar.)
So, the effective way to interview, if you happen not to be a monopoly in your field, is to find candidates who are better for your company.
Some companies believe diversity of skin color actually matters and demonstrates a serious commitment to avoiding groupthink. Some companies believe they should not be caring about skin color at all. You're looking for a company in the latter group, and they're looking for you.
If you give a poor answer to this question, as posed by a company in the first group, it serves the purpose of interviewing - it accurately determines that both you and the company will be unhappy with you being hired at that company.
This statement is based on the racist assumption that skin color makes you think differently. A middle class Asian person who went to college at Stanford is going to think identically to a white middle class person who went to college. A white person who grew up dirt poor and self taught online is going to be vastly different from either.
The best combination for being hired by these companies is having a diverse skin color and being committed to the groupthink.
The second best combination is having a non-diverse skin color and being committed to the groupthink.
Dead Comment
(Specifically that I have a frankness/matter of factness that people often find offputting and make conflict resolution more difficult.)
I understand that isn't how this author intends it to be used, but effectively it is. Never answer this. It's a trap.
That's a very strong claim. What research?
>The teams I’ve liked the most have been the most diverse; the teams I’ve felt the most uncomfortable on are the ones where everyone looks like me.
Not surprisingly, for the author, "diversity" is only about how people look like. He also seems to suffer from self-hatred.
The eighth guy is a white American guy in his 40s who grew up in Alabama, was in the US Air Force for a bit, then did his undergrad in an unrelated field from a relatively unheard-of university, then self-taught programming and worked a few odd IT jobs before landing here.
If you ask me, he is the true source of diversity in the team, but pretty sure none of the teams tasked with increasing diversity see it that way.
I wouldn't join a team like that again because of how much harder it made things. Maybe this is an argument for why diverse teams are good?
Individual people aren't diverse, teams are. To say that one guy is the source of diversity is like saying that he is the source of the eight-ness of the number of people on your team.
https://www.businessinsider.com/apples-vp-diversity-12-white...
Not really. She's still at Apple.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/soprano/
- highly intelligent
- professional work attitude
- nice people to work with
If you want to hire a more diverse group where there are some jerks in there, and idiots that screw up all the time, that's fine. But I like my team uniformly aligned like this.
;)
If you think correlation implies causation, I know a lot of ways to brings value to your company.
Perhaps there are studies that would justify a claim that "diverse teams are more successful", however, this particular search does not immediately lead to them and should not be used as evidence of some scientific consensus on the matter - quite the contrary.
Is that what the writer wants? Is the intent to select for test-prep?