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> What you --- and everyone else looking for a new gig --- should do is, bank a couple of work-process things you'd've liked to see them do differently. Maybe they should test using a different framework, or do something different with project management. Keep the answer short, objective, and anodyne.

Maybe it's not what you intended, but one could interpret this as advocating a short answer that states something along the lines of "Their of use process/framework X" as a reason for leaving the company. Obviously this is not an advisable thing to say and would be a red flag for many a hiring manager.

> You do not need a great reason for changing jobs in this market. "I feel like I contributed everything I could contribute to that team and now I'm looking for a new challenge" is a fine reason.

I agree far more with a generic answer such as this.

I would actually extend this advice to the exit interview as well. The tech community is smaller than you might expect - I run into people I thought I'd never see again all the time. Even if you hate every last person at your current company, I'd recommend against burning bridges.

Not that I like it, of course. I want to fix the problem.

For me, when I am the interviewer = and for many people, I think- "I am looking for a new challenge" is just too generic/phoney. The OP should briefly mention the frat culture/all-night drinking, without elaborating too much, or sounding angry. If the new place is similar to the old one, he will not get the job, because he "would not be a good fit". But he would not want to repeat the experience, now, would he?

This applies when you talk directly to the hiring team, may not work so well with the HR department.

There are plenty of firms (even startups :-)) where people are treated professionally, it just may take a bit longer to find them.

I appreciate the good intentions behind this comment but I want to reiterate that giving an "interesting" answer to this question is a terrible idea. The question is a trap, and it's an easy one to avoid. Most candidates have boring answers to this question, not because they're lying, but because reality is pretty boring for people in our industry.

There is a remote potential upside to an answer to this question that makes you somehow look super smart --- you rewrote the whole stack in Rust in a weekend, got 100% unit test coverage, built integration tests for both your code and the original PHP and not only got complete coverage but also uncovered a zillion bugs in PHP, and then the rest of the team decided to rewrite in Perl instead. But even then, there's more downside risk than upside risk!

In this specific case though, the answer is all downside. You can't make yourself look extra smart by being anti-homophobia. Most of us are that already and we assume it of the people we talk to. The best you can hope for with a "juicy" answer about the culture at your last job is that you won't come across as high-drama. But that's actually asking a lot of your interviewer, who is not a trained psychologist and in fact not especially good at decoding subjective answers.

Just be boring for this one question.

As I mentioned in another comment, there is more upside to telling the answer publicly, as other employers can see it and respond with job offers.

Thanks for this reply!

Its nice to hear that this is just a question hiring managers ask cause they are there to ask questions. I'm going to keep that in mind next interview and make that answer the most boring, forgettable answer possible!

I'm going to give you conflicting data. When applicants tell me they are looking for a new challenge, or some other non-answer, I wonder if they are just going to flake out and leave our company after 6months or a year.

When I ask why people are leaving their current position, I am actually very curious to hear the answer and it colors my impression quite a bit.

Most hiring managers, with the question put directly to them, are going to tell you that they want an honest and in-depth answer about why you left your last job. But you can see from the way this one just answered the question why it's all downside: they are worried that they are missing another opportunity to disqualify you.

Stupid as it may sound, even in this market, most hiring managers run screening as a systematic search for disqualifiers.

The most important thing to remember here is not my opinion on the validity of the question or the reasons any hiring manager gives you for how important the data is to them. The important thing to remember is this: most candidates don't have interesting reasons for leaving their previous jobs.

No matter what any hiring manager tells you about their preferences, the reality is that giving a boring answer really can't disqualify you. Nobody runs hiring processes that select only for people with interesting last job quit stories; they'd reject almost every candidate! But an "interesting" answer certainly can disqualify you.

The flip side is that whilst "contributed everything I can and need a new challenge" is a perfectly good, if uninteresting answer for leaving GenericCo after two years, it's an obvious dodge of the truth for someone keen to leave a notionally key role at GlamourousStartup before options vest. How can that not be a massive red flag with any screener?

Edit: There's also the fact that interviewing is a two way screening process, and anyone that thinks is capable of taking offence at homophobia is a "no hire" red flag could and should fail the OP's own personal screening process (assuming they're not working in a country or period of history where few firms aren't actively dismissive towards the concept of homosexuality). Sure, over-elaborating on how bad the place was to work (any competent interviewer won't press for details) is a red flag, as is appearing to be more desperate to leave than interested in the job on offer. But "they're an excellent company in many respects, but I feel I'd be much happier in an environment where I didn't feel I was constantly having to turn a blind eye to several coworkers' derogatory remarks about minorities" doesn't sound like it should alarm anyone the OP might actually want to work for

No, we interviewed lots of people from "GlamorousStartup", and I can't remember hearing a single negative story. In our warm-up calls, we did ask some things about previous jobs (mostly to calibrate how much help we'd be offering for the technical interview).

It's just not true that a boring answer to this question is a "massive red flag". That's terrible advice to give.

Doesn't this depend a lot on when they leave? I'm assuming you didn't rush to hire people that gave "contributed everything I can and need a new challenge" as a reason for leaving a non-contractor position after a few months.

The OP - who understandably hasn't provided many details - may be in a situation where a bland answer doesn't sound like an obvious lie, but it's evident from the way the question is phrased that they fear it might be.

Even if they'd in fact been there for 15 months at a run-of-the-mill Series A startup so a bland answer was pretty likely to be the truth, would you have been more likely to have screened them out if they'd answered "I'd prefer a working environment where people weren't constantly making homophobic comments"?

Thinking about it, this means that telling the story publicly is better than telling it privately to the wrong people, because you can get job offers by telling it publicly, after which you can assume they already saw your blog post and so answering the question will not give them any more information. That is IMO the best solution to this problem for candidates.

On the other side, I wonder if the HR process of slotting candidates into fixed number of positions don't help. It might make sense for factory workers, but for programming or even IT? This is one reason BTW why I believe anti-discrimination laws are ineffective.

What you're saying is true, a boring answer probably won't disqualify an applicant outright. However, the three or four people that gave answers like "looking for a new challenge" this week certainly didn't make a good positive impression on me. If your objective is to not get disqualified, then it's sound advice. If your objective is to find a job at a company whose culture and expectation match your own, the OP will have better odds with their honest answer.

Hold on. I'm not saying candidates shouldn't qualify culture before accepting jobs. I'm saying they should do that after the job offer, when they have the most leverage and the least to lose.

They don't get the job offer if their answers to questions lack depth and personality. In other words, optimizing for not being disqualified is not the same for optimizing for first choice for a position.

Yes, I understand this to be your argument, but I simply do not believe most hiring managers (really: any hiring managers) seriously gauge "depth" and "personality" from the answer to this one question. That's what makes the question such a trap for candidates: it's intrinsically unimportant (the data you pretend it collects simply isn't present for most candidates), but the "wrong" answer can be very harmful.

Candidates should simply dodge this question. The more I've thought about this thread, the more cut-and-dried my judgement on this is.

Yeah, its not even about having that disqualify me, I'm just trying to keep any information about the social conditions of my current role quiet so I don't burn any bridges.

I'm unfortunately not in SV and the tech community is much smaller here. The startups founders are fairly well connected with other founders and I don't want it to become a they said/they said that gets me black listed.

Of course there is an upside to this question "What did you not like about your last job", if the candidate shares the same opinion about how you should work and be efficient, about the environment where you're working, about the people, etc, I will probably hire the guy who is closer to my way of thinking.

If you volunteer extra information about what you didn't like about your last job, there is a slight chance the information will help you and a (IMO) big chance that it will hurt you. If you give a boring answer, there is no chance it will hurt you: most candidates (speaking from my own experience) don't have interesting stories about their last job.

Not sure why you think this is a no win scenario for candidates. If I asked someone this question there would definitely be positive and negative responses ...