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Here are some that I've asked:

1. "During your most recent budget period, what influence did politics rather than the merits of budget requests have in distributing resources, and in what ways?"

2. "How heavily influenced by politics (or upper management) is the performance review process?"

3. "Has anybody recently been let go as the result of being ranked lowest on a performance review?"

4. "Are managers subject to performance improvement plans?"

5. "When was the last time your HR department found in favor of an employee over management or upper management when a dispute arose?"

There's a bias to these (if it isn't obvious). But experience informs me that answers to these questions offer a good insight into how the company really operates. If they are honest answers (they won't be, most of the time, if they're answered at all).

Existential question of the day: If the answers are almost all lies or omissions, what's the point of asking the questions? To get good at spotting the rare honest answer among the PR? And how do you know what's a lie and what isn't? There's no way to verify anything they're telling you unless you know somebody working there.

That's a good summary of my view of the entire interview process, actually, from both sides. The exception would be technical questions, of course--but even those are only marginally more useful at determining anything more than whether the candidate can answer specific questions under specific circumstances, neither of which may actually ever arise during the course of employment.

Lies or omissions can still contain information. They're not nonsense, and thus you can in fact learn from them.

On 1. 2.

Politics is what happens in subjective situations where people are wrestling for resources. How many budget requests are absolutely objective and easy decisions to make? Truth be told, in a high functioning company, there shouldn't be many. But politics absolutely comes into play when you have the fuzzy.

Is Google+ a better product objectively than Buzz? I have no idea. How do you even make that decision when the project is in its infancy?

Consider John and Katy. Assume that Katy does her job, pushes her code and gets her shit done. John comes in, is a superstar gunslinger. He keeps an eye out for upper management beliefs, quickly prototypes them. Shows a bunch of flashy shit to them. YET, that is all they are. Flashy shit with rotten code. It is the job of the Katy to come and work and write good fucking code. However, both Katy and John are essential for a good organization. They should be ranked by completely different metrics depending on the needs of the organization at that time. In reality, you have managers who have a complex trade-off to make between the short term and long term. This is a situation ripe for jockeying. Politics definitely comes into the picture.

I haven't seen an organization where a power structure doesn't exist. It always does.

Unfortunately, this sort of thing is a soft skill and doing it well requires a lot of expertise. It's comparable to being a good interviewer, which is also a rarity.

You can't just ask hard, probing questions baldly and expect to get accurate answers. More so, you can't expect to do that and expect it to not affect your interviewer's appraisal of you as well. You need to build up a rapport first and then you need to ask some leading questions that give your interviewer the opportunity to reveal some perhaps unsavory truths about their workplace. Granted, it might be hard to generate a rapport, or they might be too wary to tell you anything of substance or anything negative about the company, but that alone provides a lot of information regardless. If you have a hard time connecting with interviewers then maybe culture fit would be a problem. And if they won't open up about problems then that might be a sign of a dysfunctional corporate environment that discourages honesty and openness.

I think a better way to ask your first question would be:

"What would you say separates the strongest and the weakest members of your team?"

It allows you to get a sense of what they value in the team without needing to make them get defensive over staff they probably worked hard to acquire.

> "What would you say separates the strongest and the weakest members of your team?"

It's easy to reply to this phrasing with a canned answer and very little though. "Experience, skill, and a positive attitude." If someone gave this answer to you and you're the candidate asking the question it is basically 0 information.

I think the better way to ask this question is to ask

"Has anyone been recently let go and why? Has anyone been let go or put on a performance improvement plan for not being a good enough engineer? What are specific reasons why you think they were maybe not good enough? What is your policy when programmers make big mistakes?"

I'm not sure I would ask these questions, but I still think it's a better form of phrasing. You want to know what they think makes a bad engineer.

Hmm...I think if you ask those questions, they might not get the best impression of you -- it would seem like you were getting ready to be a bad programmer.

Aren't they pretty limited in what they reveal about employees who are fired for PIPed, even if anonymized (which may not mean much for a small group anyway)?

This is a very interesting exchange because it illustrates the difficulty of forming a question that the company can't turn to their advantage. For example:

> Has anyone been let go or put on a performance improvement plan for not being a good enough engineer?

Few people are put on PiPs for not being 'good enough' at engineering; most PiPs are about people not doing what the company demanded, no matter how unreasonable, which is very different.

But the company could respond to your question with 'sure, we clear-out the deadwood every six months!' because in their view those people weren't 'good enough'

> But the company could respond to your question with 'sure, we clear-out the deadwood every six months!' because in their view those people weren't 'good enough'

And that's the kind of answer that would be really interesting to hear.

> It's easy to reply to this phrasing with a canned answer and very little though. "Experience, skill, and a positive attitude." If someone gave this answer to you and you're the candidate asking the question it is basically 0 information.

Although it doesn't say much about the team, I'd say it provides some information on management and the level of transparency vs image management you can expect on the job.

I know you think it might come across antagonistic in an interview, but I wouldn't be offended if you came in and asked us these:

> Who's the weakest person on your team?

The newest hire to our company. It's not a total ordering though, every person on the team has weaknesses.

> What do you mean to do about that?

Make sure to put people on things that they're good at is the first thing! Don't put someone on something where they're not set up to have the ability to achieve success. My main job is to figure out what's getting in your way and attack that directly so you can just focus on being successful. If there's doubt about whether someone would be successful here then we'd rather pass on a candidate.

> When's the last time you lied to someone here? How did you rationalize it?

Never. It destroys any credibly you have to lie. That's one of the biggest red flags I could think of. I'd encourage anyone encountering a boss that lies to quit.

>Are you on any medications? Do you cheat on your spouse?

No. No.

> What are you most insecure about?

I used to be insecure about my ability to obtain sales from customers, but after having to do it over past 3 months and focusing on the basics I've become much better and we're now on a great track on the sales side of the company. Be aggressive about going after your weaknesses!

All of my answers are honest and I'd encourage you to hear about the experiences of other people on the team. I'd also encourage you to reach out to anyone who has worked with me in the past through any backchannels you have- that will give you the most unfiltered picture.

Asking if someone is on medication is not only unethical, I'm pretty sure it isn't legal either. Do you want to also know their sexual orientation, religion and who they voted for?

It's completely unethical, but I don't think the candidate has any legal requirements to not discriminate against the employer based on protected classes at all.

Oh so like a first date right? Wait... is that why I don't get second dates?