chibi-totoro

I agree with your premise and approach to personalization, 100%… but not those exact questions.

I run a lot of software engineering teams and I interview people every week. I get those three exact questions from almost every single candidate. Frankly, those questions do not show any particular interest in your company - they are generic questions and kind of have a negative framing to them. The company culture one is especially annoying for a lot of reasons. If company culture is important to you, there are much better ways to tease it out from the interviewer.

Try to actually show real interest in the job, try some of these ideas:

• Ask questions about the responsibilities of the role, and tell them you love doing whatever they are.
• Ask about the kinds of projects you’ll get to work on. Relate them to any experience you have, if you’re lucky enough.
• Ask about the latest press releases you’ve seen for the company.
• Ask about the tools/software/training that is required or available for the role.
• Ask about how much autonomy you’ll have in bringing new ideas in for improving things (I love this one, it shows they might be a self-starter and have curiosity and agency).
• Ask about what kind of fun things the workers do together. Do you have a memes channel in your slack? Do you ever go for team lunches? Do they bring their dogs to the office?
• Ask about the roadmap for the department where the potential role is. What’s the vision?

All of these kinds of questions actually show genuine interest in getting involved. Remember that a company is just a bunch of people working together. I will take an engaged, friendly, curious and smart candidate with barely any experience over a distant, disengaged, looking-for-the-least-bad-option AAA software dev any day of the week.

Hope that helps!

I assume a setting for this would already be in the dev backlog? Does anyone know if there is an issue logged for this?